Julie Rak University of Alberta
Français
When George Mallory was asked in 1922 why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, the highest mountain on earth, he answered simply, “‘Because it is there.’” But Mallory’s claim proved to be anything but simplistic. Since then, the activity of mountaineering has helped to shape how the self was understood within the context of conquest and adventure for the next one-hundred years. Today, mountaineering remains at the forefront of public consciousness, particularly in the thousands of climbing biographies and memoirs in print, and in the films that are shown at popular mountaineering film festivals around the world. But even in the twenty first century, mountaineering’s position as the metaphor for the pinnacle of human achievement remains a predominately male achievement. Although the first woman to summit the major Alpine peak Mont Blanc did so in 1808–only 56 years after the first man climbed it in 1764–women’s aspirations to become mountain climbers have been the source of amusement, disapproval and even disbelief for more than a century.
As of yet, there is no an extensive study of mountaineering and gender issues in written accounts and books. Mountaineering is still male-dominated, and yet there are millions of women who read about it. To understand why, with graduate student researchers I will be analyzing films and books about mountaineering and visiting the two largest film and book festivals in the world: the Banff Film/Book Mountaineering Festival and the Festival of Mountaineering in Kendall, UK to interview fans of mountain books and films, and to talk to producers of these works to see who consumes these narratives and what their ideas about gender are. My project will result in the first book-length treatment of written and filmed expedition accounts which examines “everyday gender” in the lives of women and men who climb.
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