"Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists use polar art to illustrate our current environmental crises as well as to reimagine our world and the ways we engage with it. Examining a wide range of contemporary art, photography, and film, Lisa E. Bloom shows how these works demonstrate the ways that our planetary crises are linked to climate change as well as a long history of colonialism and capitalism. Bloom insists on linking racial, sexual, and gendered discriminatory violence to wider environmental destruction, and she engages feminist, Black, indigenous, and non-western perspectives to address the exigencies of what we are experiencing now as the Anthropocene, or the new geological period characterized by ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations"--

In this work, the author focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media, including photography and video, defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early 20th century to the present. She goes on to analyze gendered and racial constructions and idioms of American identity by examining the powerful and continuing cultural investment in the legacy of the so-called discovery of the North Pole in 1909, and the ongoing celebration of white explorers, such as Robert Peary, as "heroes". Her analysis of the polar expedition opens up contemporary questions in cultural studies about gender, race, male sexuality and social relations of science. Bloom demonstrates how the North Pole's literal emptiness made polar expedition appear in the dominant media as an intrinsically pure field of knowledge, rather than a form of colonial discourse. She portrays the National Geographic Society as a magazine and institution that tied itself to the national image of the United States in the early 20th century and seized the poles and polar expeditions as a metaphor for modernity and progress. By focusing on the development and legitimation of an American national discourse and identity that excludes women and people of colour, "Gender on Ice" offers a significant contribution to current debates on multiculturalism.