Gender and Consumption: Uncovering the Subaltern Experience of High-Achieving Women

Competence, capacity and creative problem solving generally garner one respect, appreciation and gratitude. Voluntary participation in a dangerous context generally exasperates the value of these attributes and reverence in which successful participants are held. However, the vagaries of marketplace forces undermine the extent to which women in the context of mountain climbing are graced with the accolades enjoyed by their male peers.

Our research context differs from previous gender consumption research in three important ways: the individual capacities to successfully participate in mountaineering do not privilege male or female bodies (strength to weight ratio is a more important determinant than brute force), competition is object based (success on the wall; survival), and public nature of performance (other climber see or otherwise learn about successes and failures). Rather than investigating women’s sport participation in a gender-segregated competitive context (e.g., roller derby, snowboarding), our context is cross-gender inclusive wherein females and males each climb and often climb together. To get a deep understanding of women climbers’ experiences, we employed the theory of intersectionality, subaltern experience and gender, through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory of field-dependence.