Negotiating the Nancy Boy: Representation in Conner Prairie’s “Follow the North Star”
Stephen Harrick
Abstract
Conner Prairie, a living history site in Indiana, presents the past by offering “Follow the North Star,” a traveling program in which visitors embody escaped slaves in the United States during 1836. The costumed interpreters often refer to the genders of the visitors, calling the women “breeders,” the men “bucks” and sometimes “nancy boys,” suggesting a sexual deviance or inferiority. Employing “nancy boy” instead of racialized terms changes what visitors may expect from such a racially-charged situation. Further, it effectively rewrites history by cleaning up the violent racism associated with slavery. Staging a slave program while employing rhetoric denoting sexuality may offer the visitor a visceral experience that points to a feeling of inferiority that the historical figures might have felt, but in the process falls short of presenting the past in an accurate way. This is further complicated when considering that the visitors to the site must pay to participate in the program and are subsequently herded from one location to the next for approximately 90 minutes, leading the visitor to negotiate U.S. history phenomenologically in a way that the written word does not allow.
Conner Prairie, a living history site in Indiana, presents the past by offering “Follow the North Star,” a traveling program in which visitors embody escaped slaves in the United States during 1836. The costumed interpreters often refer to the genders of the visitors, calling the women “breeders,” the men “bucks” and sometimes “nancy boys,” suggesting a sexual deviance or inferiority. Employing “nancy boy” instead of racialized terms changes what visitors may expect from such a racially-charged situation. Further, it effectively rewrites history by cleaning up the violent racism associated with slavery. Staging a slave program while employing rhetoric denoting sexuality may offer the visitor a visceral experience that points to a feeling of inferiority that the historical figures might have felt, but in the process falls short of presenting the past in an accurate way. This is further complicated when considering that the visitors to the site must pay to participate in the program and are subsequently herded from one location to the next for approximately 90 minutes, leading the visitor to negotiate U.S. history phenomenologically in a way that the written word does not allow.
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