Gender at A Distance 2

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International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Gender at a Distance
Debbie Lisle
Online publication date: 07 December 2010
To cite this Article Lisle, Debbie(2001) 'Gender at a Distance', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1: 1, 66 — 88
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Gender at a
Distance
IDENTITY, PERFO RMANCE AND CONTEMPO RARY

TRAVEL W RITING
Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 15:43 21 January 2011
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
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1:1 June 1999, 66–88

1461–6742 © Taylor & Francis 1999
civilizations’ of Asia both resist and adopt American in uence. While
explaining the combined horrors and delights of India, Iyer delivers the
following metaphor:
if the West often struck me as a masculine culture, dedicated to assertion, virility

and power, while southeast Asia seemed feminine in its texture, all softness,
delicacy and grace, India was both, and neither, as grotesque and fascinating as
a hermaphrodite.
(Iyer 1988: 261)
By employing more accessible and generally understood differences between

men and women, Iyer simpli es the complex relationships that exist between
East and West. In other words, grafting gender onto geography makes it
easier for ‘armchair travellers’ to learn about the exotic delights of India and
Asia. Indeed, translating foreign places through more universal categories

(in this case gender difference) illustrates the interpretive function of all travel
writing: these stories involve a simultaneous ‘making strange’ and ‘making
familiar’. What I nd interesting about this process is how prevailing
and often stereotypical conceptions of gender are used to tame the threat of
different and exotic places. For example, it is not dif cult to see how Iyer uses
traditional hierarchies of gender to bolster a world in which ‘other’ places like
India are gazed upon, consumed and ultimately positioned outside of global
power centers like London or New York. Armed with this masculine/feminine
axis, the reader is able to make connections to wider cartographies of world
politics, such as civilized/primitive, modern/backward, developed/under-
developed. But there is a resistive element to Iyer’s metaphor as well: the
gure of the hermaphrodite suggests an alternative reading of the gender/
geography collapse because it upsets how these binary interpretations
reinforce one another. Beginning with Iyer’s metaphor, this article explores
the way gender is used to secure and disrupt foreign territory at a particular
site of representation: the contemporary travelogue.
COMBIN ING GENDER, POWER A ND TRA VEL WRIT IN G
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
Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 67

the contemporary reader, recounts the discovery of others, either savages of
faraway lands or the representatives of non-European civilizations – Arab,
Hindu, Chinese and so on’ (Todorov 1995: 68). As many postcolonial scholars
remind us, textual maps that reproduce the axes of spatial and cultural
difference are the products of colonial power structures. Therefore, to
politicize travelogues is to argue that the geographical imagination
underscoring these texts is maintained through unequal relations between
Imperial powers and their colonized empires. Although the formal structures
of colonialism are no longer in operation, contemporary travelogues continue
to construct a world of exotic peoples that can be visited, described,
categorized and colonized. While travel writers like Iyer tell different stories
from their predecessors (e.g. about globalization rather than exploration and
discovery), contemporary travelogues cannot be divorced from their colonial
heritage.
As students, scholars and practitioners of world politics, the arrangement

of inequality motivates us to ask questions about power: where is power
located in a relationship of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’? If that relationship
is unequal, which entity enjoys the privilege of power and inuence? In what
ways is this power productive? In what ways constraining? Asking those
kinds of questions about Iyer’s opening statement produces some familiar
contours, the most obvious being the privileged location of the West,
masculinity and culture, and the subordination of Asia, femininity and nature.
But as students, scholars and practitioners of feminist politics as well, the
emergence of differential relations is a signal to investigate the various (mis)-
placements of gender in the service of power. If contemporary travelogues
derive much of their authority by positioning subjects within colonial geog-
raphies, then it is necessary to ask about the strategies of difference employed
in the ‘ lling up’ of those spaces. This article argues that traditional notions
of gender are one of the most powerful mechanisms of difference used to
bolster the familiar/foreign landscape of contemporary travelogues.2 Prevail-
ing ideas about masculinity and femininity are crucial in scripting the subject
positions of contemporary travelogues – including those who write them,
those who read them, and those who are written about. Travelogues are made
possible not only by certain assumptions about a world divided into here and
there, but also by the masculine and feminine gender roles that are ascribed
to those divisions. This article explores how the familiar/foreign cartography
of travelogues is delivered to the reader through the prevailing categories of
masculine and feminine.
By situating contemporary travelogues between the commitments of both
world politics and feminism, it is possible to examine how discourses of
masculinity and femininity are both reproduced and resisted in stories about
journeys to foreign places.3 Tracing the con icted nature of the gendered
subject in contemporary travel writing raises the following questions: how are
men and women relatively attached to masculine and feminine attributes? Are
these attachments being reinforced in new and clever ways? Are they being
68 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

