Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change (Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture)

Antarctica as Cultural Critique arrives at an auspicious time in history and on earth. Amid the centennial celebrations of the European 'race' to the last place on earth, Antarctica - a continent of ice lacking natives - is finally emerging as a center of global concern. Antarctica as Cultural Critique connects the ice of environmental crisis to its past as an impediment to progress through visualizations and photographs of what Ursula Le Guin calls the 'living ice.' Glasberg opens new ways of thinking human/ non-human divides that disturb assumptions about the gender and progress under scientific management, and about attachments to a heroic past that does not take into consideration the radically non-human and shifting ontology of ice itself.

Beginning with what was once the "last place on earth," this book redirects discussions within the history of exploration and of globalization. Glasberg takes on persistent clichés of Antarctica as exceptional territory for masculine heroics, untouched wilderness, utopia for international science, or symbol of hope for capitalism or a post-ecological future. Arguing that Antarctica is the most mediated place on earth and thus an ideal location for testing the limits of biopolitical management of population and place, this book remaps national and postcolonial methods and offers a new look on a "forgotten" continent now the focus of ecological concern.