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Gender on Ice American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions Lisa Bloom |
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$60.00 cloth |
Bloom focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early twentieth century to the present. "Gender Once Ice is not a book about women, but a feminist critique of a quintessentially Euro-American male activity: turn of the century polar exploration. It is part of a recent and long-overdue effort among revisionist scholars to rewrite the old sexist and racist histories of exploration, travel and discovery. Lisa Bloom retraces the expedition accounts of the American Robert E. Peary in the Arctic, with secondary analyses of narratives by Peary's African American aide and co-explorer, Robert Henson; his American competitor, Frederick Cook; and the Englishman Robert Scott in the Antarctic. Bloom's retelling of these polar expeditions will seem familiar enough to aficionados of exploration narratives, but she analyzes the texts from the critical perspective of social theory. A noteworthy effort to correct the gender biases and naive assumptions of the early generations of Arctic histories." —The Women's Review of Books "In Gender on Ice, Lisa Bloom has found such a cultural chronicle in the American era of heroic polar exploration. This book offers an alternative account of history of polar exploration through a textual exegesis of gender, race and class, and nationalism." —Polar Record "This book deserves to be added to the steadily developing body of substantive analysis devoted to investigating the phenomena associated with travel and tourism." —Annals of Tourism Review "Bloom graphically shows how gendered disourses are also racialized and sexualized. Bloom addresses the masculinist production of knowledge in her fascinating study of polar expeditions and American national identity." —NWSA Journal "Bloom's real interest, in fact, seems to be the Society and the cultural 'text' it represents, not polar exploration per se. Bloom's setting polar exploration in context, however, is a welcome corrective to the self-aggrandizement of much exploration literature. Gender on Ice contributes to the growing interest in constructing and writing 'alternative' histories of travel and exploration, and in explaining the relationship of these to imperialism, nationalism, colonialism and the globalization of Euro-American masculine standards and values. One of the few feminist, cultural critiques available on polar exploration." —The Ecologist "Rich, evocative, and well documented." —Signs "Offers stimulating, sometimes over-long insights into the cultural background and decision-making of what, as they reveal, has become a national institution." —Nature "Gender on Ice is a disturbing and probing examination of the American discursive formation of heroism as it was constructed by Robert Peary and the National Geographic magazine. Peary represented masculinist and nationalist ideologies that were exploited and validated by the National Geographic at a crucial point in its development and that once the investment in Peary was made it could not be abandoned or discredited without diminishing the scientific credibility, mythological power, and economic success of the magazine." —Books in Review "The book itself provides a refreshing view of polar exploration and it is written in an elegant manner. The writer is to congratulated on her approach." —Environment and Planning "Bloom's beautifully written and incisively argued book works with a wealth of cultural artifacts and historical narratives to explore its own polar axis: gendered and racially marked constructions of Amerian national identity. Polar exploration turns out to be a very effective technology for making specific kinds of men. Imperialism has never before been so compellingly put on ice." —Donna Haraway Lisa Bloom is associate professor of women's studies and comparative cultures at Josai International University in Japan. She is the author of With Other Eyes (1999). 164 pages | 1993 |
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