November 16, 2008

New Poles, Old Imperialism?

This special issue comes at a particularly charged moment. The Arctic and Antarctic have re-emerged as sites of renewed rivalry among the old colonial powers, as well as creating contention among new international participants. Nations are competing over the development of natural resources and access to shipping routes that were once off-limits. In conjunction with rapid climate change, these circumstances represent not only a political challenge but also an intellectual one, particularly for postcolonial and feminist critique. Colonial discourses dating from the early 20th century in many respects seem to have been revived by responses to both geophysical and geopolitical change. Unlike in the field of post-colonial studies, significant feminist scholarship has not been central to the emerging field of Polar Studies up to now. Lisa Bloom's book, Gender on Ice first raised these issues in 1993, and some of the projects of the artists and scholars gathered here are building on this initial foray. This special issue promotes understudied yet crucial aspects of feminist and environmentalist art and scholarship of the polar regions, connecting gender to nationalism, the politics of imperialism, and science.

While this issue of S&F Online is part of both renewed and growing interest in the poles, we could not have anticipated at the outset how quickly changing current events would shape our thinking on this topic. The Northwest and Northeast passages have been opened by melting ice due to the fast rate of radical climate change in the Arctic. Shipping companies from around the world are already planning to exploit the first simultaneous opening of the routes. Given this momentous historical development, the rivalry for the Arctic's formerly inaccessible resources has intensified, and recalls earlier 19th and 20th century struggles for power. At a moment when we thought the excesses of colonialism belonged to the past, current events remind us that the resurgence of interest in these regions is not only about concern for dying polar bears, arresting global warming, and protecting the Arctic landscape and indigenous peoples, but also involves territorial expansion and competition over natural resources. The international race to claim the vast wealth of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the Arctic seabed is only just getting underway, as competing governments position themselves to claim stakes in the seabed of the Arctic Ocean, now that it is sometimes ice-free.[1] The U.S. might start large-scale drilling thanks to its vast Alaskan territory, which holds oil in the Arctic off its shores. Some of the same discursive strategies we are seeing now, particularly the way the Arctic is being re-imagined by drilling proponents of the oil and gas industry as a conveniently "empty frozen wasteland of snow and ice" replay earlier imperial narratives of Arctic and Antarctic exploration in which those territories were imagined as "white" or "blank" spaces to be filled in by the very Europeans who designated them so.[2]

In Antarctica, this "blank" space has been filled with both the idealization of a unique space for "peace and science" and imperialist maneuvering by a number of different countries. As the British Antarctic Survey says in its description of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed in 1959: "There are few places on Earth where there has never been war, where the environment is fully protected, and where scientific research has priority. The whole of the Antarctic continent is like this. A land which the Antarctic Treaty parties call a natural reserve devoted to peace and science." Yet, despite this idealized vision, competition over territorial claims remains under the surface created by the treaty. Claims that have been established at different historical moments might also be reanimated, while countries like the U.S. and Russia, which have no actual territorial claims, are also deeply involved in setting up bases there. Whereas the Arctic is mostly of concern to the countries that share borders with it, Antarctica is of interest to much of the rest of the world, although, of course, not all nations have equal resources for exploration, exploitation, and outpost-building. Chile and Argentina are 2 of the 7 countries that have claimed major sectors of Antarctica, and at different points each has sent families with children to live there.[3] Their claims overlap with the British claim, and each country restated their claims in 2007 when Britain restated its sovereignty claims. Japan was an original treaty signatory, has had bases there since the early 60s, and is currently in the international spotlight for its Antarctic whaling practices. Brazil, China, India, Korea, Peru and Uruguay have consultative status on the Antarctic Treaty, and many other countries, such as Columbia, Cuba, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea and Venezuela have agreed to abide by the treaty. China just opened its third base, and India is claiming territory on the geological argument that it used to be connected to Antarctica.[4]

