Once a year, amidst the data centers, glass skyscrapers, and jutting hills of San Francisco, the rodeo comes to town. Situated south of the city, at the aptly-named Cow Palace, men and women gather to compete at the Grand National Rodeo in events such as bull riding, team roping, steer wrestling, and barrel racing (Cow Palace 2026). Before the evening is over, the ring is graced by the presence of one final entertainer: the beautiful, acrobatic rodeo queen. Into the center of the ring she rides, standing on horseback, and over the loud speakers the commentator announces, “The strength! The skill! The beauty! It’s all for you!” (Grand National Rodeo 2023). Then, the men sitting in the front row rise, doffing their hats and raising them to the rodeo queen as she passes, wrists rolling in a gallant wave. The men sitting in the front row are all clad in blue jeans and cowboy hats, forming a kind of silent chorus, unified in gesture.
In this paper, I will consider how the rodeo queen and the male spectators together create a specific articulation of gendered performance. I will also analyze how both the cultural and geographical context of this performance, as well as its roots in kitsch and tradition, establish the rodeo as a rich field for queering and gender futurity. First, using Richard Schechner’s writing on considering acts as performance (Schechner 2012, 39) and Diana Taylor’s writing on the engaged spectator (Taylor 2016, 86), I will consider the courtly gesture as performance, a doing by and with the audience. Next, I will take up Judith Butler’s notion of gender as a reproduction or dramatization of embodied acts (Butler 2025, 188) to understand how the interaction between the rodeo queen and the men in the audience creates a bidirectional performance of gender. Then, I will use Tiina Rosenberg’s writings on kitsch and camp (Rosenberg 2020, 98-102) to take up the cultural context and setting of the rodeo. Using Sara Ahmed’s writing on wonder and feminism (Ahmed 2014, 178-179), and Sarah Dolan’s idea of the utopian performative (Dolan 2005, 189), I will also think through the affective impact of this performance and the rodeo as a whole. Finally, I will take up José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on the futurity of queerness (Muñoz 2009, 1), and propose that the rodeo can act as a locus of gender play.
To begin, we must consider the men in the front row, and how their salute operates as performance. Richard Schechner writes, “What ‘is’ or ‘is not’ performance does not depend on an event in itself but on how that event is received and placed” (Schechner 39). To the casual observer, in the instance of the rodeo queen and the men who greet her, the gesture of doffing and waving one’s hat is anachronistic, but clearly placed. Given the dress and setting of the men who engage in it, the casual audience member can receive the gesture as a part of a set cultural choreography. Because of this, I consider the standing-doffing-waving sequence to be one of courtly gesture, something integrated both into a codified set of physical responses and one understood to carry with it both respect and a particular kind of gendered gallantry. Considering the role of the audience, or the spectator, Diana Taylor writes, “Performances ask that spectators do something […] Performance is a doing to, a thing done to and with the spectator” (Taylor 86). As such, not only can we consider the response of the spectators “as” a performance, but along Taylor’s own logic, we can understand that the spectators’ response is additive and substantive, that the ‘doing with’ in the action and response makes up the totality of the performance. In this way, we can consider the rodeo queen’s appearance not as a unidirectional performance of gender but bidirectional: the men perform her gender back to her, not through mimicry, but through coded response.
When thinking about the rodeo queen and her reception via courtly gesture as a codified performance of gender, we should turn to Judith Butler. Butler writes that to “do, to dramatize, to reproduce,” are the “elementary structures of embodiment” (Butler 188). Unlike the other female participants in the rodeo, the rodeo queen is distinct from the competition, already set apart as the “queen.” She is dressed in a bedazzled body suit, hair falling over her shoulders in large barrel curls, mimicking the beauty standards set by American beauty pageants. And unlike with the male or female rodeo competitors, the men in the front row rise to perform their courtly gesture in response to her entrance. In the rodeo queen’s reproducing of the vision of femininity put forth in pageants, and in the men’s dramatizing their receipt of this codified femininity, we see a sort of exchange, a dual identification and confirmation of gender.
The aesthetics of the rodeo serve to reinforce something that we already know, doubling down on cultural symbols that an American public is already familiar with, Americana kitsch on display. Tiina Rosenberg defines kitsch as the low-brow answer to high-brow culture, and at the rodeo, the entertainment appeals not to the educated elite but to the working class every-man (or woman) (Rosenberg 98). From the parading of the American flag, to the Ford F150 pick-up truck driven into the ring, to the unplaceably country twang of the commentator — all of these are unquestionably American symbols. And though these symbols bear with them a distinct cultural and political weight, above all during a second Trump presidency, the role of the rodeo for most of its audience is not to throw things into question, but rather to re-invoke a well-loved version of American cultural life. Rosenberg writes, “Kitsch loves its audience and its audience seems to love kitsch” (Rosenberg 102). We see this on display at the rodeo: there’s not a whiff of irony, at least not from the people who compete and put it on. Of course, the audience is free to think their own thoughts. But by appealing to the well-known, well-accepted kitsch vision of American culture, there’s a certain kind of seductive comfort there. Displays of gender, too, are free from irony, never making it over the edge of kitsch to camp. There’s no self-parody there.
