Saqqummersitaq

This article is dedicated to the complex web of gender and colonial relationships in biographical writing. The author's main focus is on publications by two women of high society who traveled through the colonial North in the early 20th century, Danish Emilie Demant-Hatt (1873-1958) and Scottish Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982). An analysis of these textual and visual works allows us to see how they made a contribution to the colonial project, while undermining it at the same time, and how colonial femininity combines obedience and disobedience.

Colonisation is a gendered enterprise, with archives both expressing and constructing the colony as masculine domain, populated by explorers, hunters and (male dominated) resource extraction. This paper explores gendered memory cultures in British/North American Arctic exploration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using archival material, the paper investigates the intersections of gender, race and class as they shape both tangible and intangible memorization narratives of Josephine Diebitsch-Peary. As the wife of the Arctic explorer Robert Peary she accompanied her husband on expeditions to Greenland, giving birth to a daughter in Northern Greenland in 1893. Using papers and objects donated to the Women’s Archive in Portland, Maine, the paper traces how women are framed alternately as the ‘ideal’ wife and citizen and ‘that woman’, forming part of the many hidden histories of Arctic exploration narratives. Her archives thus allow us not only access to a woman’s perspective on an Arctic expedition, but also illustrate the gendered aspects of memory and colonialism that reach into the archive itself. The paper will demonstrate how an analysis within the context of memory studies enhances our understanding of Arctic histories and cultures by embracing the entangled nature of history and memory.
This paper was presented as part of the panel 'Gendering memories: all the way from heroism to disposession' at the Memory Studies Association Conference, Complutense Universidad, Madrid and will be submitted for peer-review/publication in 'Memory Studies' (Sage Journals).

This paper focuses on historical travel writing by women in order to investigate the construction of gendered geographies in the Far North. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines history, territorial discourses and gender studies, the paper examines travel literature as part of the construction and performance of gendered coloniality in Greenland and Northern Sweden.

The conference paper was presented as part of a special panel "Investigating the Politics of Gender History, Coloniality, Decoloniality and Indigeneity in the Greenlandic Archive (Pre-proposed Panel)" at NORA 2019, Border Regimes, Territorial Discourses and Feminist Politics at the University of Iceland (Programme attached).

It is now available as part of a special issue "Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies", see Höglund, J., & Burnett, L. (2019). Introduction: Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1-2), 1-12. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0001.

Direct link> Reeploeg, S. (2019). Women in the Arctic: Gendering Coloniality in Travel Narratives from the Far North, 1907-1930. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1-2), 182-204. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0182.

Recognising the diverse roles that women have played in the history of the Arctic, both as colonisers and colonised, this article uses travel writing or Arctic biographies by women writers to explore female colonisation strategies within the context of Scandinavian colonialism. Inspired by Maria Lugone’s use of the concept of “coloniality of gender” (2008) the article investigates how gendered coloniality is produced and mediated through travel writing by women in the Arctic. While Lugones’ critique primarily addresses the racism and violence inherent in modern/colonial gender systems, the analysis uses her understanding of coloniality as a lived experience of Eurocentric domination in order to illuminate the gendered nature of complicity by white, elite women. Using the work of Emilie Demantt (1873-1958), later Demantt-Hatt, and Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982) the article analyses both ‘Nordic’ and ‘transnational’ female strategies of colonisation as they are performed and articulated through biographical writing. Both in form and content, these texts demonstrate the many ways in which global and imperial power intersected with local hierarchies and systems of knowledge as part of multiple and concurring representations of reality over time.