Working Title: All Forward: Negotiating Gender in the Whitewater CommunityThis book is an autoethnographic qualitative interpretive study, using interviews, participant observation, and twelve years as a whitewater rafting guide by the author. By participants telling their personal narratives they experienced as a guide they were able to voice stories that might otherwise be untold.
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Excerpt
In the winter of 2015, more than a dozen female National Park Service employees united together to submit a letter to then-Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel. In it the employees outlined 15 years of sexual harassment by the River Rangers in Grand Canyon National Park (Gilpin, 2015). The harassment varied from verbal abuse to physical assault, and an organizational culture that dismissed reports of abuse, punished and silenced women that accused their harassers, and empowered the men to continue assaults on female employees.
Reading the descriptions of shocking behaviors, I thought back to the research trip I had taken with those same river rangers in the summer of 2010. My first reaction was “those guys… but they were so fun!” But then I remembered moments from the trip…like encouragement for the women to run Lava the largest rapid on the river topless (with PFD’s on of course), how it became a joke / warning between women on the trip not to sit by Bernard on the boat because he used the rowdy rapids as an excuse to touch your body- pretending to brace himself as he grabbed flesh, and the boatman who continued to contact and proposition another women on the trip once we were home even though she had declined his advances several times on the river.
The more I thought back on my experience on the Grand Canyon, the more I realized that these behaviors did not strike me as inappropriate at the time because that behavior was considered fine in the whitewater industry. When I went down the Colorado River with the Grand Canyon river rangers, I had been part of the whitewater guiding industry for about a decade and I had fully been socialized into the unique working and social environment associated with whitewater. The combination of long hours, high-adrenaline activities, close living quarters, and easy access to alcohol creates an atmosphere where some might say the lines of sexual harassment are hazy at best. There is a permeant attitude of “this is what it is like in the river community.” This led me to be curious about an industry in which the professional and social expectations are that sexual humor and harassment are not only acceptable but expected.
This book is the result of that curiosity. I was less interested in if sexual harassment is happening in the river community. After the #MeToo movement of the fall of 2017 it can be assumed that sexual harassment is happening in every organization. This book investigates the unique culture of the guiding community, outlines how it fits into broader representation of women in outdoor recreation, the organizational structures that enable harassment, and the strategies that individuals use to navigate this hyper-masculine workplace.
Reading the descriptions of shocking behaviors, I thought back to the research trip I had taken with those same river rangers in the summer of 2010. My first reaction was “those guys… but they were so fun!” But then I remembered moments from the trip…like encouragement for the women to run Lava the largest rapid on the river topless (with PFD’s on of course), how it became a joke / warning between women on the trip not to sit by Bernard on the boat because he used the rowdy rapids as an excuse to touch your body- pretending to brace himself as he grabbed flesh, and the boatman who continued to contact and proposition another women on the trip once we were home even though she had declined his advances several times on the river.
The more I thought back on my experience on the Grand Canyon, the more I realized that these behaviors did not strike me as inappropriate at the time because that behavior was considered fine in the whitewater industry. When I went down the Colorado River with the Grand Canyon river rangers, I had been part of the whitewater guiding industry for about a decade and I had fully been socialized into the unique working and social environment associated with whitewater. The combination of long hours, high-adrenaline activities, close living quarters, and easy access to alcohol creates an atmosphere where some might say the lines of sexual harassment are hazy at best. There is a permeant attitude of “this is what it is like in the river community.” This led me to be curious about an industry in which the professional and social expectations are that sexual humor and harassment are not only acceptable but expected.
This book is the result of that curiosity. I was less interested in if sexual harassment is happening in the river community. After the #MeToo movement of the fall of 2017 it can be assumed that sexual harassment is happening in every organization. This book investigates the unique culture of the guiding community, outlines how it fits into broader representation of women in outdoor recreation, the organizational structures that enable harassment, and the strategies that individuals use to navigate this hyper-masculine workplace.