Violent Inheritance

Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West

E Cram

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520976757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Violent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—"land lines"—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the "electric" climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.

CHAPTER 1

Cartographies of Sexual Modernity

Often when I have camped here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never unmix again.

—Owen Wister, The Virginian, 1902

Deboarding the Columbian Express upon arrival in Chicago after several days of travel from Philadelphia, Owen Wister gallivanted from the train station to his temporary stay, then sauntered back to the station yet again en route to the 1893 world’s fair. This summer would take him between and betwixt Wyoming, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Ambling through heavy crowds gathered in the sticky summer heat, Wister made his way somewhat aimlessly, stalling time until he would later meet for dinner with Theodore Roosevelt and other men on Wooded Island. Wister suddenly felt bewildered and seized by the grandiosity of his surroundings, a captivation that intensified with each passing hour. Wister reflected, stunned, “I did not look at anything in particular, but merely swam in the atmosphere of beauty and brilliance and stateliness that poured from everything.” As he made his way toward the lagoon, he braced himself once again as he stared at the Beaux Arts buildings in a stupefied fashion, the white sheen of Columbia’s body amplified by the basin’s water. Suddenly, the tiredness registered; his energy drained and intelligence diminished. He reflected, “I became so deluged with this splendor that, as I say, all thinking power ceased, leaving a pleasurable elation of body and spirits that carried me on when we landed, through more new vistas of astonishment. It did not make the slightest matter where one went. I wandered at haphazard seeing everything but looking at nothing.”¹ The sensorial overwhelm and depletion of it all would shift only later that evening.

Wister later met with his company in the afternoon at Hunter’s Camp, an islet located south of Wooded Island. Structured by marshland, the whole of Wooded Island was an extension of the horticulture exhibit located just west, connected to the island by a bridge over one of the fair’s lagoons. Instilling the contrast between stately urbanism and a promised respite in a Japanese Ho-o-den, planting exhibits, and long tree-buttressed walkways, here visitors could find a brief retreat from the overwhelm of the illumination. On the islet the men gathered in a small structure named Hunter’s Cabin, a small log cabin structure built to commemorate the rugged “pioneer.” Funded by Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Foundation, the cabin replicated pioneer fashion. Adorned with skinned and tanned animal pelts, hunting gear, and leather stockings, the interior was a monument to nostalgic artifice. Cast against the grandiosity of its surrounding buildings, Hunter’s Cabin concretized the pioneer as a figure of masculine vitality and a modern past: an extractive subject capable of generating energy through the mastery land seized for a “manifest destiny.” Here Wister joined Roosevelt and other club members for a lengthy, revitalizing dinner, the meal “well and simple,” “camp fashion,” with whiskey and beer.² At dinner’s end the men lingered amid the peristyle to imbibe in the illumination—lights and fireworks glimmering on the water. As the crowds receded and quiet dissipated throughout the grounds, the men moved back to the cabin for cigars and later rejoined to their own dwellings, all in the rhythm of their homosocial interlude. Wister narrates the vigorous simplicity of Wooded Island, cast against the stimulating and gradually debilitating splendor of the fair’s center near Lake Michigan. As he would recount after a later trip back to Chicago, this feeling of overwhelm would pass as he became more and more accustomed to its surroundings.

More than a simple sum of its parts, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, as we encounter it in Wister’s observations, was the concretization of a world view that understands a white nation and people as both tied to land and capable of revitalizing movement. In this chapter I show how that revitalization operated as an imagined consequence of transportation networks and city planning rather than as a discrete property of any given location. Wister’s recollections underscore an assumptive logic of vitality as produced in motion, made possible through a belief in climate as a technology of energy generation. That revitalization relied on the fundamental interconnection of urban and nature, not as opposing terms but as interconnected pairs generative of friction as a technique of bodily energy management.³ By the time of the fair, Wister was arguably familiar with friction as a response to overwhelm and exhaustion. Prior to this trip he had already traveled west a number of times in search of respite, and with each excursion his reputation hastened as the acclaimed western writer from Philadelphia. On the advice of his physician and cousin, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, in 1885, Wister’s illnesses prompted his first journey to a friend’s ranch in Wyoming. A nineteenth-century “nerve doctor,” Mitchell diagnosed Wister with “neurasthenia,” meaning a deficit of nerve energy, something of an umbrella term for fin de siècle nervous maladies.⁴ Wister in particular was a progeny of what Mitchell called “the west cure,” a treatment capitalizing on what the latter believed to be the arid and strenuous West’s therapeutic qualities.⁵

