VIRTUAL LAUNCH | Julie Rak - False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction

On Zoom - contact jrak@ualberta.ca for access

Join author Julie Rak for the launch of her new book, False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction. This event is in partnership with Glass Bookshop (Edmonton, AB). Julie Rak is professor of English and film studies and holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta.

Special Guest Presenters
Peter Hansen, Worcester Polytech Institute, USA
PearlAnn Reichwein, University of Alberta, Canada

Host
Jonathan Cohn, University of Alberta, Canada

ABOUT THE BOOK

False Summit unpacks gender politics in the expedition narratives and memoirs of mountaineers in the Himalayas and the Karakoram. Why are women still a minority in the world's highest places? Julie Rak proposes that the genre has itself reached a "false summit" - a peak that proves not to be the pinnacle - and that mountaineering is not ready to welcome other ways of climbing or other kinds of climbers. For more than two centuries mountaineering, as an activity and as an ideal, has helped shape how the self is understood within the context of conquest, adventure, and proximity to risk. As climbing shows signs of becoming more diverse, Rak asks why change is so hard to achieve and why gender bias and other inequities exist in climbing at all.