Though at first glance it might seem that these recent territorial claims as well as contemporary discourses on global warming are gender and race neutral, a feminist analysis of representations of the Arctic and Antarctic suggests a re-emergence of interest in polar narratives promoting imperial masculinities. This surge of interest since the late 1990s is exemplified by recent reprintings of original accounts, new biographies of 19th and early 20th century explorers, and even 'reality TV' simulated re-enactments of their journeys.[5]

In contrast to the colonial nostalgia for masculine heroism, what some of the works collected here share is a questioning of the desire to re-create and recover the world of the late Victorian colonial explorers and their culture of extraordinary confidence, manly spirit, and grace under pressure. These feminist scholars and artists are witnessing colonialism, in both the Arctic and Antarctic, being recuperated and rehabilitated at a distance, such that the inherent violence of its dispositions is lost from view. In Antarctica, the material remnants of empire remain preserved in the ice. The huts of explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton create "the past [that] is uncannily visitable," to use Francis Spufford's phrase.[6] The remains of the failed Franklin expedition serve a similar function in the Arctic. There are few more enduring Arctic obsessions than discovering the fate of the celebrated British explorer Franklin, who led three Arctic expeditions in the 19th century. As the Arctic warms and the summer sea ice melts, attracting global attention, attempts to find Franklin's ships and its relics that were trapped by the sea ice in 1846 underscore the renewed interest in the Northwest Passage.[7] It is as if the past does not have to end—it can be relived, uncomplicatedly and detached from historical time, at the "end of the earth."

This special issue collects critical feminist engagements with a newly exposed past, as well as more recent scholarship and art works that demonstrate a feminist opening of the territory of the polar regions. These essays, interviews and artworks offer overlapping and competing visions of the polar regions, even as they challenge and engage older narratives and material histories that have shaped the regions. Given the ambitious range of global, social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural factors that have prompted our focus on the Arctic and Antarctic, it has taken the feminist collaborative efforts of three of us working together for over the period of a year and a half to bring completion to this project. All of us had done substantial work on this subject in the past. Kay spent 13 months at the South Pole base in Antarctica in 1985; currently she is an astronomer who chairs the Department of Women's Studies and co-teaches 'Exploring the Poles' at Barnard College. Since the publication of Gender on Ice, Bloom has re-engaged the topic by writing about how artistic practices are re-visualizing the Arctic and Antarctic. Glasberg is working on a book on U.S. geopolitics, literature, and visual culture of Antarctica, and visited the continent with the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in 2005.[8]

Science at the Poles

One of the incentives for our project was to contribute to the current International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007-March 2009, the largest coordinated international interdisciplinary scientific program in 50 years, involving hundreds of projects with thousands of scientists from over 60 countries.[9] The previous International Polar Year, 1957-1958, overlapped with the International Geophysical Year and also featured a huge multi-national scientific enterprise, taking place at the peak of the Cold War. Results from that program included the establishment of permanent bases in Antarctica, and international treaties on the seas, Antarctica, and space.[10]

One obvious difference from the 1957-58 IPY is the substantial involvement of women as organizers, scientists, workers, adventurers, writers, and artists in current IPY projects. For example, Robin Bell, a senior research geophysicist from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, chairs the National Academies Polar Research Board and convened the international meeting in which the decision was made to implement the current IPY.[11] Numerous women have been blogging from the polar regions on public websites.[12]

The challenge to traditional gender roles of women working as scientists and adventurers under extreme conditions is still not as common as feminists might advocate. This issue of S&F Online includes pieces by women working in and exploring polar regions, including Heidi Lim, who has just finished her fifth winter as a Physicians Assistant at the South Pole (a record for women), Daryl Xavier, who returned to school at age 48 to work on a PhD in biology in Antarctica, and Barbara Hillary, the first African-American woman to reach the North Pole—at the age of 75—and who is planning a trip to the South Pole for next year. Many of the women artists and writers included in this issue visited Antarctica through grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program and the New Zealand Artists to Antarctica Programme.