Wister delivers a story of vitality not as an innate disposition but as one deeply embedded in networked capacity, or the ebb and flow of vital energies made in both technological and social networks.⁶ The bodily capacity of whiteness and heteroproductivity linked city and nature together through rail and forged cultural narratives of transcontinental thinking wherein nature was rendered a form of capital. The center of neurasthenia’s interpretive clusters reflected a broader culture of vitality. Neurasthenia captured complaints associated with the condition of modern life and rendered them objects of medical scrutiny, particularly their environmental etiology.⁷ Neurasthenia’s clusters of symptoms, regimes of classification, and therapeutics also reflected a broader culture of medical models of energy, scientific racism, misogyny, and apprehension of “modern” troubles, including sexual function or white women rebelling against marriage.⁸ To trace those networks of actualizing energy, I interpret Wister’s observations twofold: first, the scene of depletion mimics the sensory overload of an electrified city, and, second, his journey to the pioneer cabin parodies the formative West cure on a much smaller scale yet instills the function of reconstituting energy through friction afforded by nature. Wooded Island, and especially Hunter’s Cabin with its pioneer artifice, spatialized that place of restoration for fairgoers, creating a nature deeply intertwined with the social process of vitality production.

Indeed, the cultivation of sex as energy—a capacity to be produced, managed, and regulated to protect whiteness through a language of heredity—was but one consequence of the “commodity machine” of Chicago’s emerging metropolis.⁹ I open with this story of Wister gallivanting in Chicago because his recorded observations and reflection elucidate the fundamental connection between sexuality, environment, and vital energy production, a domain of sexual modernity underappreciated in North American histories of sexuality. Scholars of the medical humanities, sexuality, and disability have well established the power of neurasthenic cultural imagination in facilitating western myth, especially in Wister’s and Roosevelt’s respective biographies, as a romanticized story of the West as a space of vital energy. For example, historian Peter Boag traces how sexologist’s typologies of sexual inversion and nervous exhaustion helped shape the rhetorical power of frontier myth.¹⁰ Speaking to neurasthenia’s longevity, Julian B. Carter notes how its emotional vocabulary, rooted in twentieth-century popular culture, outlived its timespan in medicine.¹¹ Finally, Alexandra Stern’s vital scholarship emphasizes how twentieth-century eugenicists often revitalized the story of the neurasthenic migrating from degenerate landscapes to the vital atmospheres of the West, especially California.¹² Together this work establishes an important rhetorical dimension of making inheritance: connecting appeals to hereditary as energy, as well as their later moments of reinvention across space and time. In colloquial terms reinvention refers to scenes of argumentative creation that draw on already existing myth or stories. In the context of this book, inheritance travels through the social life of the archive.

The purpose of this chapter is to denaturalize western myth as a consequence of extractivism, defined in the introduction to this book as the ideologies undergirding a model of economic production that rely on the depletion of matter rendered “resource.” In doing so my aim is not to celebrate elite white men in the making of the region (though the predominance of men in the West cure in addition to medical writings of neurasthenia necessitate dwelling with this iteration of masculinity), nor is it to suggest neurasthenia is exceptional to a range of sexual disorders operative at the time.¹³ This is a book about confronting the naturalized and overwhelming weight of Anglo-American modernity that lingers as a violent inheritance on the landscapes of the North American West. Denaturalizing this familiar myth of masculine somatic energy that proliferates in western myth and memory returns to scenes, knowledge systems, and networks of its making. Connections between neurasthenia and western myths are well established, but what this work does not do is trace how the actualization of vitality is made possible through particular conditions of energy extraction. In other words, I map the conditions where “sexual modernity” is rendered possible.

