Susan Frohlick

‘That playfulness of white masculinity’ Mediating masculinities and adventure at mountain film festivals

This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out at mountain film festivals in three Canadian cities to show how women viewers reacted to and talked about the predominantly masculine narratives and active male subjects that they were bombarded with in the mediated hype of the festival. The women viewers’ interpretations of the films complicated the ‘alleged neutrality’ of mens bodies by drawing attention to nuanced constructions of the unmarked male adventure subject, such as world explorer, elite athlete and extreme adventurer. At the same time, the womens narratives demonstrate that ‘playful, white masculinity’ is repeatedly represented in these media spaces, which effectively displaces women and non-white men to the periphery of the adventure imaginary. Positioned as consuming subjects, female viewers do not blithely accept these images but as white, educated, middle-class western women both distance themselves from and place themselves within these imaginaries, and engage with ambivalent re-articulations of adventure.

Intimate Tourism Markets: Money, Gender, and the Complexity of Erotic Exchange in a Costa Rican Caribbean Town

This article focuses on heterosexual North American and European tourist women in a transnational town in Atlantic Costa Rica renown for its intimate “vibe” and independent eco-oriented tourist development, where they grappled with the unexpected monetary aspects of intimate relations with Caribbean-Costa Rican men. Drawing from three women’s narratives, I explore the particularities of how North American women give money to men with whom they are having sex or intimate relations and what this giving means to both the women and their partners. Rather than refute the monetary underpinnings of tourist women’s transnational sex or see money as all powerful, I show the complexity of transactions and multiple meanings that accrue to money and markets. I argue that the small-scale, informal, and “intimate market” context of the Caribbean as a tourist destination, as well as the valence of sexual secrecy in combination with the moral evaluations about foreign women’s relations with local men that circulated in the town, were central influences on the exchanges.

Pathos of Love in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica: Emotion, Travel and Migration

Abstract Most literature on local–tourist intimate relations focuses on the aspirational migration of Third World subjects, and often presumes the unencumbered mobility of tourists. Yet Northern tourists seek out belonging, emplacement and attachment in the global South for reasons to do with love. In this paper I draw upon research in Costa Rica with European and North American women whose emotional subjectivities, I suggest, shape their mobility shift from tourist to migrant. Using a transnational framework to examine the remaking of emotion in global encounters, I show how emotion, travel and migration are linked, and how cultural and transcultural notions of ‘love’ profoundly affect migration experiences.

‘Who is Lhakpa Sherpa?’ circulating subjectivities within the global/local terrain of Himalayan mountaineering

This paper traces different formations of subjectivities negotiated within the transnational circuits of mountaineering media and cultural production. Drawing from ethnographic research in Nepal and Canada in 2000, I examine various representations of the second Nepali woman to climb Everest in order to demonstrate the linkages between scales and geographies of media narratives and subjectivities. Appearing in newspapers, a research interview with myself (a foreign researcher) and on the Internet, these differently scaled narratives render Lhakpa Sherpa in terms of local and global subjectivities, which shift after her successful climb, and are complex and dynamic. I engage with feminist critiques of globalization to encourage a view of globalization as enacted rather than merely resisted and to analyse ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as inseparable and contingent and productive of particular gendered subjectivities. The disjuncture between her popularity in Nepal and the lack of knowledge about her in Canada reveals the uneven processes of globalization wherein Lhakpa Sherpa struggles against gender and racial politics in mountaineering at the same time that she is privileged to climb as a sponsored mountaineer, a new subjectivity for a Nepali mountaineer.