Editing Arctic Masculinities

Arctic ‘wildernesses’, can be seen as sites for the enactment of a specific white, hetero-masculinity associated with physical strength, roughness, ingenuity, and self-realization (Sandilands & Ericson, 2010). 



Such sites of enactment (can) extend into scientific spaces, like laboratories or lecture rooms, reproducing hegemonic masculinities and perpetuating racial and gender inequalities and unequal power relations (MacGregor & Seymour, 2017). 

Drag has the potential to de-naturalize and unsettle such masculinities by embodying its technologies as separable from sex. Such masculinity, as performed through drag then becomes liminal, a place beyond categories – a space of play; ‘the betwixt and between’ through which shape-shifting figures turn things on their heads and pass on their way from one state of being to another (Rosenfeld, 2003). 

Taking these techniques and applying them not so much towards normative categories of gender, but towards norms upheld within western scientific spaces, opens our understanding of its conventions and social contracts in similar ways. Drag can thus, shift fixed positions, and transform everyday expectations and habits, that allows us to not to conduct transformative research – but also transform the researcher itself.