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This article reflects on forms of domination at the intersection of class, race and gender in the Rocky Mountains (USA), and is itself situated at the intersection of several disciplinary fields. The text proposes avenues of reflection in an attempt to identify the mechanisms by which the hegemony of a normative white, straight, male and upper-middle class body is constituted in the historic place of the Wild West myth. Going beyond a class-based approach, the aim is to present new analytical strata and complementary lines of inquiry, based in particular on a new epistemology of outdoor sports and mountains, drawing on work that sheds light on race and gender issues.

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  • 1 Author's translation from the French.
  • 2 For Gloria Joseph too, writing in the same edited volume, “if one can claim that marxism is incompl (...)
  • 3 Although Elsa Dorlin tends to question its limits in her edited book (Dorlin, 2009).
  • 4 This movement denounces the unifying vision of women, which “abusively universalises an experience (...)

1This article reflects on forms of domination at the intersection of class, race and gender in the Rocky Mountains, USA. It is thus itself situated at the intersection of several disciplinary fields, notably those of class, gender and race issues (Ndiaye, 2006; Mazouz, 2020; Collins, 1990). As such, it is notably in line with recent work on whiteness and its privileges (Viveros Vigoya, 2019), which shows that in race relations, whiteness embodies a dominant (Brun, 2021) and normative position (Mazouz, 2020; Lépinard and Mazouz, 2019). In Sexe, race, classe. Pour une épistémologie de la domination, Elsa Dorlin reminds us that the terms “gender”, “race” and “class” “refer to the social production of forms of difference and distinction and their incorporation”, and enable us to “apprehend the mechanisms of naturalisation of power and the relations of domination at play within them (exploitation, subordination, normalisation, othering, etc.)”1 (2009, p. 8). The complex exercise of interconnecting analyses of race, gender and class domination was declared to be necessary in a key text of materialist feminism by Heidi Hartmann, in which she describes a capitalist, patriarchal and white society (1996) 2. The analytical framework of intersectionality, which can be defined as “the understanding of power relations as being interconnected or interwoven” (Dorlin, 2009, p. 9) 3, was developed by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1989, 1991), drawing on the legacy of Black Feminism.4

2Beyond its intersectional epistemological anchoring, the analyses proposed in this article are also situated at the crossroads of several disciplinary fields due to the symbolic nature of the site of study. The Rocky Mountains, defined as the historic place of the Wild West myth, and the location of many protected natural areas – including the highly celebrated Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks – have a particular draw today. They are therefore a major site of study in relation to amenity migration and rural gentrification (Ghose, 2004; Bryson and Wyckoff, 2010; Saumon, 2019, 2022), but are also central to academic output on American environmental history. Finally, the appeal of these mountains relies to a large extent on outdoor sports, for which they are a major setting, calling for a careful reading of multidisciplinary work on outdoor activities.

3The analysis proposed here constitutes an extension of my PhD thesis (Saumon, 2019). As such, the empirical materials come from two periods of fieldwork carried out in western Montana in 2014 and 2015, during which I conducted semi-structured interviews with gentrifying amenity migrants, long-term “locals”, political actors and environmental NGOs, and collected mental maps. All of these materials were subjected to qualitative processing and lexical analysis. I also conducted a shorter, more exploratory period of collective fieldwork in July 2018, which consisted of travelling through the Rocky Mountains from Montana to Colorado via Wyoming. These materials are supplemented by analysis of a varied corpus consisting of nature writing, films and various promotional flyers celebrating the recreational activities on offer in Montana.

  • 5 As proposed by Léa Sallenave in the PhD thesis she defended in 2022: see in particular chapters 1 a (...)

