Antarctica as cultural critique: the gendered politics of scientific exploration and climate change
In: Critical studies in gender, sexuality, and culture
"Antarctica as Cultural Critique arrives at an auspicious time in history and on earth. Amid the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the European "race" to the last place on earth, Antarctica -- a continent of ice and without natives -- is finally emerging as a center of global concern. Once an impediment to and backdrop for heroic endeavor, the ice itself now focuses dramas of national competition. Antarctica as Cultural Critique creates complex connections between the present ice of environmental crisis and the past through visualizations and photographs of what Ursula Le Guin names the "living ice." Antarctica as Cultural Critique links to new ways of thinking human/ non-human divides and disturbs understandings of gendered relations as fixed and hierarchical, science as progressive and rational, and history as a mode of nostalgia, remembering, or simple reinvigoration of power that does not take into consideration the effects of its content and in the case of Antarctica, the radically non-human and shifting ontology of ice itself. On Ice reconfigures the controversy over climate change and disaster capitalism by understanding Antarctica as a cultural object in itself, a site of resource and data extraction, and as workplace for national science. On Ice contributes to new interest in contested/ resistant territories, messy borders, un-rational, uninhabitable, and anti-anthropomorphic attachment to territory"--