Description

This book is an antidote to the ideas of American white hetero-settler masculinity, prowess, and exceptionalism that are currently being flexed on the global stage. Through a fascinating combination of ethnographic research across six US states and an application of anti-colonial, feminist, and poststructuralist theories, Land, God and Guns reveals how time-honored rationalities and rites of passage associated with manhood in the American Heartland are constitutive of colonial worldviews, capitalist logics, essentialist gender binaries, ethnocentric religious conservatism, jingoistic nationalism, racial superiority, and embodied violence. A violence that both privileges and ultimately damages its main proliferators, white settler men. A detailed work that unravels how white constructions of and claims to land, history, and manhood are manufactured frontier myths that uphold a racist and heteropatriarchal ordering of life, and argues for a reconceiving of taken-for-granted notions such as respect, pride, property, and production.