4This article is not only an extension of my thesis, but also bears witness to my epistemological development over the last five years. The result is a strong and assertive reflexive perspective, a focus on theoretical questions and a bibliographical framework, with numerous references and citations.5 I feel it is essential to continue to support the dissemination of English-language critical research, some of which has as yet had limited impact in France, and this requires translation and transmission work, to which I hope to contribute with the original French-language version of this article. It is therefore conceived as an essay in which I attempt to open up new avenues of reflection based on theoretical fields not explored in my previous work. While I was working on and writing my thesis, between September 2013 and March 2019, I conceived of relations of domination solely through the lens of social class. This was undoubtedly due to my academic anchoring in the research group I was part of at the time. I was aware that the ease with which I forged relationships in the Rocky Mountains, and was therefore subsequently able to conduct interviews, stemmed from the normativity of my bodily appearance, through my outdoors sports clothes as a young researcher in a gentrified place. During my two periods of fieldwork, I also had strong feelings about the masculinity of the sports postures I observed, and was sometimes shocked by the invisibilisation of women’s backgrounds in research on amenity migration or rural gentrification. But my remarks never went beyond the footnote in my final report. Obviously the whiteness of my site of study was clear to me, and I dealt with this very indirectly through the critique of conventional environmental history and the necessary mention of the double dispossession of the Indian Nations that must be associated with it – notably, in the case of Montana, the Blackfeet whose lands were seized to create Glacier National Park. But through to my thesis defence in 2019, this issue remained an unthought in my academic output. Today, I consider this implicit treatment of the question of whiteness in my work up to that point to be the consequence of my own privileged position as a “universal white researcher”: universalist thinking is the prerogative of the dominant (Dorlin, 2009; Lépinard and Mazouz, 2019).

5Based on these considerations, it seems to me absolutely urgent that we extricate ourselves from what researcher Anthony Kwame Harrison calls ideological cynicism, “where people have some awareness of whats going on but only acknowledge it in exceptional instances, choosing to otherwise participate in it uncritically” (Harrison, 2013). This leads us to tolerate more or less latent forms of structural racism, sexism and ableism, and still further, to participate in them through our everyday behaviours or cowardise. I believe there is the same intellectual need to try to shed light on the multiple mechanisms of gender, race and class domination in our academic work, as there is in calling out the same mechanisms of domination operating in our universities. This article is therefore both an academic proposition and a call to open our eyes to the conditions under which we produce knowledge.

A White, Male and Heteronormative Takeover of the Mountains

6In the American West, the normativity of the athletic body (of the skier, mountain biker or trail runner, for example) is the result of class domination embodied in hegemonic environmental practices (Saumon, 2019, 2022). Here, however, I aim to propose additional strata to the analysis, and to shed light on why the body that takes up all the space in the American Rockies is not only an athletic one, but also white, male and straight. In order to move beyond the unthought in conventional academic output on the Rocky Mountains, it is necessary to look not only at American environmental history, in which the mountains are a major site, but also at multidisciplinary analyses that combine gender and/or race and outdoor sports, since these mountains are also characterised by the activities they host. This will enable me to shed light on the specificity of mountains in relation to the whiteness of other recreational spaces, such as beaches, which have previously been studied in Australia (Moreton-Robinson and Nicoll, 2007), England (Burdsey, 2011) and the USA (Phoenix et. al., 2021).

