Unsettling gender and sexuality at the Point Barrow, Alaska station of the First International Polar Year (1882–1883)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The American expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska to establish a station for the First International Polar Year (IPY) in 1881 was shaped by familiar gendered and sexualised settler colonial discourses about the North as secretive, unknown, and ethereal, yet knowable by techniques of scientific observation. The First IPY (1882–1883) was a significant moment in colonial scientific exploration and research, as the largest coordinated international effort to gather scientific data about the Arctic and Antarctic related to meteorology, geomagnetism, and auroral observation. This essay looks at the relationship between the Americans and Iñupiaq, and specifically at settler fantasies about race, gender and sexuality that circulate in the documents of the expedition. This analysis focuses on how Iñupiaq women operate as a reference point from which to construct Iñupiaq masculinity as deficient and American masculinity as superior. This ‘failure’ to conform to settler norms of gender and sexuality supported the pervasive settler narrative of Indigenous peoples as a ‘vanishing race’ declining as a result of a natural process, rather than due to settler colonialism. I then situate the Point Barrow expedition in relation to literature on polar exploration in other sites – for example, the North Pole and Antarctica – to contextualise this expedition and its implications for settler colonial studies.