Travel Literatures and the Making of 'Orientalisms'

This work investigates the construction, heterogeneity, and multivocal nature of gendered and sexualised Orientalisms in travel literature. The issues addressed centre on the role played by the traveller's gendered and sexualised positions in the West, the contestatory nature of travelling, and the impact of historical developments pertaining to the end of empire and the sexual revolution' in the West. The question is how these three factors shape cultural productions of gender and sexuality in travel accounts on the Middle East and North Africa. A hermeneutical analysis of the representations of gender and sexuality in travel narratives written by Westerners allows for a more nuanced understanding of the complex relations between the Orient and Occident. Through the examination of representations of gender and sexuality, Orientalism emerges, in this genre, not as a monolithic and homogenous pronouncement on what the East is, but as a discourse that is informed by, and in turn informs, subject positions defined by constructions of gender and sexuality, resulting in a complex matrix of interpretation and meaning that is often contestatory and far from hegemonic.