7Indeed, studies of outdoor sports and/or mountain activities show that women and non-white people are less likely to participate. The whiteness of national park visitors in the USA has been regularly highlighted in the US press since the 2010s. An article headlined “Why Are Our Parks So White?” was published in The New York Times on 10 July 2015,6 and even more recently, an article in The Harvard Gazette, on 3 April 2023, was entitled “How Did ‘The Great Ourdoors’ Get So Exclusive?”7 Harrison develops the concept of racial spatiality, arguing that certain racialised bodies are expected in certain social spaces and that, in a complementary way, the presence of other, non-expected bodies disturbs these. The social space of skiing is an emblematically white social space (Harrison, 2013), which has led researchers such as Annie Gilbert Coleman and Mark C. J. Stoddart to return to the concept of “hegemony” developed by Antonio Gramsci, conceived as a process of normalisation of power whereby the interests of minorities respond solely to those of the dominant (Coleman, 1996; Stoddart, 2012). Derek C. Martin (2004) shows in a complementary way that white people have an exclusive practice of the “Great Outdoors”. His study is based on statistical data that capture the considerable discrepancies between the leisure activities, and in particular outdoor activities, of white and Black people in the USA, and the differences in national park visitor numbers. Among Canadian academics, work on outdoor activities and spaces has also pointed to the hegemonic whiteness and minoritisation of Black bodies, particularly in skiing (Baldwin et al., 2011). Similarly, other theoretical perspectives have demonstrated that fewer women take part in outdoor sports (Wearing, 1998), notably in the mountains, due to embedded representations: “mountains or remote national parks have been traditionally imagined and marketed as environments to be ‘conquered’ and ‘tamed’ by men” (Godtman Kling et al., 2020, p. 233). For example, in her work on women’s mountaineering, and mountain guiding in particular, Rozenn Martinoia describes the environment studied as “a factual and ideological space of male domination” (2013, p. 4). And while there is today a form, albeit very minor, of feminisation of the profession, the author observes “the reactivation in some discourses of a historical figure of masculine heroism [...]: any threat for male domination gives rise to defence reactions” (2013, p. 5). This last point brings us to the heteronormativity of mountain spaces, in particular the Rocky Mountains, which is an academic field that has not yet been fully explored. However, as with the heteronormativity of public spaces (Bonté, 2022; Cattan and Leroy, 2010), the heteronormativity of environmental thought has been studied: it is also reflected in LGBTphobic – and in particular transphobic – arguments, which frequently refer to the idea of nature, supporting the supposed naturalness of gender difference (Gray, 2017). In this respect, the environmental history of the Rocky Mountains is part of an intrinsically straight, heteronormative and masculine relationship to the wilderness. This further jeopardises LGBT+ livability in very conservative states: Montana’s transphobic politics in particular are increasingly evident8 – from the ban on drag shows in the majority of public places to the ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and the censure to which state representative Zooey Zephyr is subject.9

  • 10 Author’s translation from the French.

8The white, male takeover of mountain spaces and outdoor activities, as well as their heteronormative nature, raises questions about the causes. The question of the visibility/invisibility of white/Black bodies in outdoor sports has led to the development of several explanatory models since the 1970s (Martin, 2004). One of these is structural and systemic: the “marginality perspective” is based on socioeconomic explanations, and specifically on the difference in income between different groups, which gives them greater or lesser access to leisure activities. As such, Martin refers to work denouncing the anchoring of racism in our everyday lives, which Laura Pulido also addresses in geographic terms by considering the “spatial sedimentation of racial inequalities”10 (2000, p. 16). In his analysis of the low numbers of non-white people who practice skiing, Harrison also considers economic disparities as a structural explanatory factor (2013). In work looking jointly at outdoor sports practices and gender issues, another structural explanatory factor has also been stated: for women, the care responsibilities that are assigned to them in their professional environment as well as in their homes, combined with unpaid domestic labour, all on top of their actual job, create strong constraints for practicing leisure activities (in relation to time, money and social acceptance) (Wearing, 1998; Godtman Kling et al., 2020). But while this factor remains decisive in characterising the unequal possible involvement of women and men in leisure activities, it does not explain why fewer women access outdoor sports specifically.

  • 11 Idem.
  • 12 Idem.

