Unlikely hikers? Activism, Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers, women hiking alone, and hikers of colour

Stanley, Phiona

doi:10.1080/17450101.2019.1696038

Unlikely hikers? Activism, Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers, women hiking alone, and hikers of colour

Stanley, Phiona

Authors

Dr Phiona Stanley P.Stanley@napier.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

This paper investigates a nascent, primarily online community of so-called 'unlikely hikers', united in the premise that hiking is good for everyone's mental and physical health and that diversity can and should extend to outdoor spaces including national parks. However, the ways in which hikers have hitherto been represented in outdoors media, advertising, and wider social imaginaries present potent barriers to participation. The paper traces the discursive origins and positioned ideologies of 'the outdoors' in former British settler colonies, particularly the USA, showing how national parks maintain legacies of frontier colonialism and default understandings of legitimate outdoorspeople as necessarily White, able-bodied, straight, and male. These legacies are then traced through four years of online ethnographic data (2015-2018), comprising multimedia narratives of fat hikers, solo women hikers including lesbian women, and hikers of colour as they relate their outdoor experiences on Instagram and related podcasts, blogs, and magazine articles. The discussion is theorized using Holman Jones and Harris's notion of queering and Urry's mobilities paradigm, and 'queer mobilities' is proposed as part of an activism and amplification aimed at queering the trail both within and beyond academic spaces.

Citation

Stanley, P. (2020). Unlikely hikers? Activism, Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers, women hiking alone, and hikers of colour. Mobilities, 15(2), 241-256. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1696038

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Nov 11, 2019
Online Publication Date	Nov 30, 2019
Publication Date	2020-04
Deposit Date	Nov 11, 2019
Publicly Available Date	May 31, 2021
Journal	Mobilities
Print ISSN	1745-0101
Electronic ISSN	1745-011X
Publisher	Routledge
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	15
Issue	2
Pages	241-256
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1696038
Keywords	queer mobilities; embodiment; outdoors; hiking; representation; Instagram
Public URL	http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2310740

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Copyright Statement
“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Mobilities on [date of publication], available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/[Article DOI].”