While science has been the vehicle to opening the Antarctic to women, it has also been a somewhat ambivalent force in relation to the polar regions. Science has led to renewed concern for the regions, their climates and inhabitants, including (sometimes) the peoples of the Arctic. Historically however, scientific investigation could also produce a science that is oblivious to, or even destructive of, the cultures that it encounters. Another difference from the IPY of 1957 is the current effort of organizers to pay attention to issues important to the northern indigenous communities who are most affected by climate change, including the study of indigenous knowledges in modern polar science. For example, Chris Cuomo has an extremely valuable website "Indigenous Knowledge and Science" as part of her National Science Foundation research project.

In this issue of S&F Online, Mary Simon, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization representing Inuit in Canada, writes about how Canada is engaging in politics-as-usual in their Arctic, and ignoring the voices of—and the treaties with—native northern peoples. Chris Cuomo, Wendy Eisner and Kenneth Hinkel write about their project to study scientific questions of climate change in the Alaskan north slope while incorporating feminist epistemology and native knowledge into their research methods. They ask what we can learn by explicitly paying attention to gender.

The importance of attending to differences in approach can literally be seen, for example, in two recent and very different documentaries by Anne Aghion and Werner Herzog, both of which portray scientists at work in Antarctica. While neither directly engages gender, the films are veritable showcases of implicitly gendered methods of visualizing what science is about. Aghion's Ice People focuses on a team of geologists as they live and work in a remote field camp. The film is paced to the rhythm of process-oriented work, its narrative center is at a remote camp where geologists search for fossils in a vast ice field using small shovels, and when they find an actual imprint of a leaf, it is filmed in real time. In her method, Aghion has followed at least the feel of fieldwork and what it is like to do the kind of science that has yielded knowledge on the history of the ice, global warming, and other major fields of Antarctic-based science.

Herzog begins his voiced-over narration complaining humorously of the NSF's bureaucratic safety protocols that protected him well but also prevented his unrestrained access to the territory and thus to its heroic past. And indeed Herzog does seem to spend the entire film trying to get lost or blown up or caught in a natural disaster. He seems to need to experience Antarctica as still connected to heroic exploration. Yet even in his choice of historic footage from Shackleton's days, particularly a promotional clip obviously shot on a soundstage in London, Herzog undercuts the authenticity of the very heroic past he yearns to experience himself. Unlike Aghion, who is content to see through the eyes of contemporary science as the major mode of engagement in Antarctica, Herzog engages agonistically both with Antarctic history and with the contemporary Antarctic, drained of the masculine ideal of those heroes.

Same Territories, New Strategies

The contributors to this special issue offer a range of alternatives to the imagination, whether scientific or cultural, of such a masculinist and western approach to the regions and the challenges of living and working in them. The contributors attend to the different ways that time passes in extreme environments; they listen to the environment—literally to its sounds and figuratively to its meanings; they photograph their surroundings from unusual angles, sometimes emphasizing immense expanses and sometimes emphasizing the mundane minimalism of living in rigidly enclosed spaces. While tourists are often taken to sites that enhance the Arctic and Antarctic's "atmospheric" and "well-maintained" pristine image, an anti-colonialist artist such as Subhankar Banerjee dedicates his conservationist ethics to show, through his photographs of animal migration patterns, the urgent environmental problems that face the Alaskan Arctic and its inhabitants, Gwich'in and Inupiat Americans. Originally trained as a scientist, since 2001 Banerjee has been working as both an artist and activist for the protection of the native Inupiat and Athabaskan Gwich'in against incursion and contamination by the fossil-fuel industry, which was already dangerously close to the Arctic Wildlife Preserve in the oil and gas fields known as Prudhoe Bay.