9Feminist and racial perspectives also offer another explanatory model for the white male hegemony in mountain outdoor sports, by pointing to more symbolic mechanisms of exclusion. Martin describes a “racialized outdoor leisure identity”, drawing on the theoretical field of leisure socialisation to remind us that any leisure activity, and its specific techniques and rules, is a matter of learned behaviour, as are values and beliefs. Parents, teachers and friends, both at home and at school, teach us to distinguish what is acceptable from what is not, and whether or not it is legitimate to take pleasure in something. This gives racial identities to the different activities we take part in, and the different spaces we use, based on the relationship our socio-racial group has with these activities and spaces (Martin, 2004). In her work, French sociologist Solène Brun introduces the concept of “racial socialisation” (Brun, 2022), previously studied in the USA. This provides insight into both the cultural pride in the minority group transmitted by the family circle and on the need, from an early age, to “learn to cope with the fact that being Black is precisely attached to negative meanings”11 (Brun, 2022, p. 6). In his PhD thesis, Romane Blassel links this first concept to that of “awareness of race relations”,12 and to racism in particular (2021, p. 14). The racialised identity of outdoor sports activities specifically, and therefore the white exclusivity of the associated socialisations, is founded in part on the history of their development. Annie G. Coleman has shown that the development of downhill skiing in the USA was based on a European vocabulary and iconography. The ski schools that flourished in the 1940s taught “French”, “Swiss” or “Austrian” methods. Even the names of ski resorts, often Alpine-inspired, and their architecture, referred to this white European imaginary. She takes as an example the tourism marketing campaign run in the late 1950s in Colorado, which presented the Rocky Mountains as “the ‘other’ Alps” (Coleman, 1996, p. 593). This helps to make skiing, even in the USA, a pan-European experience (Harrison, 2013, p. 324), whether the skis come from Italy or Germany, whether the resort’s name is Alpine-inspired or its architecture Bavarian: the whiteness of the bodies attests to the common “nationality” of white.

  • 13 Idem.

10In the same way as with racial issues, gendered socialisation, which gives our spaces and practices de facto gendered identities, creates substantial barriers for people who practice outdoor sports, making them feel more or less legitimate to have this experience. Feminist researchers have demonstrated from this perspective the consequences of women’s confinement to the domestic space, “while men perform the role of ‘tamers of nature’” (Godtman Kling et al., 2020, p. 235). Women are forced to stay indoors because they are unable to master their natural wildness, in contrast to the outdoors, which men are themselves able to civilise. In addition, studies show how the “edgework” or “voluntary and real emotional and physical endangerment” (Martinoia, 2013, p. 6) that characterises certain high-risk outdoor sports is socially constructed as typically masculine, referring to emotions corresponding to the virile archetype (composure in particular) (Lyng, Matthews, 2007; Lois, 2001). For Nicolas Penin, “risk-taking is clearly virilizing”13 (2006, p. 655), and has to be reserved for the legitimate male mountain body.

Wilderness and Whiteness in the Rocky Mountains: An Imaginary Built Over Time

11I believe it is crucial to develop and reinforce the hypothesis presented here of the racialised and gendered identity of outdoor sports and mountains with another element, namely the specific history of my site of study, and the way in which it has been conceived of and written about. The Rocky Mountains are, for several reasons, the symbolic place of the American wilderness and its coloniality. The conquest of the West was, first and foremost, an enterprise of colonial despoilment, and the contemporary appeal of the “wilderness” – and specifically the way in which gentrifiers come to confront it via outdoor sports – is a new form of conquest by neo-pioneers who are equally white and masculine. This ideal of pushing oneself to the limits by confronting the wilderness has profoundly influenced the relationship to nature of the white middle and upper middle classes in the USA. The same is true in Canada, where studies have shown that wilderness and whiteness are equally consubstantial (Scott, 2022).

  • 14 Giovanna Di Chiro analyses the opposition of environmental NGOs in the 1980s to join in with protes (...)
  • 15 Beyond the Rocky Mountains, Rozenn Martinoia has shown how women have been invisibilised in the col (...)

12While American environmental history has been blindingly white – with Roderick F. Nash embodying the undisputed supreme example (1967) – since the 1990s, wilderness has been the subject of more critical approaches, the most influential being William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1996). A new generation of historians reflects this major epistemological break, asserting the existence of “new wilderness historians” countering “the received view of wilderness” (Callicott and Nelson, 1998; Lewis, 2007), and advocating a decentred gaze so as to adopt other perspectives, notably postcolonial approaches or those sensitive to issues of environmental justice. One of the new historiographers following in Cronon’s footsteps was Susan R. Schrepfer, who showed how the highest mountain peaks in the American West have been widely renamed after male scientists, artists, politicians and climbers of European descent (Schrepfer, 2005, p. 32). Researchers today are also shedding light on the trauma of the Indian Nations but also that of African-American populations, linked to the collective memory of slavery and then sharecropping, which have left significant traces on their relationship to the land (Martin, 2004; Meeker, 1973; Johnson, 1998). This academic exploration and its expression are all the more necessary since beyond history writing, environmental activism has suffered, and continues to suffer, from a blindness to racial issues. The reluctance of very white conventional environmental movements to support struggles against environmental racism (Bullard, 1994)14 have amply demonstrated this (Keucheyan, 2014; Di Chiro, 1996). The minoritisation or even invisibilisation of non-white and non-male bodies in history writing, as well as in the dissemination of a collective memory, thus seem to have played a particularly decisive role in the socially constructed imaginary of legitimate spaces and practices in the Rocky Mountains.15

