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Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine 101-1 | 2013 Lever le voile : les montagnes au masculin-féminin Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession “Don’t go thinking he was a guide for ladies” Rozenn Martinoia Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rga/2001 DOI : 10.4000/rga.2001 ISSN : 1760-7426 Éditeur Association pour la diffusion de la recherche alpine Référence électronique Rozenn Martinoia, « Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession », Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine [En ligne], 101-1 | 2013, mis en ligne le 03 octobre 2013, consulté le 01 mai 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rga/2001 ; DOI : 10.4000/rga.2001 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 1 mai 2019. La Revue de Géographie Alpine est mise à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession 1 Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession “Don’t go thinking he was a guide for ladies” Rozenn Martinoia 1 CERAG, Université Grenoble Alpes, Maître de conférences-HDR, Gestion, [email protected] “So that’s how it still is with the indecisive ones, who waver when faced with a dangerous section or get nervous when a storm rumbles above them; they may well boast in the village squares, recount their daring feats to whoever will listen to them, the fearful porters are soon unmasked and their reputation established as dubious […]. If these porters ever manage to become guides by some strange stroke of luck, the village gossips do not falter and rightly debase them: prairie guides, they will say, good for guiding young ladies!” Louis Spiro (1944), Guides de montagne 2 A researcher is an explorer. Rarely brilliant or heroic, he is more often than not driven by trivial motives, by curiosity interspersed with lack of understanding (at times the opposite), in the face of fieldwork that sometimes gives nothing away – the worry when adopting ethnographic approaches – sometimes too much. In the research I had undertaken, dedicated to the conditions of professional practice for mountain guides, I took, so to speak, a secondary path by focusing on the guide-male client relationship then, going forward, the guide-female client relationship (Martinoia, 2009). In the privacy of a private interview, guides admitted to liking their female clients, with regard to their advantages in service management. It is true that when women conform to the gender Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine, 101-1 | 2013 Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession 2 stereotypes of humility, obedience, hedonism, and fear of danger (Lois, 2001; Ottogalli- Mazzacavallo, 2003; Gallissaire Mennesson, 2004) , they facilitate service co-production and reduce risk-taking. Yet, the triangulation of sources and methods, the researcher’s compass, led me to an area where the echoes of the first interpretations were greatly distorted. In public, and more particularly in the presence of peers, guides failed to mention the advantages of female clients for service management. All that remained was the seductive element of the relationship – something all of the interviewed guides (a 99% male profession) did not fail to mention spontaneously to the female researcher facing them1 – together with masculinised discourses that seemed to exhort them not to be labelled as a “guide ‘for ladies’”(Busk, 1974, p. 89). My secondary path had taken me to an intersection, or rather a labyrinth; that of the construction and social validation of the professional and gender identities of mountain guides, which I will endeavour to present here. 3 For the guides, women are not only efficient “partial employees” (Chase et al., 1983) in service co-production. They also represent resources for the production of their masculinity (Terret, 2004). Nevertheless, the stones that the female clientele may lay in the construction of the guides’ gender identity and professional identity can be rearranged differently by peers. In the new context, the construction may collapse. The guides, therefore, negotiate compromises by manoeuvring between the multiple axiological frameworks that construct and validate both their gender and professional identities. Among peers, guides seem to seek to save face (Goffman, 1974, p. 13) by clinging to the myth of the masculine guide. For them, in a strongly gendered professional world, it is about not being identified as the Trojan Horse who would bring into the citadel, not so much women into mountain practices – the deed was done – but the feminisation of practices and professional skills. 