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).

BearWatch co-PI van Coeverden-de Groot refers to an example of such enactment, through comparing his style of conducting research with that of Ernest Shackleton:

I fashion myself after Ernest Shackleton. Acknowledged as the greatest explorer, Arctic explorer. But the most disorganized. Right? But he never lost a man. He never lost a man. Because you either say you're disorganized, or bad luck happens to you all the time. Which one is it? But he never lost a man, and his most memorable feat was rowing 300, 700 miles in this little open wooden boat to get to a whaling station to send back a ship to pick up his crew that was abandoned on an iceberg that was slowly melting. Which he did. But he got this rep... He's also the Arctic explorer that didn't die. They went to both poles and didn't die. But the narrative is that it [his expeditions] was in shambles. Well, no. (Co-PI van Coeverden de Groot, 2023, post-workshop interview).

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 only conduct transformative research – but also transform the researcher itself.