The Gender of Water and the Pleasure of Alienation: A Critical Analysis of Visiting Hoover Dam

Abstract

Hoover Dam, located on the Arizona-Nevada border and damming the Colorado River, is a well-known and often-visited place. The meanings people assign to such a structure articulate key environmental, economic and technological ideologies. An exploration of those meanings is important for understanding the forces that shape public perception and environmental policy. Specifically, this essay examines the official rhetoric of Hoover Dam from an ecofeminist perspective. Through a critical reading of the educational displays, films, plaques and other texts as well as the physical structure of the dam itself, three rhetorical strategies used in the dam's official presentation are identified. First, the Bureau of Reclamation presents the Colorado River as a chaotic, feminine entity in need of masculine control. Second, the river's rhetorical status as an Other encourages audiences to identify with the subject position of nature's master and thereby participate in the pleasures such an identity offers. Third, the Bureau uses the prevalent “common sense” of Native Americans as environmentally sensitive in combination with an “historical” Native American voice to establish the dam as both environmentally sound and a logical step in humanity's progress toward economic development and dominion over nature.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Western States Communication Association convention, Rhetoric and Public Address Division, Vancouver, B.C., February 1999.

Notes

1 In addition to our analysis of detailed transcriptions and photographs of the dam site and visitors center, we have spent a combined total of about twenty-six hours at the dam during eight visits, watching and listening to what people do and say and taking detailed notes of the site itself, our reactions to it, and our observations of other visitors and staff.

2 While a historical survey of the rhetoric of Hoover Dam would undoubtedly be valuable, our focus here is not to examine the historical development of the rhetoric, but the rhetorical shaping of the history of Hoover Dam in the context of contemporary environmental ideologies. One recent contribution to the historical study of Hoover Dam rhetoric is Vilander's (1999) study of the official photographs documenting the construction of Hoover Dam.

3 Unfortunately, a full comparison of the rhetorics of Hoover and Glen Canyon dams is beyond the scope of this essay. A more exhaustive examination of the rhetoric of Glen Canyon Dam as well as a fully developed comparison between the two offers fruitful possibilities for future research.

4 Given the dam's location, most visitors are either leaving, heading toward, or taking an excursion from Las Vegas. Given the close technological, economic, geographical, and tourism-related connections between Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, it can be argued that an understanding of the meanings of Hoover Dam would be incomplete without Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a city that thrives because of many of the dams along the Colorado River which provide it with water and electricity; the roots of its present status as an entertainment supercity go back to its role as an R&R center for the workers who built Hoover Dam in the 1930s. In particular, the first segment of the multimedia presentation has important connections to the Vegas experience, especially the city's fountains, pools, and golf courses. The musical water fountain show presented in front of the Bellagio Hotel during the period of our fieldwork, for example, articulates closely with the view of water presented in the first segment of the multimedia presentation at the visitors center: clear, clean, highly controlled, and designed for human benefit. While beyond the scope of this essay, greater understanding of the rhetoric of Hoover Dam could be developed by reading Hoover Dam and Las Vegas with and against each other in a dialogic fashion.

5 Much like an incomplete syllogism, the presentation never explicitly draws the conclusion that native peoples would have wanted a huge concrete dam. However, like Aristotle's enthymeme, the conclusion appears somewhat inevitable given the premises.

6 The process of formal/aesthetic abstraction has also been discussed by Vilander (1999) in her recent work on the photographs of Hoover Dam commissioned by the Bureau of Reclamation to document the project's viability.