Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Gender at a Distance
Debbie Lisle
To cite this Article Lisle, Debbie(2001) 'Gender at a Distance', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1: 1, 66 — 88
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/146167499360040
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/146167499360040
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Gender at a
Distance
DEBBIE LISLE
Keele University
Ab stract
This article explores the con icting representations of masculinity and femininity in
contemporary travel writing. The workings of power are quite easy to identify in texts
that represent ‘other’ places populated by foreign and exotic people. This article adds
another layer to that cartography by exploring how patriarchy is embedded in
the representation of foreign lands. Using the insights of postcolonial and feminist
research, it is possible to illustrate how intertwining hierarchies of gender and geog-
raphy continue to reinforce one another in contemporary travelogues. However,
locating the ways in which masculine/feminine maps onto familiar/foreign is only part
of the project – this article is also concerned with resisting the hegemonies of
patriarchy and colonialism. With a performative understanding of identity formulated
by Judith Butler, it is possible to interrupt the strict attachments of man = masculine
and woman = feminine that are employed in the literary colonization of foreign places.
When these subject positions are understood as performative identities with no innate
gender core, the liberating potential of travel writing takes on a new meaning. This
article argues that stories concerned with crossing the boundaries of territory and
identity reveal an important disruption in the man/woman ontology.
Keywords
gender, contemporary travelogues, identity performance, masculinity, feminity
During the late 1980s, Time journalist and travel writer Pico Iyer made
extensive journeys to Asia in order to witness what he called ‘America’s
pop-culture imperialism’. He collected and published these observations
in Video Night in Kathmandu And Other Reports From the Not-So-Far-
East (1988), a comprehensive and often amusing look at how the ‘ancient
For the most part, travelogues are constructed around the journey to far away
lands, the experience of exotic adventures, and the eventual return home.1
A familiar trope to be sure. But what is interesting about travelogues is their
inescapable encounter with difference – one must go away and learn about
other people in order to be an authentic traveller, and in order to write a
travelogue (Todorov 1995: 68). To ensure that engagement with otherness,
travelogues produce a geographical imagination that is constructed around
the familiar and foreign, in other words, it uses here and there to locate us and
them. As Todorov explains, travelogues are founded on a map of spatial
and cultural difference: ‘the “true” travel narrative, from the point of view of
the social construction of gender is actually a system of power that not only
divides men and women as masculine and feminine but typically also places men
and masculinity above women and femininity and operates to value more highly
those institutions and practices that are male dominated and/or representative
of masculine traits and style.
(Runyan and Peterson 1993: 18)5
More generally, concerns about gender that are present in the study of
International Relations and world politics address how differential practices
of power operate according to mutually reinforcing divisions of gender and
sovereignty. My interest in Butler’s work is an effort to understand not only
the effects of androcentrism and patriarchy, but also how those divided
practices of power are generated in the rst place. Butler’s work in Gender
Trouble provides an account of the gendered subject that interrupts the
attachment of men and women to masculine and feminine, and suggests that
our subject positions are inherently unstable. Using Butler’s formulation to
‘untie’ contemporary travelogues makes it possible to critically analyse the
location of gender in particular subjects and spaces. More speci cally, Butler’s
‘interruptive’ formulation dislodges the attachments of ‘here’ and ‘there’ and
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ from their status as familiar, natural and stable.
Using Butler’s framework, this article argues that contemporary travel-
ogues both reproduce and dislodge our usual understandings of gender. While
travelogues certainly represent powerful exclusions produced by gender
and cultural stereotypes, they also resist those hegemonic discourses. The
very focus of travelogues – the journey – indicates the continual process of
moving across borders, but those borders can just as easily be social, physical,
AND DISPLACEMENT
Generic Constraints
Since 1980, there have been six male winners of the award and one female
(Robyn Davidson for her book Tracks {1980}). In several of the accounts of the
male winners, the style and manner of presentation is drawn attention to.
However, no such attention is paid to the ‘literary’ qualities of Davidson’s book.
It is simply presented as an excellent book since it confounds the stereotypes of
the content of women’s travel writing: that is, what it is thought possible for
a woman to do.
