Settling the BoomExamines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U. S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.