Touching Power: White Womanhood, Colonial Spectacle, and the “Forces of Nature” at the Boulder Power Inaugural

Abstract

This article examines the 1936 Boulder Power Inaugural, a civic spectacle celebrating the arrival of the first electricity from Hoover Dam in Los Angeles. The event mobilized, in ways it could not entirely control, narratives about gender, colonization, progress, and the “laws of nature.” As California repurposes its twentieth-century infrastructure for an era of climate chaos, it is necessary to consider—and transform—the cultural meanings and social relations of energy.