(Mills 1991: 111–12)
that treasured moment of being rst anywhere, but they can certainly be
the rst to get there in an unusual, dangerous or impossible way. Contempo-
rary travelogues betray the masculine desire to be rst, to be tough, to be
adventurous in the face of a world overexposed to the operations of mass
tourism.
Tim Cahill’s book Road Fever: A High-Speed Travelogue (1992) is an
account of his record breaking 15,000 mile drive from the tip of Patagonia
to the tip of Alaska. He and ‘professional endurance driver’ Garry Sowerby
(who has done several high-speed long-distance journeys) aim to drive a
souped-up GMC Sierra into the Guinness Book of World Records. This modern
day ‘buddy’ story is all about conquering – the elements, the bureaucracy,
the landscape, the fatigue, the machine. As such, it is infused with hyper-
masculine passages of battle, competition and strategy on the road. For
example, Cahill is constantly pitched against Argentinean drivers who believe
themselves to be Juan Fangio, a Grand Prix winner in the 1950s. Trying
to deal with the ‘macho’ local custom of ashing bright headlights into
oncoming traf c, Cahill gets himself pumped:
‘I’m going to nail the next guy’ . . . The car was less than half a mile away. My
ngers tingled at the toggles. We closed to twenty feet and drew simultaneously.
Die, Fangio. I had him outgunned. Boom, boom: High beams and Halogens, both
at once. I could see two dark heads in the passing car. The night blazed with
painful brilliance. They were beaten, fried, and I imagined I could see both their
skulls behind the skin, as if in an X-ray.
No mercy as they passed, I hit the sidelights, and then nailed them in the rear
high beams.
In the side mirror I saw the car weave across the center line, then right
itself . . .
I felt I was beginning to master the local customs.
(Cahill 1992:138–9)
And that term ‘camel lady’. Had I been a man, I’d be lucky to get a mention in
the Wiluma Times, let alone international press coverage. Neither could I
Being a ‘regular guy’ is easy for Cahill because it is ‘natural’, but Davidson
must work extra hard to subordinate her ‘natural’ femininity in order to
achieve the required level of rationality, bravery and intrepidness.
As Mills explains in reference to colonial texts, the inclusion of women in
the travelogue genre involves different degrees of subverting the hyper-
masculine author/subject/hero role that dominates the travelogue genre (Mills
1991: 27–46). Women travel writers reproduce the androcentric foundations
of the genre by adopting them (i.e. I can be just as tough as the next guy), or
by resorting to more traditionally feminine characteristics (i.e. empathizing
and taking care of others, re ecting on nature and domesticity). That kind of
gender negotiation continues today, but on a slightly expanded landscape.
Despite travelling everywhere that men do, women travel writers are still
positioned as either fully inhabiting the masculine hero role or reverting into
feminine domesticity and irrelevancy.
Although women travel writers are tolerated to the extent that they can be
classi ed as ‘extraordinary’, they are also attached to traditional feminine
roles by way of ‘recovery’. In effect, this preserves the mythology of the
woman as courageous, but it positions that myth within the prevailing order
of gender stereotypes. Davidson illustrates this social and cultural process of
‘recovering the feminine’ when she reacts to a proposed lm of her journey
across the outback:
cheating are moments in which the masculine codes of the travelogue become
explicit. Very simply, women doing manly things like walking around
the world should not get pregnant. Campbell can ‘pass’ as a legitimate (male)
travel writer only to the extent that she accepts the generic codes that
travelogues require. But because pregnancy is construed as the very sign of
femininity, it cannot be present within the remit of the masculine travelogue
genre. One cannot have balls and be pregnant at the same time.
Because the potential disruption of pregnancy cannot be sustained within
a genre constructed around the prevailing order of masculinity, it instigates a
necessary refeminization of Campbell’s subject position. For a while, the
reader is able to forget that the text is about a brave woman having a manly
adventure. For a while, pregnancy makes even Campbell forget her role as
an ‘honorary man’. By accepting a lift, she ‘fails’ to live up to the norm of
masculinity – the instance of cheating ‘proves’ that women like Campbell
cannot fully inhabit the man’s world of adventure travel. Campbell’s
subsequent adoption of femininity occurs in direct relation to those moments
when her quest to walk around the world is threatened. During the pregnancy,
Campbell creates and retreats into an idyllic home where she can nally
express all her repressed femininity:
I made a place in the motor home, took care of Brian, cooked wonderful food,
swept up, went shopping, had wild sex with him, heard him say that he was
madly in love with me and felt like I was really home, that I had something to
contribute and I was needed. Perhaps the hormones in me then simply added
to this and I’d never felt happier or more wholly feminine.