4 In addition to the collection of guides’ own autobiographical texts, the primary sources of this research come from fieldwork allowing the cross-cutting of discourses and practices in different types of interaction2: with the researcher, with peers and with male or female clients, both in and outside the mountaineering playground. The fieldwork is made up of 10 semi-directive interviews (from 1.5 to 2.5 hours), informal interviews, passive observation (as an independent mountaineer) and participating observations (as a guide’s client; 4 French guides, 47 days), recorded in a logbook over a period of 6 years. The fieldwork does however have its limits: as a woman, my presence, albeit discreet, prevents me de facto from gaining access to situations where men are exclusively amongst themselves. Through women’s eyes 5 Roped up or tied by a symbolic rope (Boutroy, 2011), guides and clients evolve interdependently in a dangerous, uncertain, and sometimes highly irreversible natural environment. Their bodily integrity, even their survival, is at stake – “at the end of the day, we’re risking our necks” (Gilles, 53). In this rather singular context of service co- production, guides appreciate the female clients who underestimate their abilities, seek pleasure rather than performance, and obey authority. Women give guides the feeling that there will be less exposure to danger, easier coordination among members of the roped party and more easily satisfied customers. Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine, 101-1 | 2013 Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession 3 6 These stereotyped qualities – that guides bestow upon their female clients and that their own behaviours cause or reinforce – recall the fact that in spite of the isolation, the uncertainty of the environment and the engagement, which serve to build an extraordinary experience (Belk, Tumbat, 2011), the mountains remain a space for social relations woven onto a canvas of representations and pre-existent social relationships, including gender (Kergoat, 2005, p. 98). Gender, as a system of beliefs, with which psychological attributes and roles and status assigned to each sex are associated (Hurtig, Kail, Rouch, 2002, p. 13), is intimately linked to power relationships (Scott, 1986, p. 1067). Yet, to the prism of service management, power is the cornerstone of the guides’ performance (Martinoia, 2012). 7 For safety purposes, it is essential that guides maintain complete control of their decision-making power and do not succumb to any attempts made by their clients to influence them – “If you ever allow yourself to be influenced by a client when you deem the situation dangerous, then you’re heading for disaster” (Christophe, 48). Psychosocial mechanisms may be used for this purpose: give the illusion of sharing decision-making in order to encourage the decision to be carried out and its consequences accepted, or place clients in a situation of inferiority and dependence, so they have no alternative but to obey. Although these mechanisms may be independent from gender, their effectiveness is nonetheless increased in women who accept the gender roles – “I have never had any real argument with women […] they trust me more easily and they accept more quickly that I am more of an expert than they are” (Sébastien, 35). It is therefore in the guides’ interest to maintain these stereotypes, by conveying, both in words and gestures, the humility, fear, fragility and inferiority of women,3 despite the fact that the reality of the situation shows different qualities – “Their level is good and often higher than they think – Shush! Don’t tell them …. “ (Sébastien). 8 Conveying – to both the female client and female researcher – women’s inferiority and his ability to lead them is also for a guide a way of demonstrating his masculinity (Lois, 2001). “Take Evelyne for example, she always assumes it’s not for her. She easily feels apprehensive. At the beginning of each section, she’ll tell you it’s much too difficult for me.’” (Éric, 32) 9 And not without a certain satisfaction, Éric narrates in detail the way he manages to carry out his protective role and enables his client to overcome her apprehension. “[S]he is delighted, says ‘thank you, thank you!’ to you”. Like many of the other guides who were interviewed or watched, Éric dramatises gender obligations in his words and actions (Goffman, 1977, p. 50). Albeit not without the help of his female client, he makes possible this “arrangement” in which “a female […[ can constitute herself into the sort of object to which a male can properly extend his helping hand”(Goffman, 1977, p. 71). Moreover, Éric “love[s] climbing with women for that reason. A woman stays in her place in the mountains.”4 Which means, by contrast, that he stays in his … that of a man. Female clientele through the prism of peers 10 In its hegemonic form, masculinity is a process of differential construction. It develops in contrast with femininity (Badinter, 1986, p. 175; Connel, Messerchmidt, 2005, p 847). Supervising a female clientele thus contributes to the construction of gender identity – as Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine, 101-1 | 2013 Women’s mountaineering and dissonances within the mountain guide profession 4 the feeling of being a man and recognised as such – of masculine guides.