This chapter argues that climate and environment, from infrastructure to environmental landforms, were central to the production of the “modern sexual subject,” defined by a porous white body who imbibes and inherits environments ordered to maximize bodily capacity. I examine the crucial, though overlooked, networks of capacity building: tethers between eastern cities, nonurban lands of the North American West, and Chicago and the world’s fair as visions of future city life. Throughout these spaces medical systems of knowledge deploy the ecological and sexual body in ways that emphasize friction and thermodynamic energy, or the capacity of individuated bodies to convert climatic energy to do the work of reprosexual (not necessarily heterosexual) whiteness. In what follows I examine several nodes in this network: first, the medical writings and knowledge systems undergirding the classification, etiology, and therapeutics of neurasthenia broadly and for men in particular; second, Wister’s writing from his experience with the West cure; and, finally, how the imagery of a mythic frontier and Wild West intersected with the landscape of the Chicago World Fair of 1893. Together these underscore that critical dimension that sexuality studies calls sexual modernity: medical models of somatic energy production and perceived vital capacities of land and climate for actualizing that energy to materialize a civilized sexual subject. Consequently, this approach reframes sexual modernity as a capacity produced within an intensive network between urban and nonurban lands.

This argument draws from two central threads. First, neurologists and medical climatologists configured western lands as therapeutic places to extract and convert vital energies from their purified surroundings. Specifically, the West cure included a set of techniques rooted in “rugged” habits. Rugged is a type of friction, an environmental relationship that generates force. In this equation bodies become rugged as they extract and convert vital energies, restoring in turn vital energy central to racial logics of heredity. In the decades of 1880 to 1900, neurologists and biologists such as Mitchell, George Beard, and John Harvey Kellogg cultivated optimizing technologies in the face of a belief that climate threatened the longevity of whiteness and heredity. Rooted in anxieties that the new rhythms, sounds, and smells of modern culture would deplete energy stores of racial vitality, physicians in eastern states directed men such as Wister to “go west!” to restore their bodily stamina. Mitchell, Beard, and their contemporaries believed that an overstimulation from brainwork and poor climatic conditions created a crisis in sexual reproduction. This nineteenth-century belief in neurasthenia promised controlling climate’s influence on heredity through movement, design, and technologies to secure the integrity of whiteness, sexual reproduction, and heteroproductivity. The point worth emphasizing here is that in these medical writings, climate functions as a technology of energy actualization, and what they call nature facilitates a social process of producing that energy—the commodity machine of “nature’s metropolis,” to borrow a phrase from William Cronon.¹⁴ Consequentially, however, nature would also bear the sheen of white supremacy, one of many violent inheritances of Anglo-American modernity.

Second, the world’s fair celebration of Columbus’s 1492 voyage intersected with Chicago’s landscape more broadly, to foster sites that dramatized these ideas about energy and vitality. In its planning stages fair managers and architects carefully arranged buildings, transportation, waterways, and exhibition to mythologize national space within the landscape of Chicago, making organization, navigation, and geography substantial to how fairgoers would learn to imagine “America” with others watching on the world stage. Competing against the reputation of the Paris Exhibition and the cultural draw of New York City, Chicago’s fair would battle unruly lands and olfactory nuisance, all at great expense and enthusiasm amid constant warnings of failure. Like other cities, Chicago’s reputation as perverse would draw and repel potential visitors. Despite moral and criminal policing, perversity saturated the air...

Table of contents

• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: Rooted Kinship
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Land Lines of Violent Inheritance
• 1. Cartographies of Sexual Modernity
• 2. Settler Intimacies and the Social Life of the Archive
• 3. Childhood and Settler Aesthetics of Violence
• 4. Affected Persons, Sexual Transits, and Contested Public Memories
• 5. Petroculture and Intimate Atmospheres
• Conclusion: Infrastructures of Feeling and Queer Collaborative Stewardship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index