Other Everests Symposium: Royal Geographical Society 2022, 5 – 6 July.

Excited to be invited to be part of the AHRC research network and present at the Royal Geographical Society – Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024. The network will host a series of events and exhibitions over the next 12 months.

I will be presenting within the Globalization on Everest panel discussion with Dr Paul Gilchrist, Jase Wilson and Dr Nathan Smith, my contribution centres on:

GENDERED EXPERIENCES OF PROFESSIONAL FEMALE MOUNTAINEERS: JUNKO TABEI MOUNTAINEERING HERO?

In response to this symposium my contribution centres on the psychological, cultural and nationalistic imperatives that drive the commodification of Everest, with particular focus on the inequalities produced through the enduring appeal of adventurous white masculinities. 

Recently I have been researching how gender and race intersect in spaces of risk and the factors that limit access to social and material mountain spaces, focusing on the experiences of Junko Tabei, the first woman to ascend Everest in 1975.

To understand her experiences, it is important to consider how:

1. Governance structures in mountaineering codify and grade mountaineering spaces and produce/reproduce extreme spaces of risk that have become increasingly commodified – to understand how:
2. These structural processes impact mountaineering identities at the intersection of gender and race