Introduction

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. ¹ 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. ² 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.

1. 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.[↑]
2. 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.[↑]