(F. Campbell 1996: 73)
Campbell thus writes over and feminizes her own landscape: while the roads
she walks on require a more masculine identity, the motor home is the place
where she can nally reveal her ‘natural’ femininity.9 These recurring
practices of re-feminization work to undermine the rigour and temerity of
Women travel writers begin to resist the limits of the masculine gaze through
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
an evacuation and displacement of gender. These authors are faced with two
choices: either adopt the hyper-masculine codes of the genre, or reverse that
gaze and end up in a purely ‘personal’ tale of emotions, sentimentality and
everyday detail. But instead of choosing between already structured mas-
culine and feminine subject positions, the negotiations of gender get silenced
in the travel writer and relocated onto the people being observed – the
‘natives’. Josie Dew’s book The Wind in my Wheels: Travel Tales From the
Saddle (1992) includes several accounts of her bicycle journeys around
the world. When questions of gender appear in this book, they are never in
relation to Dew’s own subject position as a woman traveller, cyclist and
writer, but only in relation to those people she encounters. On the surface, this
appears to be an oddly ‘genderless’ book – which is not to say there are no
messages of masculinity and femininity in the text. Dew is simply unwilling
and uninterested in addressing questions of gender in any other than a
super cial manner, as she states: ‘I prefer to remain “lost within” and throw
any self-analysis to the wind’ (Dew 1992: 172). With that kind of refusal, Dew
is able to present herself as a ‘genderless’ narrator whose only functions are
observer, describer and representer. But the ruse of the ‘objective observer’
here simply repeats the hyper-masculine generic structure: what could be
more rational, truthful, devoid of sentiment – what could be more masculine
– than ‘objectivity’?
While these ‘genderless’ texts represent a kind of resistance to the
constraints placed upon women travel writers, I want to suggest that the
evacuation of gender from the position of narrator is coupled with a cunning
displacement. While masculine and feminine traits might not be something
that the writer exhibits, they can certainly be found in the people being
written about. During her trips to Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, Dew’s text is
lled with descriptions of pestering and ogling Muslim men who never leave
her alone. They are described, at various times, as clamouring, noisy, hawking,
relentless, greasy-haired, curious, unceasing, inane, gibbering, hammering,
lthy, stalking hustlers and tormentors. And the women, when they are
His wife could speak no English and sat in a corner smiling shyly, every
now and then leaving the room as she obeyed her husband’s Imperious
commands . . . the evening began to turn sour when he expected payment
for his hospitality . . . All the while his shrew-like little wife sat timidly in the
corner, looking embarrassed about the whole affair. It was only because of
her mute work-dog role, her poverty, the meal she had prepared for us and her
genuine expressions of apology about her husband’s aggressive imploring that
we handed her some dirhams. Then we left.
(Dew 1992: 158)
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
Women played the traditional female role, staying home, caring for the children,
cooking, ‘being there’ for their husbands. Now that gathering was no longer
crucial to survival, as it had been in the lives of the older women at Balgo, they
fall into the housewife role that most women ful lled in my youth in England,
and that many women in Europe still live even today.
(Furlong 1996: 75)
Gender Trouble is provocative not only because it explains the gender core,
but also because it destabilizes the essential founding ontology. Under-
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
standing how men and women get squeezed into the categories of masculine
and feminine is only part of the exercise for Butler – it is also necessary to
resist that equation, take it apart and de-attach its terms. To this end, Butler
asks questions about what occurs when that binary is not taken for granted,
when the man/woman ontology is dispensed with as a de ning feature of our
subject positions.
