Cataloguing Wilderness: Whiteness, Masculinity and Responsible Citizenship in Canadian Outdoor Recreation Texts

This research examines representations of wilderness, Canadian nationalism and the production of responsible and respectable subjects in commonplace outdoor recreation texts from Mountain Equipment Co-op, the Bruce Trail Conservancy and the Bruce Peninsula National Park. Drawing theoretical insights from Foucault’s genealogy and technologies of the self, post-structural feminism and anti-racist scholarship on whiteness, I pose three broad questions: How is nature understood? How is Canada imagined? How are certain subjects produced through outdoor recreation? In this research, I outline five ways in which wilderness is represented. First, I consider how wilderness is produced as a place that is above all else empty (of human inhabitants and human presence). I then examine four ways in which the empty wilderness is represented: first, as dangerous and inhospitable, second, as threatened, third, as sublime and fourth, as the Canadian nation. I link the meanings invested into wilderness with a set of practices or desired forms of conduct in order to articulate how a specific subject is produced. These subjects draw on the meanings attributed to wilderness. The dangerous wilderness can only be navigated by a Calculating Adventurer. The threatened wilderness desperately needs the assistance of the Conscientious Consumer. The sublime wilderness provides respite for the Transformed Traveler. The Canadian or national wilderness is best suited to and belongs to the Wilderness Citizen. The four subjects I examine in this thesis each draw from particular wilderness representations and specific practices in order to be produced as desirable in the context of outdoor recreation. By examining the relationship between wilderness discourse, subjects and practices in everyday texts, I illustrate how masculine and white respectability operate in outdoor recreation. Pointing to subtle shifts in the meanings and values attributed to masculinity, Canadianness and whiteness, I articulate how outdoor recreation texts produce subject positions which are richly embedded in race and gender privilege and assertions about national belonging. In addition to examining whiteness, nationalism and masculinity, this research examines how individualized practices, such as consumer activism, become understood as the conduct of responsible neoliberal citizens concerned with national and environmental interests.

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