Contribution short abstract:

Masculinist/Colonialist narratives of the North excluded women even as they contributed to representations of the North. Focusing on women photographers and using feminist theory, this paper un-writes the dominant narratives to tell the untold stories of these women photographers and their images.

Contribution long abstract:

The double project of feminist theory and methodology is the historical recovery of the stories and work of women producers of culture that have been systematically erased, and the concomitant deconstruction of prevailing discourses and practices that such a recovery project can produce. This paper focuses on a particular group: women photographers who, in the early 20th century, worked in the far north of Norway and Sweden, producing photographic images that, in their mediated circulation, contributed to the representation and construction of the North.

Narratives of colonization of the North were generally subsumed into the social construction of masculinity that legitimized the exclusion of women in public discourse. In the narrativization of the photographic record of the North, it has thus been male photographers who have been written into (or indeed wrote themselves into) the heroic narrative of conquest. A revisionist narrative has subsequently emerged that constructs women photographers as gender “trailblazers,” a feminist fantasy narrative in which individual women appropriate the heroic persona -- acting alone and with impunity. In both narratives, the masculinist imperative is preserved, not challenged.

The real-life stories of the women photographers confound these simplistic scripts, as do their photographs. A closer look at the lives of several women photographers through the lens of feminist theory helps un-write the dominant narratives by using the untold stories of women photographers and their images in new stories that emerge from the intersection of nation, gender, race, and colonialism.