For both the Arctic and Antarctic, photography has been a critical tool. In the case of Banerjee's work, his images, which serve as both art and as scientific data, are inspired by Alaska's native people and the wildlife on which they depend. Banerjee's photographs remind us that scientific projects also have an aesthetic dimension, perhaps not apparent in scientific accounts, but which Banerjee is careful to foreground in his photographs. Unlike other art photographers who were promoting conservation, such as in the work of Elliot Porter, discussed in this issue by Elena Glasberg, Banerjee's landscapes create a different way of seeing landscape that deviates from the norm of, for example, a Sierra Club coffee table book. Banerjee photographs the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve as a living space that is home not only to indigenous people but to thousands of animals that pass through, rather than as a blank space or wilderness. As Banerjee writes: "My engagement with the Arctic and its people and wildlife is to create a visual culture of the often mystified, obscured, unrepresented connections that make land-as-home."

For Joyce Campbell art also supplements what the maps of official history leave out. There is a lingering fascination with sublime nature as awesome, overwhelming, and simultaneously humbling in her work on Antarctica, which, unlike Banerjee's, records an alien icescape devoid of humans and wildlife. Campbell's work also uses the genres of gothic and horror to reinvigorate the sublime, and thus creates tension between the traditional heroic landscape images and those of the present. If Campbell uses the sublime to create photographs epic in scale, she also deliberately documents the cracks, crevasses and pressure ridges to reveal that something terrible is also happening in this beautiful but extreme landscape.

Artists such as Jane Marsching, Connie Samaras, Andrea Polli, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), and Marina Zurkow take another direction altogether and have little interest in reassessing the colonial era, and generally use less traditional artistic means to confront the issue of climate change in their work. We have become used to seeing global warming in polar regions represented though the iconic images of Arctic polar bears and Antarctic penguin colonies trapped by melting ice floes. Perhaps even more striking are the scientific visualizations—the images from space showing the changes in ice surface area and thickness, the seasonal hole in Earth's ozone layer in polar regions, and the Manhattan-sized chunks of Antarctica breaking away from the main continent and drifting off. Some of our contributing artists explicitly utilize scientific imagery in their work. Jane Marsching's video shows the effect of possible rising sea levels from melting polar ice caps on the major populated cities of planet Earth. Andrea Polli and Paul Miller use the sounds of the ice in Antarctica, combined with images of scientific data, in their multimedia productions Ground Truth and Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. Zurkow's animation shows us an Arctic space already so disembodied and iconic—the floating iceberg—that it creates a hyper-real arctic occupied by cherubic kids wielding automatic weapons and stranded animals. Zurkow's work creates an apocalyptic commentary on social breakdowns in the lower 48, as well as discourses of the future sentimentally linked to children. Miller's poster series for the "People's Republic of Antarctica" looks instead to the past of Communist revolution. Countering imperialist flag planting, Miller is interested in the free utopian potential of Antarctica, one that looks back to historical political models, but like Zurkow and Polli, towards new media renderings of an alternate "space" of Antarctica. These new works extend the utopic potential of political and scientific endeavors, including the IPY and ATS, which have created Antarctica as an international territory devoted to scientific research and non-military interaction. Some have even articulated a vision of Antarctica as a global space for peace.[13] But these artistic adventures also question the ability of contemporary international science and geopolitics to maintain a course for Antarctica as a part of the world system, not a serviceable exception to it.

Strategies of Subversion in Feminist Polar Narratives

Just as the photographers use different strategies to approach the poles, the writers use at least two approaches to produce feminist narratives about the poles. Some seek to recover the history of women's involvement in polar exploration, and some use fictional approaches that imagine alternate histories and revitalize these older heroic narratives from the perspective of subjects who were historically absented.

Sherrill Grace and Gísli Pálsson's scholarship, for example, reveals how the study of the arctic has been structured and marked by absences. Pálsson, an Icelandic anthropologist, opens up the question of how racial ideologies produced distinctly different national narratives, both in the Arctic and the West. Pálsson traces the intimate relations between the anthropologist-explorer Viljalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) and what he calls "their indigenous collaborators" in the Arctic, focusing mostly on Stefansson's involvement with the Inuit, in particular his wife Fanny Pannigabluk and their son Alex.

