This presentation seeks to better understand how masculinity was deployed and performed in this frontier setting, focusing on three interrelated dynamics. The first is the ways in which the expansion of settler society deeper into the frontier produced a moment of racialization of masculinity which conflated misunderstood cultural practices, the dispossession of colonial violence, and the scarcity of state authority to alter how indigenous men were able to assert their own gender identities. The second dynamic is the ways in which the process of settling—including staggered transatlantic immigration, economic precarity on the frontier, and the creation of hybrid households comprised of both blood and fictive kinship ties—juxtaposed at least two different ideals of masculinity along a “violence-protection” continuum. The final dynamic concerns the creation of institutional patriarchs on the frontier, particularly in the ubiquitous police that understood themselves as “guardians of all humankind” and the remote but omnipresent office of the governor, who came to be seen as a “father” (distant, fair, decisive) to the residents of the frontier.
The presentation further compares trends at the national level with these developments on the frontier to suggest the ways in which the semi-colonial administration of the national territories warped efforts at the national level to modernize the country’s civil code.