Frontier Myths

Land, manhood, and work. Three desires that have come to define American society since its colonial beginnings. They were the aspirations of the first white settlers to the continent, and continue to resonate deeply across contemporary rural America.

Frontier Myths takes you to the American Heartland to interrogate these desires, and how they are realised today. Levi Gahman spent years living and working in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas in order to understand the perspectives and practices of white settler men and show the links that masculinity in the region has with dispossession, nationalism, and capitalist production.

Through a critical analysis of how the construction of both history and gendered power relations in rural America are linked to race, place, sexuality, religion, and violence, Frontier Myths chronicles how rites of passage related to competition, consumption, gun culture, and 'being a man' are as compromising and constraining, as they are enabling and privileging.