Named and Gendered Mountains

Current decolonial scholarship emphasizes biocultural memory as well as sentient features to describe the actual mountainscape, including bodily metaphors based on the semiotics of geoecological and socioecological processes claiming gender identity to mountains. In searching for the pourquoi story of mountains, we aim to dissect the place naming grappled from feminist geography’s angles. Despite the clear topographic reference of the bodily metaphor, mountains are given personhood, including sex and age, in their epistemological understanding and ontological realization as sentient landscapes. This identification of gendered mountains allows mountain communities to affiliate their livelihood practices and overall mythology more closely with the gendered settings of their ancestral traditions, lifescapes, and worldviews.