Grace reintroduces the Canadian woman Arctic explorer, Mina Benson Hubbard, author of A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908), to polar historiography. In her essay published here, "Inventing Mina Benson Hubbard: From her 1905 Expedition across Labrador to her 2005 Centennial (and Beyond)," Grace foregrounds the role of white women explorers at a moment when their narratives were drowned out by the hyper-masculinist tales of the era. Consequently, Grace is interested in the complex way Mina Benson Hubbard successfully negotiated her entrance into this all-white, male space, and the important role that writing played in scripting her considerable accomplishments.

If Grace emphasizes how Mina Benson Hubbard changed her identity through her writing and created different discursive selves, artists have us understand exploration narratives by creating plausible, yet fictional, accounts from the historical record. The most complex literary example of how these older heroic narratives are being re-narrativized from a feminist perspective is Ursula Le Guin's 1982 "Sur," a utopian feminist hoax about an exploration in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of the real exploration teams of Amundsen and Scott.[14] The women characters in Le Guin's fantasy refuse white masculinist teleologies of conquest and heroism, and significantly, do not feel compelled to leave any record, or proof, of their presence at the South Pole. Le Guin relocates the paradox of revolution and power—how to lead a revolution without replacing (or imitating) the mode of power that oppresses you—to Antarctica, to free history from its written or recorded constraints, and to replay territory as space, not place. Given the reality of its frozen unmanageability and intractability, Le Guin also keeps Antarctica open, but not as a conventional territory, or even as a conventional utopia. Antarctica seems to call for an entirely other mode of relation that geopolitics and capital cannot easily accommodate. But feminism can—only if it does not try to re-establish a closed set of possibilities for Antarctic knowledge.

The challenges of imagining the future of both the Arctic and the Antarctic have led artists to employ a variety of media and of fictional techniques. The 2006 British stage play Moj of the Antarctic is about a 19th Century African-American woman who escapes from North American slavery by passing as a white man. She ends up on a whaling ship heading to Antarctica, and becomes both the first woman and first African-American to reach the continent. Multi-media artist Judit Hersko has a project titled Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer, a fictional narrative about a female explorer and Antarctic biologist from the 1930s called Anna Schwartz.[15] In this issue, we highlight Isaac Julien's film True North, which makes us reimagine the queerness of the Arctic intimacies by emphasizing the homosocial and racial relations between Robert Peary and his African-American exploration partner Matthew Henson, who made many attempts to reach the North Pole in the early 1900s. Through his rethinking of these social relations, Julien also asks us to rethink the meaning of beauty, whether the beauty of the region or the beauty of film. In her essay, Lisa Bloom puts Julien's film in relation to Connie Samaras's photography to demonstrate the ways in which a new "polar aesthetics" not only helps us to imagine a future for the poles (and hence for a world dependent on the well-being of the poles), but also future possibilities for artistic endeavors.

Mapping Spaces and Places

Artists such as Annie Pootoogook disrupt a whole discourse of earlier colonialist artistic representations of the Arctic to restage, and in some sense mock, the aesthetics and politics from which those original representations are drawn. Pootoogook, like Isaac Julien, also makes us rethink the Arctic in a fairly over-the-top way, through drawings that depict somewhat unsettling social interactions between Inuits in domestic settings in Cape Dorset in Nunavut. Rather than focusing on the landscape, Pootoogook turns her back on the beautiful yet desolate Baffin Island where she lives, and instead focuses her attention on fairly mundane and ordinary interiors and aspects of everyday life. This everyday life includes depictions of Western food from the new Co-op Food Store and the availability of television and broadband. While many families sleep in tents in nice weather, Pootoogook's drawings focus on the interiors of "southern style" three-bedroom houses, and her work makes us think of the Arctic as a welfare state in Canada.

