The Mountain and the Politics of Representation

Book excerpt: The stories we tell, published or otherwise, condition our mountain experiences in practice and reinforce cultural memory and representation. Yet, as this book and the authors within it set out to demonstrate, if we look beyond the boundaries of this ‘singular white history’ there is a rich diversity of stories to tell. This volume contributes to a growing body of scholarship that calls for a heterogeneity of voices in mountain memoir genres. For the first time, this diverse scholarship interrogates how mountaineering literary and media culture impact bodies, spaces, and places, in order to nuance how commodification intersects across social categories and is embodied in multi-dimensional ways. In this volume, we explore a burgeoning tradition of mountaineering literature, of cinema and of memoir to appreciate difference, beyond the habitual heroic, white male, adventurer that dominates screens and bookshelves. Through exploring multidimensional axes of social differentiation from gender, race, class, and age to dis/ability and sexuality, the book will demonstrate how commodification is embodied through representation in mountaineering literature, media, film and memoir in mountaineering spaces. Amongst our aims, this book intends to understand how multiple social dimensions overlap and work to produce independent systems of exclusion and inclusion that focus on untraditional ways to be a mountaineer.