Abstract
Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest explores how the rural Midwestern communities of LeClaire, Iowa, and Port Byron, Illinois, have attempted to sustain their communities through the creation of an annual festival featuring a tug-of-war contest between the towns that spans the Mississippi River. Any event that requires a 2700-foot rope and the United States Coast Guard to close the Mississippi River to maritime traffic is a remarkable accomplishment. However, Johnston argues that the festival is far more than just spectacle. By analyzing local newspaper and television coverage of the festival produced between 2000 and 2019, Johnston contends that these communities reimagine and reinvigorate their cultures and economies through Tug Fest. As residents and tourists attend the festival, they spend money, create and renew social bonds, and reimagine their collective pasts, presents, and futures. The social differences and inequalities that are central to the communities are also on display and potentially reorganized. In short, Tug Fest provides attendees an annual opportunity to transform and renew their communities in manners that help to sustain them while maintaining meaningful ties to the past.
Chapter 1 places LeClaire, Port Byron, and Tug Fest within broader patterns of depopulation and deindustrialization that have characterized much of the rural Midwest over the past century. Johnston suggests that annual festivals like Tug Fest are especially significant to rural towns experiencing depopulation. Not only can festivals provide an economic boost through an influx of cash from tourists, these festivals provide community members with opportunities to renew and reorganize their cultures amidst shifting socioeconomic conditions that can render previous modes of organizing communities increasingly untenable. festivals, in short, are opportunities to rework and sustain communities.
In Chapter 2, Johnston stresses that winning the tug competitions involves far more than just individuals deploying brute strength. Instead, winning requires the development and deployment of embodied skillsets that allow individuals to work effectively as a team. Johnston also briefly explores the significance of gender to the festival and how it is covered in news media. Noting that tug-of-war has generally been associated with men and masculinities, Johnston shows that women have increasingly participated in the official tug-of-war competitions. Consequently, coverage of the festival offers an opportunity to assess whether and how men and women participants are represented differently. While men are often depicted as “farm boys,” representations of women are more varied. One woman who participated was portrayed as “smallish,” but others are represented as effective competitors because they are “beefy.” Further, Johnston notes a team of women who were pictured with a sign that indicated they were “Tuggers” instead of “Barbie girls.”
Chapters 3 through 5 focus on tourism. Chapter 3 considers different types of tourism and whether Tug Fest can properly be understood as party or sport tourism. Chapter 4 explores how the creation of Tug Fest as a tourist attraction requires tourists, residents, and the Mississippi River to be organized into functional arrangements involving both socially constructed meanings and the physical features of place. Finally, in lieu of Tug Fest becoming an international tourist destination, Chapter 5 considers whether Tug Fest still provides residents with opportunities to create and sustain a unique, meaningful place that is embedded in globalized media and economic institutions.
Because Tug Fest is such an intriguing event, I wanted to know more about LeClaire and Port Byron as I was reading. For example, while depopulation across the rural Midwest is discussed, the population trends and demographic compositions of LeClaire and Port Byron are not covered. This was surprising given LeClaire roughly quadrupled in population since 1950 and Port Byron grew by over half during the same period. Featuring more of the newspaper and television coverage that informed the analysis could have also helped draw a more detailed picture of these communities.
Tug Fest will be of interest to sociologists studying rural communities, sports, and media. Gender and masculinities scholars interested in these topics could also find it both interesting and useful. Tug Fest has limited use for gender and masculinities scholars that are not analyzing these topics because the gendered dynamics of the festival are not a central component of Johnston’s analysis. Nevertheless, the book provides more than just an invitation to learn about a unique set of communities. Tug Fest presents an opportunity to consider how individuals continue to renew communities amidst shifting socioecological conditions by creatively reimaging their relationships with each other and the environments in which they live. In an era characterized by socioecological disruptions associated with shifting economic production processes and climate change, such analyses are invaluable.