Engendering Wilderness Body, Belonging, and Refuge

Wild places are often sought out for escape from social constraints since ways of being in wild places are quite distinct from those experienced in everyday life (Driver, 1983; Manfredo, Driver, & Tarrant, 1996). Wilderness, for example, is often considered a "push back" against society and encompasses aspects such as freedom from structure, sanctuary away from social control, and immersive experiences. Gary Snyder describes wilderness as a place "where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order" (1990, p. 12). In particular, bodily engagements in wilderness may be quite different, in contrast to how most North Americans fill their days with routines, schedules, and entertainment that often alienate people from their bodies. Moreover, how we engage and express our bodily selves has much to do with our gendered identities (Grosz, 1994; Butler, 1990) and how we are situated in contexts of normative gender expectations, discrimination, oppression, and social surveillance (Bordo, 1993; Bartky, 1988; Foucault, 1977). Johnson and Kivel (2007), for example, urge leisure and sport scholars to "ask how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are policed in their leisure and sport, especially when the space is constructed in and among heterosexual discourses" (p. 103).We believe that wilderness experiences can offer a different kind of "perceptual orienteering, a different way of locating oneself in relation to one's environment" (Gaard, 1997, p. 17). These experiences sensually engage our bodies with the natural world in relation to space, energy, sight, smells, sounds, and sense of time (Gaard) while also providing space away from social surveillance as it relates to gender, sex, and sexuality.Because gender is a construct that is historically and culturally defined (Butler, 1990), attempts to interpret one's experience based on conventional definitions of what it means to be a woman or a man might be limiting. This study therefore uses a poststructural feminist framework to allow alternate tellings of gendered experience in wilderness.1 We begin with this theoretical frame, thereby explaining central concepts such as transitivity, performativity, "Othering," and subjectivity. We then situate this study in literature on wilderness and gender. Next, we outline and describe our methodological approach including our use of in-depth/ semi-structured interviewing and feminist/constructivist oriented grounded theory. Pulling from our interviews we then describe why and how we find ecological belonging in wild places by looking at experiences of bodily awakening, vulnerability, and connection. As part of these narratives, we will also discuss why and how wilderness can be experienced as a refuge from normative gender as well as how gender identity and gender negotiation influence leisure. We will close the paper with a discussion of what these stories reveal about the human-wilderness relationship and the broader implications of gender difference and belonging in American society.Theoretical FrameworkWe employed a poststructural feminist framework for this research. This informed our conceptualizations of gender, wilderness, and identity as well as our methodological choices, approaches, and imperatives. As others have argued, poststructural feminist theory can contribute much to our understandings of gender in leisure contexts (Aitchison, 2000, 2003; Fox, 1992; Henderson & Hlckerson, 2007; Johnson & Kivel, 2007) and has the potential to increase theoretical sophistication within the field of leisure studies (Aitchison, 2000). Poststructurallsm is a way of thinking and theorizing subjectivity by disrupting and deconstructing the grand modernist narratives that depict universal truths across culture, history, and time (Aitchison, 2003). Further, poststructuralism "seeks to reveal the power relations upon which the construction, legitimation and reproduction of modernist society depends" (Aitchison, 2003, p. …