[Discussion] Mobile Bodies: Women, Travel, and Empire

[Gonul Pultar]

Mobile Bodies: Women, Travel, and Empire
NEMLA 3-7 March 2004 Pittsburgh
Deadline. 15 September 2003

      
This panel will explore the relationship between travel writing,
gender, and empire. We know that women often used the genre of travel
writing for a variety of reasons, because it was less a part of the
tradition of ‘high genres’ such as poetry, because the seemingly
non-directed, non-theoretical genre allowed for more flexibility and
fluidity in writing, because often written in the guise of ‘letters’ or
private correspondence to loved ones, travel writing appeared less
blatantly public in its form.  At the same time, we know that travel
writing was instrumental in constructing primitive others in need of
colonizing and civilizing agents, and certainly these areas of
scholarly interest have increased in recent years and a growing body of
scholarship has emerged that conceptualizes white women’s significance
in the maintenance of imperial domination by colonizing nations.  By
bringing together diverse and exemplary papers that address these
issues, this panel will intervene in this discussion in at least two
ways.  First, it will expand the discourse regarding the interactions
of gender, travel writing, and empire.  Secondly, by presenting less
well-known and established examples of women travel writers and
locations of imperial interest, it will begin to engage this area of
scholarship through alternative examples and theoretical approaches
that will broaden and complicate established modes of inquiry for these
areas of interest.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to: Women and the
foreign, informal sites of empire and travel writing, “going native”
and the implications of gender, counter-colonial possibilities and the
woman traveler, signs of otherness for the woman traveler, gender and
genre, national boundaries and gender realities, privacy and the
nation, traveling and contagions, women as colonizers, women as
colonized, alternative examples of travel writing and women travelers.

Please send 1-2 page abstracts as attachments for a 15-20 minute
presentation to:
M. Soledad Caballero
scaballe@allegheny.edu

Panelist must  become members of NEMLA by October 15, 2003.