13In my opinion, there is all the more need today to study and call out the close link between wilderness and whiteness in the Rockies, in both the academic sphere and in activist circles, since it is given prominence by the far-right groups that are increasingly present and organised in the American West. These groups are formalising and legitimising their racist theories within the already dangerous framework of bioregionalism, which they have taken up and hijacked: in the American Northwest, the federal states are often regarded as artificial entities, whose boundaries have been defined by geometry rather than “nature”. This mismatch between political regions and mountain ranges or watersheds is at the root of the many proposals for regional divisions that challenge the political organisation of the USA. They include “Cascadia”, a bioregion named by an early nineteenth-century Scottish botanist, David Douglas, who was fascinated by the region’s cascading waterfalls and rivers (Todd, 2008). Cascadia, as a coherent ecological entity, is now being conceived as a political territory, giving rise to the pro-independence ambitions of some small secessionist political parties. But the bioregionalist movement is also a source of political abuses. It is a short step from asserting an ecosystemic, biological coherence to creating a racist territory. The environment then becomes a pretext for the creation of supremacist groups, supporting the conception of a bioregion that should only be home to the white race, just as it should only be home to endemic plant and animal species – ignoring the earlier presence of Indian Nations. These groups see the Rocky Mountains as a place of potential white refuge and, in the name of the bioregion’s ecological and racial coherence, thus often encourage white mobility. Indeed, the leaders themselves seem to be newcomers, outlining a new front of racist conquest, for example by advertising jobs and real estate in the hope of enticing other white people to join them.

The Role of Media Representations in Perpetuating a White, Straight, Male Imaginary of Mountains and Outdoor Sports

14The racialised and gendered identity of the Rocky Mountains and the outdoor sports practiced there thus seems to be nourished by an old collective imaginary, in which these mountains are associated with the coloniality and masculinity of the relationship between heteronormative white male bodies and the wilderness. While this imaginary is rooted in the long history of the conquest of the West, it is continually fed by contemporary media representations. Some analyses, for example, point to the heteronormativity of films such as Brokeback Mountain (directed by Ang Lee, 2005). Although the latter features an LGBT+ romance, in terms of media representations of sexuality, the couple and fidelity, it responds to expectations that are ultimately highly heteronormative, as evidenced by its success with a predominantly heterosexual female audience (Nayar, 2011). To support their analyses of media corpuses, researchers have also paid particular attention to outdoor sports magazines, promotional brochures and other regional marketing documents for mountain locations. In an article exploring promotional images of mountain destinations in Sweden, the authors note that men are portrayed as overcoming fear or pain in the context of solo experiences, while women settle for being there, passive, and usually accompanied by others (Godtman Kling et al., 2020, p. 237). These representations reinforce normative gender roles, contributing to making women feel illegitimate in certain practices, and to avoiding them. Martin, who analysed over 4,000 advertisements from three US magazines relating to the Great Outdoors published between 1984 and 2000, shows in a complementary way how the white imaginary of the mountains is disseminated by these media, paying particular attention to the places occupied by Black and white models, the activities with which they are associated and the image of them that is presented. He argues that the Great Outdoors are constructed in the media as white spaces, since representations of Black Americans are very much in the minority in the magazines studied, and representations of Black Americans explicitly practicing an outdoor activity are even scarcer (Martin, 2004).