Anomalies
First, one begins to notice those instances when certain attributes fail to
conform to the male = masculine, female = feminine equation, that is to say,
when anomalies appear in the sequential ordering of gender. What happens
to those subjects who do not t the formulation – masculine women and
feminine men? These anomalies emerge in contemporary travel writing as
moments of gender instability that disrupt the androcentric foundations of the
genre. For example, even that slight displacement of gender from woman to
native leaves the writer slightly less captured by the man/woman ontology.12
In order to silence anomalies and keep the ontology stable, the subject
position of ‘honorary man’ is created to banish those uneasy moments where
women travellers are neither masculine nor feminine, or they are both. It is
almost as if by simply adding women to the observing gaze of the author/
subject/hero, those uncomfortable gender negotiations will be alleviated. But
as a recent anthology of women’s travel writing explains, this ‘addition’ of
women to the genre presents its own set of problems:
The line between being an ‘honorary man’ and a more available sex object
(symbol of the immoral West) is a hard one to negotiate . . . Often there’s an
uneasy guilt about identifying with men – who in many cultures are much more
likely to approach and entertain passing strangers – and a regret at the barriers
that exist in forging closer relationships with women . . . Being an honorary
As a woman I had access to both sexes. The woman’s world would have been
quite closed to a man, whereas I’m allowed into the men’s world as an honorary
man. I think that gives me more opportunities for seeing how things work than
a bloke might have.
(Davidson as quoted in Hughes 1996: 7)
Women travel writers as honorary men illustrate Butler’s rst point about
anomalies: the very presence of women in the travel writing genre destabilizes
its androcentric foundations.
Regulations
to capture both men and women in these texts. Subject positions that are
scripted according to masculinity become possible and desirable (e.g. manly
men, honorary men) and subject positions that are scripted according to
femininity are subordinated to that norm (e.g. mothers, sentimental men).13
Fictions
These days more people go to Nepal to expand their muscles than their minds.
Most were trekkers chatting with animation about their adventures in the
mountains . . . about how they would set off for their ‘major’ expeditions with
all the latest high tech and macho garb – heavy boots, garters, goretex,
anatomically designed rucksacks – only to have frail sinewy local women and
children nip past them in ip- ops carrying impossible loads from tumplines
around their foreheads.
(Dew 1992: 208)
Coming full circle, Butler’s formulation of the gender core helps to reveal the
assumptions about masculinity and femininity at work in contemporary
travelogues. Iyer’s opening quotation is exemplary here: in identifying a
masculine West and a feminine Asia, Iyer sets up a hierarchy that simply
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
Notes
1 While it is possible to see how the home-away-home journey is built into the
beginning-middle-end structure of the travelogue, the literary conventions of
travel writing are highly unstable and contested. As Tzvetan Todorov explains, the
impossibility of distinguishing between what is and what is not a journey makes
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
the generic boundaries of travel writing extremely dif cult to locate (Todorov
1995).
2 Recent postcolonial work in literary theory and geography makes explicit linkages
between travelogues and the operations of colonialism. For example, Tzvetan
Todorov explains the historical emergence of travel writing as a quest for authen-
ticity and difference. Although the nal goals of that quest changed over time (e.g.
from the Holy Grail to the source of the Nile), the search itself was greatly
augmented by the Imperial age (Todorov 1995). Describing that relationship in
more political terms, Edward Said suggests that travelogues were a crucial factor
in the discursive construction of Orientalism (Said 1978). Although Todorov and
Said’s formulations are necessary in order to place difference and power in a
colonial context, too often the complex negotiations of gender and subjectivity
are overlooked. This article joins more recent interdisciplinary research that
foregrounds gender, patriarchy and sexuality in the reworking of colonialism
(Mills 1991; Blunt 1992; Pratt 1992; Behdad 1994; McEwan 1996).
3 As such, this article should be read as an attempt to push the discursive efforts of
both Sara Mills and Mary Louise Pratt into contemporary travel writing (Mills
1991; Pratt 1992). Mills’ Discourses of Difference focuses more on the intertwining
discourses of gender and colonialism than it does on the subject as a site of politics
and contestation; however, it is an important combination of postcolonial
research, feminism and rich discursive analyses of colonial women’s travel writing.
Pratt’s Imperial Eyes complicates the discourses of patriarchy and colonialism by
shifting the focus to the ‘contact zone’ of the colonial encounter. As Pratt argues,
it is through the mutual practices of transculturation that moments of resistance to
both patriarchy and colonialism can be found. Pratt’s provocative (but brief)
comments on the contemporary travel writing of Paul Theroux and Joan Didion
provide the starting point not only for this article, but also for the larger
dissertation it is taken from (Lisle 1999: Pratt 1992: 216–27).