Anne Noble grew up hearing about Antarctica and reading about it almost daily in the New Zealand press. Her map series reflects the infiltration of Antarctic representation into the ways she imagines the earth as a whole. For Noble, the mapped Antarctic seeps into all sorts of strange and surprising locations: the bottom of a cheap plastic blow-up globe, the south pole the ball's "bung;" a decoration on a CD marketing the continent. Are these forms of seeing Antarctica as an innocent diversion, decorative, instructional, or something else? Noble chooses a portrait mode with a blackout background for some of the images. For others she emphasizes the materiality of the paper of the original map. Some maps seem more sinister now; it is impossible not to view the 1955 British Petroleum map of the South Pole as a board game, separately from the renewed press to extract fossil fuel from ice, even though the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 protected the continent from interests like BP. Other maps in the series are site-specific and include the blurred shapes of museum-goers, themselves often caught capturing the representations of Antarctica on cameras and cell phones. Are these maps or power? Or powerful maps? Whatever territory they point to, it is unsettled and unsettling.

The Argentinean multi-media artist Andrea Juan comes from a nation that includes its Antarctic territories in insets on national maps. Juan's colorful projections confuse the common separation of map and territory by overlaying her mapped projection onto the territory. The discordant colors and the showy hyper-feminine patterns projected on an iceberg play with ideas of culture versus nature, and with the classic concept of Antarctica as a blank page to be filled in—this time by a fanciful, degraded (feminized) form of culture. Juan questions which culture should be making a place of Antarctic space. Should that place be instrumental? What's wrong with a little prettification of the blank, especially if the "painting" technique of light projection, as Juan's ecofeminist principles require, leaves no permanent trace?

Connie Samaras' photographs, on the other hand, bring us down to earth by focusing precisely on those traces, particularly buildings and construction. Her aesthetic approach invites us to see Antarctica as a gritty corporate environment that is not quite a rooted place but more of a transit zone set in a sublime landscape. As her artist's statement makes clear, she shows us the remains of buildings from an earlier, more utopian era. She also documents the construction of new buildings that suggest a future more corporate than utopic. The current wave of globalization may be one of world cities, and Samaras' photographs show that Antarctica is not separate from this world. But, she also makes us doubt that global interconnection necessarily points us toward peaceful interrelation.

Placing Antarctica into a global frame is also the project of An-My Lê, whose series of photographs, Events Ashore, depicts operations on U.S. military bases throughout the globe. By including U.S. bases at McMurdo Station and the South Pole in Events Ashore, Lê de-exceptionalizes Antarctica and connects it as a place within global economies of power. She records a built environment that is brutally industrial, menacing, and yet strangely familiar. While her large format images monumentalize the massive effort to support scientists in Antarctica, it also points to the anxiety of colonization for science, in tension with the growing trend toward remote, modeled, or robotic modes of information gathering. The glorification of labor and the working class aspect of the South Pole site gestures complicatedly to the impossibility of a nostalgia for human survival. Lê's South Pole is a combination (post) industrial office park and (de) militarized base. The support of science requires an infrastructure whose implications secures Antarctica within a map of globalization and capital flows at odds with depictions of the ice as pure, empty, or even as heroic and sublime.

The impact of building an industrial empire is also at issue in the Arctic. New oil drilling, as well as the vast increase in ship traffic, is having an effect on local Inuit populations, the environment and wildlife in the region, and is leading to a reappraisal of Arctic international law and practice. As both poles face a speeded-up version of industrialization, and the Antarctic is everyday more open to scientists and tourists, it is crucial to think knowledgeably, as well as critically, about regions in which so many vital U.S. and global concerns revolve. The circumpolar world is now a transformed geographical reality and a geopolitical force to be dealt with. As a result, there is a greater need now for anti-colonial and feminist work on these regions than ever before.

