'Every Damn one of 'em's got a Little Piece of Land in his Head': Masculinity and Ecological Crisis in the Dust Bowl

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The environmental and human devastation - rapid aridification, crop failure, and consequent massmigration - wrought by the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s closely parallels predictions made by climatescientists for our collective future. Yet, despite presaging the effects of global climate change, the DustBowl remains a parochial subject for historians. More specifically, the feature shared between past andpresent environmental disasters which has been most been neglected historiographically is the role ofmasculinity. Whilst sociologists and activists have long noted the reciprocal connection betweenenvironmental crises and masculinity, this knowledge has not been applied historically, no more so than inthe case of the Dust Bowl.1 Through rectifying this disparity, this project will further our understanding ofthe Dust Bowl and environmental crises at large whilst also using it as a case study to reframe the historyof inter-war American masculinity. How, this project asks, did ideas of masculinity intersect withenvironmental crisis in the Dust Bowl? How had men's ideological relationship to the land been historicallyformed? How were male casualties of the Dust Bowl represented at the time? What did it feel like to be aman in the Dust Bowl and why?