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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

The Club Andino Bariloche (CAB) is an Argentine mountaineering and winter sports club that was established in San Carlos de Bariloche in 1931. This paper provides a historical assessment of gender dynamics and mountaineering subjectivities in the CAB’s digital archive from 1931 to 2011. Specifically, I examine the CAB’s gendered ideologies of mountaineering as pertaining to: 1) the Andean landscape; 2) masculine protagonism; 3) feminine (in)action; and 4) transitional feminism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I argue that a history of feminine marginalization marks much of the CAB expeditionary record, drawing attention to the gendered ideologies of masculine control over mountain space. For most of the CAB’s existence, male mountaineers have denigrated the accomplishments of women and appropriated images of femininity and sexual conquest to construct the Andes as a space of masculine power, status, and accomplishment. Though a greater mutual respect emerges in the 1980s, the CAB has historically considered mountaineering incomprehensible with femininity, effectively marginalizing manifestations of womanhood from the mountaineering world.

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