But the rodeo cannot meet its audience perfectly. When the rodeo comes to San Francisco, for example, the fantasy of an agrarian America focused on down-home, family-values falls on the reality of the urban center of AI booms and technofascism, a city wholly divorced from the rope-a-doping Wild West. This fracturing of context and performative content doesn’t mean that the performance loses its power or potentiality, however. As Jill Dolan writes, “Utopian performatives gather power through their attachment to particulars— particular moments in time, spaces in geography, constellations of spectators joined as audiences to witness specific configurations of performers.” Certainly, the potency of the moment in which the rodeo queen is received with a courtly gesture is both more powerful and more legible thanks to the distance these both have from the ordinary San Franciscan spectator. To “witness this configuration of performers” as Dolan writes, is in fact more moving and evocative thanks to the setting. Likewise, the particular production of gendered meaning that arises from this configuration, the ability for this moment alone to stand out amongst many others, is moving to us because it is an “inevitably specific […] product of a here and now that passes into there and then even as we experience [it]” (Dolan 189). The friction between context and content is precisely what opens the potential for something new. “Wonder is an encounter with an object that one does not recognize,” Sara Ahmed writes (Ahmed 179). So, for the ordinary city-dwelling audience member, it is this alienation from the spectacle that makes the gendered performance, the courtly gesture et al, recognizable and distinct.
To return to the performance at hand, we must then ask: what effect does this meeting of performer and spectators produce? Butler writes, “The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness” (Butler 189). It is precisely this idea of “necessity and naturalness” that permeates the entire rodeo; it is, after all, founded upon the idea that man must dominate nature, proving his ability to ride, rope, and generally master the bucking beast. At the rodeo, we are invited to celebrate the “natural order” of things, bearing witness to a self-celebrating spectacle of hierarchy and categorization. Men have one set of events they compete in, women another. In maintaining this gender separation, along with its celebration of a mythologized America, the rodeo attempts to carry forward a sort of manifest destiny in which men and women each have their distinct gendered roles and exert power over the animal kingdom.
So, where does this leave us vis-à-vis feminism? Sarah Ahmed writes, “feminism cannot be reduced to that which it is against […] Feminism is also ‘for’ something other, a ‘for-ness’ that does not simply take the shape of what it is against” (Ahmed 178). It’s easy to simply position ourselves against the rigidity of the binary and hierarchy presented at the rodeo, to write the whole thing off as a product of an outdated, hegemonic notion of American life. To stand in broad opposition of the rodeo, however, leads no clear path to what that rejection stands for. Where can we locate the “for-ness” here? If, as José Esteban Muñoz writes, “queerness [is] the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 1), then we can say that the rodeo, in its upholding of arch gender stereotypes, is a ripe field for disruption and queering. In my estimation, the rodeo’s peak embodiment of kitsch Americana leaves open room on the table to bring in more play, more openness, queering the traditional.
If “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here-and-now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1), and our experience of wonder is what opens us up to visions of utopia, then the rodeo is already ripe for dreaming and change, a fertile stage for queering and gender play.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “Feminist Attachments.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 168–190. New York: Routledge. E-book: https://research.ebsco.com/c/qzil4s/search/details/kdqdz4yhq5?limiters=FT1%3AY&q=the%20cultural%20politics%20of%20emotions&searchMode=all
Butler, Judith. 2025. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial & Sara Brady, 186–196. London: Routledge, 4th ed.
Cow Palace. “The Grand National Rodeo.” Accessed March 17, 2026. Web page: https://www.cowpalace.com/the-grand-national-rodeo/.
Dolan, Jill. 2005. “Epilogue: Finding Hope at the Theater.” In Utopia in Performance. Finding Hope at the Theater, 167–171. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. E-book: https://research.ebsco.com/c/qzil4s/search/details/4ihmwce2zr?limiters=FT1%3AY&q=Utopia%20in%20Performance%3A%20Finding%20Hope%20at%20the%20Theater&searchMode=all
Grand National Rodeo. October 7, 2023. Cow Palace, San Francisco, California.
Muñoz, José Estaban. 2009. Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, p. 1–15.
Rosenberg, Tiina. 2020. “Rising Like the Eurovision Song Contest. On Kitsch, Camp, and Queer Culture.” lambda nordica 2, p. 93–113.
Schechner, Richard. 2012. “What is performance?” In Performance Studies: An Introduction, 28–51. London/New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Diana. 2016. Performance. Durham & London: Duke University Press. E-book: https://research.ebsco.com/c/qzil4s/search/details/xycyvpzwg5?limiters=FT1%3AY&q=performance&searchMode=all