  • 16 Author’s translation from the French.

15I observed this in my own analysis of the media corpus representing the Rocky Mountains. For example, among the 104 pages of the latest edition of the promotional brochure published by Missoula, Montana (“The Official 2024 Missoula Area Visitor Guide”), while many women are represented, they are always sharing the activity with other women, or being guided, very visibly supported in their practices by one or more men. In the most striking example, a photograph shows six women wearing large life jackets on a canoe steered by the only man in the scene. In the same guide, only two racialised people are pictured, neither of them practicing an outdoor sport (the first is riding a merry-go-round with a child, and the second taking a break during an art tour). As Léa Sallenave writes, I thus had to “patiently rummage through the headings”16 to find non-white models (2020, p. 5).

16As such, contemporary media representations both perpetuate and reinforce the racialised identity of outdoor activities at the same time as they attest to it. For Martin, this has three main consequences:

  • the stereotype that Black Americans do not participate in outdoor activities can be seen as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, since they end up unconsciously accepting the fact that these activities are not for them without even trying them out;

  • if the recreational activities associated with the wilderness are activities defined as white, and wilderness spaces defined as white spaces, racialised people may not want to participate in these activities in these spaces for fear of increasing the risk of being subject to forms of discrimination, and of experiencing even more racism in them: this leads to quite explicit forms of avoidance;

  • these people may also be afraid of coming into conflict with their own racial identity, and fear being criticized for this by other Black people in their communities (Martin, 2004).

  • 17 Idem.

17In the French-language literature, Léa Sallenave is one of the few researchers to have explicitly documented media representations of Black and mixed-race people in the mountains, based on a corpus of over a thousand promotional and cinematographic images depicting men and women taking part in mountain activities in fourteen alpine ski areas, and in “mainstream” films. She has thus demonstrated the “processes of media visibilisation/invisibilisation” (2020, p. 2) of people according to whether they are white, Black or mixed-race in mountain recreational areas, and conceptualised in this respect a “media hyper-visibilisation of white bodies” (ibid., p. 4) and even a “spatial white monochromy” (2020, p. 5). This contributes to the minoritisation of non-white bodies, seen as marginal to this “white spatial norm” (Sallenave, 2020, p. 11)17.

18The dissemination in the media of gendered and racialised identities of place and practice thus plays a decisive role in perpetuating a white, male imaginary of the mountains. Harrison goes even further by linking this dissemination to a more or less consciously racist housing strategy, driven by local political and economic actors. Through the perpetuation of this imaginary, which condemns non-white bodies to a feeling of illegitimacy, ski resorts effectively remain white, corroborating “a long tradition of racially segregated leisure resorts in the United States” (Harrison, 2013, p. 330). This is something that their customers blatantly accommodate, with Harrison referring to “the dogma that keeping skiing White is good for business. And it appears that its clientele [...] is unwittingly, or at least cynically, complicit” (Harrison, p. 333).

Conclusion

  • 18 In the same way that Malcolm Ferdinand affirms the need to join decolonial and environmental moveme (...)

19This latter point refers to what remains an intellectual barrier in most French-speaking academic circles: the structural racism and sexism that our ideological cynicism ultimately lead us to tolerate and which can be seen as explaining the difficulty of “thinking the unthought” in the social sciences and taking a stand in everyday life. Yet “understanding how race operates in the few remaining racially homogeneous outposts of privilege is essential to the project of dismantling its power” (Harrison, 2013, p. 333). In both our teaching and in our research proposals, we therefore need to renew our epistemologies, in an ongoing effort towards an emancipatory and intersectional bibliography.18