4 This article works through the main arguments in Gender Trouble (i.e. the ctive
construction of the gender core, imposed gender coherence, naturalized hetero-
sexuality and especially the idea of performative identities) in order to politicize
12 Which is not to say that the shift is unproblematic in its attempt to recolonize the
other. Indeed, women travel writers can be just as racist and colonizing as their
male counterparts. When women simply join in the machismo game of travel
writing without questioning the masculine dictates of the genre, they reproduce its
colonial heritage (Mills 1991; Blunt 1992). As Dew’s story demonstrates, not
questioning the unequal construction of gender makes it dif cult to address other
forms of economic, social and political inequalities that arise in different cultures
and landscapes.
13 An excellent discussion of the relationship between masculine and feminine tropes
in colonial travel writing can be found in Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992). In section I
she outlines a shift from the masculine, rational taxonomy of Linneus that
characterized the seventeenth century, to the feminine sentimentality of Mungo
Park that characterized the eighteenth century (Pratt 1992: 15–107). Another
excellent study of gender in travel writing is Ali Behdad’s Belated Travellers which
explains the complex eld of sexuality that emerged during the dissolution of
Orientalism in the late nineteenth century (Behdad 1994).
14 Butler gestures directly to the hermaphrodite alternative in reference to Michel
Foucault’s work on Herculine Barbine (Foucault 1980; Butler 1990: 23–4, 93–106).
Although the hermaphrodite is useful in symbolic terms, I think her arguments
resisting gender coherence are best understood as an effort to politicize the
imposition of the gender core. By illustrating how the man/woman ontology is
performative and never complete, Butler makes connections to the wider
‘incompleteness’ of subject positions and identity formation. But that does not
mean our always-performing selves have to abandon all political commitment.
Rather, Butler argues that living with our own instability, our own incompleteness,
is political to the extent that it prevents us from locking other subjects into the
stable foundations of otherness. Reformulating the modern subject outside of any
‘natural’ characteristics introduces a different approach to identity, one that
focuses on the interruptions, repetitions and performances of the very symbols we
take to be innate. This, I think, is the resistive and ethical import of Butler’s work.
References
Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Blunt, Alison. 1992. Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley in West Africa.
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
London: Routledge.
—— 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London:
Routledge.
—— 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Buzard, J. 1993. The Beaten Track. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cahill, Tim. 1992. Road Fever: A High-Speed Travelogue. London: Fourth Estate.
Campbell, David. 1992. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics
of Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Campbell, Ffyona. 1996. The Whole Story: A Walk Around the World. London: Orion.
Davidson, Robyn. 1980. Tracks. London: Picador.
Dew, Josie. 1992. The Wind in My Wheels: Travel Tales from the Saddle. London:
Little, Brown & Company.
Elshtain, Jean. 1987. Women and War. New York: Basic Books.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel (ed.). 1980. Herculine Barbine, Being the Recently Discovered
Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite. Trans. Richard McDougall. New
York: Colophon.
Furlong, Monica. 1996. Flight of the Kingsher: A Journey Among the Kukatja
Aborigines. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Hughes, Lyn. 1996. ‘The Reluctant Role Model: An Interview with Robyn Davidson’,
Wanderlust 17: 6–7.
Iyer, Pico. 1988. Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports From the Not-So-Far-
East. New York: Vintage Departures.
Jansz, Natania and Miranda Davies (eds). 1995. More Women Travel: A Rough Guide
Special. London: Rough Guides.
Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
in Anne Runyan and V. Spike Peterson (eds) Global Gender Issues, pp. 17–44.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge.
Steans, Jill. 1997. Gender and International Relations: An Introduction. Oxford: Polity
Press.
Tickner, Anne. 1992. Gender in International Relations. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1995. ‘The Journey and its Narratives’, in Tzvetan Todorov The
Morals of History. Trans. Alyson Waters, pp. 60–70. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Urry, John and Chris Rojek (eds). 1997. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel
and Theory. London: Routledge.
Veijola, S. and E. Jokinen. 1994. ‘The Body in Tourism’, Theory, Culture and Society
11 (3): 125–52.
Weber, Cynthia. 1998. ‘Performative States’, Millennium 27 (1): 77–95.