Masculinity in a nineteenth century western mining town: gendered relations of power in a red-light district, the Vanoli Sporting Complex (5OR30), Ouray, Colorado
Date
2014
Authors
Burnette, Richard T., author
Van Buren, Mary, advisor
Kwiatkowski, Lynn, committee member
Orsi, Jared, committee member
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Abstract
The historical artifact collection recovered from the Vanoli Sporting Complex site (5OR30), a brothel district adjacent to the Second Street red-light district in Ouray, Colorado, in the United States, has stimulated a number of anthropological questions regarding the social processes enabling the rapid growth and long-term sustentation of sporting-male commerce in Colorado mining towns in the latter-half of the nineteenth-century. Potentially representing the real economic engine responsible for the viability of tenuous western mining towns, prostitution was tacitly accepted by moral Victorian elites, underscoring the entrenched nature of masculine ideologies and customs. The class-based regulatory structures adopted to exploit and control the illicit commerce would have an alienating influence over the lives of prostitutes, significantly altering the relations of power forged between men and women in these urbanized mining towns. Ironically, the pervasiveness of long-standing homocentric paradigms in western historical literature has continued to mask the socio-cultural and economic significance of masculine social institutions in numerous industrial sub-regions emerging in the mining west. Benefiting from the advances made in the discourse on gender and power, this archaeological study assesses the changing life ways of prostitutes within a brothel district, providing a unique perspective on gendered relations of power in a western mining context.
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Subject
masculinity
western mining
Vanoli
relations of power
red-light district