20There is also a need to document the agency of the persons concerned – those who experience illegitimacy and/or rejection and counter them with strategies of resistance – as demonstrated, for example, by Black People Who Hike. This group, which was founded in 2019 and is very active on social media, encourages Black people in the USA to take part in outdoor activities. Another example is the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS), which was created in 1974 to promote skiing among the Black community, and brings together over 80 Black ski clubs across the USA. But such initiatives, whether taken individually or collectively, raise the question of who is in a position to resist. In the reactionary social space of Montana, for example, gentrified towns and cities seem to be the only Democratic bastions in which LGBT+ Rocky Mountain residents take refuge, as evidenced by the presence of LGBT centres and regular Pride events. The highly gentrified Missoula is often referred to as Montana’s most gay-friendly city. And yet, in these localities, LGBT+ initiatives are driven for the most part by newcomers, or people who have completed a return migration, are endowed with various forms of capital – and have thus now gained, in their own words, the social legitimacy to dare to speak out and take their place in the public space. Gender and sexual minorities thus seem to secure a form of visibility on the condition that they belong to a dominant socioeconomic group. This perspective adds complexity to the analysis of the normativity of bodies in the American Rockies. It also invites us to question the way in which people who are considered to be on the margins by virtue of their race or gender live in these mountains, and use their forms of capital to invent ways of living in which other relations of domination are also at play. These questions shed light on the complexity and fluidity of places in the mountains, which are made and unmade based on multiple relations of domination, and above all, at the point of their intersection.

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Notes

1 Author's translation from the French.

2 For Gloria Joseph too, writing in the same edited volume, “if one can claim that marxism is incomplete without a consideration of feminism, it is certainly true that neither is complete without a consideration of racial relations” (Joseph, 1996, p.103). The existence of pioneering work on the sexual and racial division of labour should also be noted (for references, see Dorlin, 2009, p. 8-9).

3 Although Elsa Dorlin tends to question its limits in her edited book (Dorlin, 2009).

4 This movement denounces the unifying vision of women, which “abusively universalises an experience of gender domination, modelled on the experience of European or Northern European middle-class women, and draws the contours of what women’s emancipation should consist of” (Dorlin, 2009, p. 10, author's translation from the French).

5 As proposed by Léa Sallenave in the PhD thesis she defended in 2022: see in particular chapters 1 and 2.

6 Article available at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/diversify-our-national-parks.html (consulted March 28, 2024).

7 Article available at https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/04/americas-best-idea-but-not-for-all/ (consulted March 28, 2024).

8 For more information see https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-blasts-gianforte-for-signing-statewide-drag-ban (consulted March 28, 2024).

9 For more information see https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-condemns-baseless-censure-of-state-rep-zooey-zephyr (consulted March 28, 2024).

10 Author’s translation from the French.

11 Idem.

12 Idem.

13 Idem.

14 Giovanna Di Chiro analyses the opposition of environmental NGOs in the 1980s to join in with protests by Black and Hispanic communities in a poor district of South Central Los Angeles against a waste incinerator project (1999, p. 299).

15 Beyond the Rocky Mountains, Rozenn Martinoia has shown how women have been invisibilised in the collective memory and the history of mountaineering in general (2013, p. 4).

16 Author’s translation from the French.

17 Idem.

18 In the same way that Malcolm Ferdinand affirms the need to join decolonial and environmental movements (Ferdinand, 2019), linking struggles is, by way of example, the starting point of Cy Lecerf Maulpoix., She gives in her book Ecologies déviantes. Voyage en terres queers (Lecerf Maulpoix, 2021) pioneering visibility in France to queer ecology (Mortimer-Sandilands et al., 2016; Gray, 2017): this approach consists in queering ecology and ecologizing queer thought. Queer fluidity makes it possible to rethink the environment by emancipating ourselves from the normative and excluding frameworks already studied in this article, for “a plural ecology that can only be intersectional, fundamentally anticapitalist, queer, decolonial and feminist” (Lecerf Maulpoix, 2021, p. 19) (author’s translation from the French).

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Gabrielle Saumon, « Reflections on the Conditions of White, Straight, Male and Upper-Middle Class Normativity in the Rocky Mountains (USA) »Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine [En ligne], 112-3 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 janvier 2025, consulté le 23 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rga/14202 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/139u3

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Gabrielle Saumon

ACP, Université Gustave Eiffel, Marne-la-Vallée
EHIC, Université de Limoges

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