Standing on top: Gendered aspects of competition and collaboration in Himalayan mountaineering

Description

Competition and collaboration are crucial elements of Himalayan expeditions. However, in extreme mountaineering these terms are strongly linked with masculinity. The run for the first ascents of the fourteen Himalayan giants in the 1950s and 1960s was an exclusive male venture just as the concept of comradeship in expedition teams was purely perceived a male value. Female mountaineers entered the field of high-altitude mountaineering with a delay of 20 years reaching the first summits of 8,000 m peaks in the 1970s. Especially in the period from the 1950s to the 1990s, women-only-teams offered an opportunity for female mountaineers to get access to the highest mountains worldwide. The first generation of women’s teams in the 1950s avoided to be associated with competitive motives and justified their goals with the sheer love of mountains and the joy of exploration. In order to gain acceptance for their projects, they acted modestly and in correspondence with social gender norms. However, thirty years later, the Polish mountaineer Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first European woman to summit Mount Everest in 1978, claimed, that mountaineering was not only a passion but must be perceived as a competitive sport. She suggested, that women’s achievements in this sport may only be valued and rewarded when they are fulfilled in all-women teams. With her attitudes, she challenged not only herself but also a gender order in alpinism, which did not perceive female climbers as equally ambitious and competitive athletes. The paper debates the significance of competition in high altitude climbing since the beginning of the 20th century from a gender history perspective. It argues that competition was a means to exclude female mountaineers from high-altitude expeditions until at least the end of the 20th century. Besides that, strategies and opinions of different generations of female Himalayan mountaineers towards competition and collaboration are discussed.

Period	21 Sept 2022
Event title	25th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF CESH
Event type	Conference
Location	RomaniaShow on map