‘That playfulness of white masculinity’

Abstract

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 men's 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 women's 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.