Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 5, No. 2, June 2004 ‘Who is Lhakpa Sherpa?’ Circulating subjectivities within the global/local terrain of Himalayan mountaineering Susan Frohlick Department of Anthropology, 435 Fletcher Argue Building, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 5V5, Canada This paper traces different formations of subjectivities negotiated within the transnational circuits of mountaineering media and cultural production. Drawing from ethnographic research in Nepal and Canada in 2000, I examine various representations of the second Nepali woman to climb Everest in order to demonstrate the linkages between scales and geographies of media narratives and subjectivities. Appearing in newspapers, a research interview with myself (a foreign researcher) and on the Internet, these differently scaled narratives render Lhakpa Sherpa in terms of local and global subjectivities, which shift after her successful climb, and are complex and dynamic. I engage with feminist critiques of globalization to encourage a view of globalization as enacted rather than merely resisted and to analyse ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as inseparable and contingent and productive of particular gendered subjectivities. The disjuncture between her popularity in Nepal and the lack of knowledge about her in Canada reveals the uneven processes of globalization wherein Lhakpa Sherpa struggles against gender and racial politics in mountaineering at the same time that she is privileged to climb as a sponsored mountaineer, a new subjectivity for a Nepali mountaineer. Key words: gender, globalization, subjectivities, media, mountaineering, Nepal. Introduction In the spring of 2000, a Nepali woman who reached the top of Mount Everest was part of the circulating media images and stories. 1 Mountaineering subjects were produced by lo- cal and foreign media seeking opportunities for new mountaineering stories generated by the hype of ‘new millennium’ discourses. While many mountaineers who climb Everest at the turn of the twenty-first century are made into media subjects in spite of their rather ordinari- ness (see Barcott 1996; Chessler 1999), the story of a Nepali female mountaineer was taken up by a variety of media and cultural producers including myself because of her new subjec- tivity. Within the predominantly male terrain of high-altitude mountaineering, Lhakpa Sherpa embodied a feminized, racialized mountaineer- ing subject. 2 Very few women from Nepal, or elsewhere, have attempted to climb Everest or reach its summit. 3 Prior to Lhakpa Sherpa, one other Nepali woman, the late Pasang Lhamu ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/04/020000–00  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/14649360410001690213