Call for paper for the JAR

Call for paper – before November 15th, 2012 for the Journal of Alpine Research

The present call for papers seeks to offer a feminine/masculine reading of mountains. Many works have already analysed the roles of human activity in mountain spaces, in agricultural production, the travel trade, the economy and the arts. But such investigation has often focused on the masculine side, revealing the practices, customs and narratives of men in the mountains. However the relations between humans and mountains do not all take a masculine form, their feminine side being equally extensive. A gender-related approach highlights these ‘blind spots’ in the epistemological, theoretical and methodological grounding of such investigation, and in its reading of the mountain space, its practices and its representations (Mac Dowell, 1999, 2008). Our purpose is not to oppose masculine with feminine views of the mountains as the object of representations and practices, but to suggest a reading more resolutely rooted in an understanding of the complementary nature of the sexes and their comparison (Louargant S., 2003, 2004), and in a geography of various forms of sexuality (Blidon M. 2008, Jaurand E., 2011). By giving priority to such approaches we aim to enrich scientific input revealing the feminine-masculine construction of the object we call the mountains.

Read the call for paper