Endnotes

1. In the Antarctic, a scientific truce remains in effect whereas the Arctic is increasingly becoming the site of commercial and territorial conflict. The U.S., Canada, and Russia are mapping the underwater continental shelf in order to stake claims to what are believed to be vast deposits of oil, gas and minerals. See: "Arctic in Retreat". New York Times. 8 September 2008. Also see: "World's Leading Superpowers May Soon Launch War for Arctic and Antarctic Riches". Pravda. 12 April 2007; and "Russians Say Soil Samples Prove Arctic is Theirs." Reuters. 20 September 2007; and "Riches in the Arctic: The New Oil Race". The Independent. 25 July 2008. [Return to text]

2. See Banerjees's paper in this issue of S&F Online about how his art work provided a visual counterpoint to the debate about whether the Arctic Refuge should be opened up for oil drilling during a very critical and bitterly contested Senate debate in March 2003. See also: Ingrid Sischy. "The Smithsonian's Big Chill." Vanity Fair. December 2003: 242-6. [Return to text]

3. Argentina went to war with England in 1982 over the subantarctic Malvinas/Falkland Islands. New York Times 4 December 1984. [Return to text]

4. See the Antarctic Treaty. [Return to text]

5. See, for example, recent biographies such as: Stephanie Barczewski. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon & London, 2008; and others reviewed in: Al Alvarez. "S&M at the Poles." The New York Review of Books 54:14 (2007). See also: Rebecca Farley. "By Endurance We Conquer: Ernest Shackleton and Performances of White Male Hegemony." International Journal of Cultural Studies 8.2 (2005): 231-254, for an analysis on how these accounts are sometimes used by both the adventure travel industry and by business management consultants to promote men's leadership skills. [Return to text]

6. Francis Spufford. Keynote Address. "Imagining Antarctica." University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 4 September 2008. [Return to text]

7. Marian Wilkinson. "As the ice gives way, a great Arctic mystery may be solved". WAToday.com.au. 3 August 2008. [Return to text]

8. In 2007, Glasberg and Kay attended a performance in Manchester, England of the stage play Moj of the Antarctic (discussed on page 4 of this article). This trip prompted an interest in developing their ideas further, and, in June 2007, they formed a collaboration with Lisa Bloom and began planning this special issue of S&F Online and the related event, the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Conference, "Gender on Ice," held at Barnard College in November 2008. Over the past year and a half, among the three of us we have attended various conferences, panels, gallery shows, films, dance and multimedia performances in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Jose, Toronto, Norway and New Zealand on various Polar topics. [Return to text]

9. The IPY includes numerous conferences and events, in addition to the "Gender on Ice" conference in conjunction with this issue of S&F Online. As editors, we attended three different conferences on topics related to this special issue, sometimes also presenting our own work: in Tromso, Norway ("Arctic Discourses," February 2008); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ("North by Degree: An International Conference on Arctic Exploration," May 2008); and Christchurch, New Zealand ("Imagining Antarctica," September 2008). [Return to text]

10. For a recent review of the IPY, see: Christy Collis and Klaus Dobbs. "Assault on the unknown: the historical and political geographies of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58)." Journal of Historical Geography. 34.4 (2008): 555-573. The launch of Sputnik was also part of the International Geophysical Year. [Return to text]

11. The ice itself is a medium of information; climatologists and geologists go to the Arctic and Antarctic searching for data regarding Earth's history and study ice sheets and rock formations that provide archives of past climates. Robin Bell is currently in an Antarctic field camp as co-leader of a large international project to study a mountain range several miles under the ice. She also directs an ADVANCE program for women in science at Columbia University's Earth Institute. [Return to text]

12. See: "Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists". [Return to text]

13. See: Elena Glasberg. "Who goes there? Science, fiction, and belonging in Antarctica." Journal of Historical Geography. 34.4 (2008): 639-657. [Return to text]

14. Ursula LeGuin. "Sur." The New Yorker. 1 February 1982: 38. See also: Elena Glasberg. "Refusing History at the End of the Earth: Ursula Le Guin's 'Sur' and the 2000-01 Women's Antarctic Crossing." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 21.1 (2002): 99-121. [Return to text]

15. See Judit Hersko's website for images and a full description of her Antarctic, work-in-progress art project, "From the Pages of the Unknown Explorer." Hersko will be traveling to Antarctica on a NSF Artist's grant in December 2008 to continue her work on this project. [Return to text]