Stampede

The yearly Calgary Stampede, the largest Western heritage festival in Canada and a leading draw for visitors, is usually seen as a boon to the city and to the people who live there. Scholars of development have linked tourism to the growth of the global sex industry, and researchers in critical tourism studies have argued that the carnival mood at events like this one reinforces the ideas behind rape culture and raises rates of gender-based sexual violence. No one has yet tested these links against the Stampede. Each year, local media report rises in sexually transmitted infections, divorces, pregnancies, sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and prostitution arrests during the festival and in the weeks after it. These patterns have become routine in a city that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives repeatedly ranks among the least favourable urban areas in Canada for women, a ranking that does not account for the Stampede's role.

That ranking also misses the differences among Calgary women based on skin colour, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors that an intersectional analysis would examine. The omission matters because Calgary, one of Canada's most prosperous and fastest-growing cities, lies at the heart of the Blackfoot Confederacy's territory, land ceded under Treaty 7 of 1877 by five First Nations of southern Alberta to the British Crown. The author contends that Indigenous women in southern Alberta already face heightened economic and social precarity after generations of colonial projects, and that the Stampede is part of that history. Municipal policy makers have shown little interest in addressing the roots of the city's gendered problems, and scholars have not examined the festival's part in creating or sustaining them.

Selling Sex: Gender Matters at the Calgary Stampede applies an intersectional feminist lens to the gendered and racialized dynamics of the Stampede as it exists today. It challenges the long-held assumption that the event is a family-friendly gathering that benefits all Calgarians alike.