Paper short abstract:

This paper explores gendered more-than-human tensions in Nansen’s Farthest North. Considering its compositions with animal centered approaches, it examines evolving, gendered relationships between sledge dog and polar bear, and considers more-than-human trauma to find where our histories fall short.

Paper long abstract:

The relationships between polar bears and the sledge dogs which hunted, feasted on, and played about them are vividly captured in the visual and written record of nineteenth century circumpolar expedition logs and memoir. Indeed, the compositions in these works convey in terms unrecordable by language the disagreements and dynamics between the animals who filled roles from “domestic companions” to “monsters”, as well as the settler gender roles which European expeditionists ascribed to them. Scholars have made laudable efforts in disentangling the settler-colonial legacies encapsulated by the relationships between sledge dogs and the European polar expeditionists who led them, and considerations for the canids’ entanglements with white masculinity have shed light on examinations of extractive colonial expeditions in Northern frontiers. Similarly, consideration for the transitioning gender roles recorded in artistic and literary impressions of animals — domestic and wild — throughout late nineteenth century art and media have inspired exciting intersectional work. However, while more-than-human relationships are perhaps nowhere more evocatively recorded than in visual culture, direct application of animal-centered approaches to ecocritical consideration of the circumpolar region have yet to relate extensively to settler gender dynamics. Building on previous work, this paper explores the gendered tensions underwritten in Nansen’s Farthest North, taking its visual compositions in concert with more-than-human frameworks. In problematising the evolving relationships between the gendered sledge dog and the gendered polar bear, it considers the extraction of more-than-human trauma alongside settler human attempts to understand where our histories fall short.