Abstract
Stories about the foundation of US geology as a discipline are prominent
in the culture of field geology today. This article traces the threads
of such “origin stories” through field geology practices and
undergraduate training. The repetition of these origin stories
obfuscates the colonialist and race-fueled motives that underpin the
actions of the US geologist characters featured in these stories. I
extend concepts of performativity from feminist theory to interrogate
the role of such stories in constructing an idealized field geologist’s
body. I theorize the field geologist as a social construction forged
through repeated practice ingrained within narratives about the origin
of US geology. Increasingly, the field is recognized as a site of sexual
and racial harassment and abuse. By making visible the racialized
subplots in the history of US geology, which include entrenchment in
racial science and land dispossession, I posit that the curated origin
stories repeated today perpetuate processes of exclusion and subjugation
in field geology.