Fatherhood, emotional (dis)entanglements and adventurous masculinities: Ben Fogle on Everest

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBNChapter

Abstract

This chapter extends the analysis of the incommensurability of parenthood and mountaineering and the particular vitriol given to ‘mountaineering mothers’ (Frohlick, 2006; Gilchrist, 2007) through close textual reading of a memoir that is one of few to explicitly address the subject of fatherhood, family and a life of extreme adventuring. This chapter draws upon and analyses the memoir, Up: My Life’s Journey to the Top of Everest, written by British TV personality and adventurer Ben Fogle and his wife Marina Fogle. This dual-voiced memoir narrates Ben Fogle’s boyhood dream of summiting Everest, whilst revealing the emotional process of a grieving father confronting a recent stillbirth and missing his remaining children. The memoir is interspersed with Marina’s personal reflections on living with her husband’s Everest dream and the family’s role in supporting Ben’s adventurous desires. This chapter reveals Ben Fogle’s subject position as a ‘father-mountaineer’ and his complex considerations of his responsibilities as family breadwinner, carer, husband, dutiful son, and moral exemplar to his children. It argues that his anxieties about becoming a ‘father-mountaineer’ draw on discourses which are prevalent in other climbers’ experiences and accounts – a balancing of mountaineering as a wilderness journey removed from home and parenthood as an intensive affective presence. The chapter analyses the discourses the Fogles draw on to constitute their subjectivities as a ‘father-mountaineer’ and supportive wife. In the final section, I argue that the sociological concept of “emotional capital” needs to be utilised in order to interrogate the gendered locations and emotional norms which the Fogles adopt in their reconciling of a life of adventure with the demands of parenting, requiring a more nuanced understanding of the place of gender, family and emotion in mountaineering memoirs and a potential reworking of the idea of the male adventurer to take better account of familial interdependencies and potent emotional relations.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Mountain and the Politics of Representation
EditorsMartin Hall, Jenny Hall
Place of PublicationLiverpool
PublisherLiverpool University Press
Chapter14
Pages269-288
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)9781837642755
ISBN (Print)9781837645060
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Dec 2023

Keywords

  • Masculinity
  • Everest
  • Mountaineering
  • Fatherhood
  • Celebrity

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