interrupted and dislodged? It is not a novel assertion to say that traditional or
‘natural’ gender differences are problematic – these statements have been
made in one form or another as long as there has been feminism. But to argue
that traditional notions of masculinity and femininity themselves travel, there
needs to be a different kind of critical engagement. To this end, I think Judith
Butler’s explanation of performance and identity is a useful way into the
complicated intersections of gender, power, geography and difference (Butler
1990).4
Butler is particularly effective in discussing the gendered subject because
her work is a sustained explanation of how the bodies of men and women get
relatively attached to descriptions of masculine and feminine. That process
of attachment is familiar to those of us concerned with world politics –
feminist scholars have explained how the social construction of gender along
masculine and feminine lines is not divorced from the way that International
Relations positions sovereign states in an anarchical system. Those seeking to

address (and re-dress) the gendered nature of International Relations have
illustrated the various ways in which institutional, social and political forces
are androcentric:
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,

spiritual or sexual, as they can be geographical and cultural. In the explicit
crossing of borders, travelogues can problematize and confound the con-
straining features of entrenched subject positions. Using gender ‘at a distance’
in the title is a way to explain this interruptive departure. It is a way to arrest
the endless logics at the heart of the travelogue (e.g. familiar/foreign, us/them,
same/different) without losing the political importance of those exclusions.
This is not the distance required by the objective observer, rather, it is the
distance necessary to disengage and destabilize the collusions of gender,
power, geography and difference. More speci cally, it is the distance that can
prevent the strictly regulated occupation of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ gender
roles.
ASSUMING THE GENDER CORE: CONSTRA IN T, RECOVERY

AND DISPLACEMENT
In Gender Trouble, Butler describes how the privileged ontology of man/

woman leads to a sequential ordering of masculine and feminine attributes.
For example, if ‘man’ is the stable signi er, then ‘rational, powerful, assertive’
are the logical and obvious denotations. Butler explains this ontology through
simple grammar: ‘man’ or ‘woman’ constitutes the primary category of noun,
and the attending ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes are the secondary and
dependent category of adjectives (Butler 1990: 24–5). This ontology gives
everyone a stable ‘gender core’ so that either ‘man’ or ‘woman’ becomes an
essential and primary component of identity. Starting from the stable core, a
series of descriptive and denotative adjectives are called into presence in
a causal fashion, for example, being a ‘man’ causes one to be rational, aggres-
sive and dominating, while being a ‘woman’ causes one to be accommodating,
emotional and complacent. Using Butler’s formulation of the gender core, it is
possible to locate four mechanisms through which the attachments of man =
masculine and woman = feminine are produced in contemporary travelogues.
Generic Constraints
Gender coherence in travelogues is primarily ltered through the masculine

codes of the genre itself. Going back to the basic literary de nition, we
remember that travelogues require an understanding and engagement with
difference. At the heart of the travelogue is the desire to ‘ x’ that difference
in the act of familiarization, a process that involves various kinds of explora-
tion, domination, taming, mastery, ownership, subjugation and control. In
short, travelogues are about colonizing and commanding the unfamiliar,
and rendering it understandable through the sanctioned codes of what Butler
calls the ‘hegemonic signifying economy of the masculine’ (Butler 1990:
26). Because that textual colonization is accomplished through a heavily

masculinized subject position, whatever is included in the travelogue is
ltered through the rational organizing scheme of the author/ subject/hero.
In this way, the masculine gaze of the travel writer is imbued with the
power to write over whatever it encounters. This ‘objective gaze’ is the most
overwhelming aspect of gender in contemporary travelogues because it serves
as the accepted standard through which both masculine and feminine
attributes are judged. Travelogues are exemplary translations of masculine
literary foundations because both men and women (authors, readers and
others) are attached so explicitly to those standards. In discussing the Thomas
Cook annual travel book award, Sara Mills explains how the supposedly
‘neutral’ literary standards used to judge travelogues are actually infused with
the masculine gaze. As such, the resulting awards are different for men and
women authors:
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)
In order to achieve recognition in the literary establishment, women travel

writers must battle against charges of both irrelevancy (‘feminine’ concerns
with domesticity are not interesting) and lying (women cannot possibly
manage the rough world of foreign travel and adventure).6 Therefore, any
attempt at recognition by women travel writers involves authentication and
validation according to the norms and rules set by their male counterparts.
These generic boundaries place the masculine gaze and male travel writers
rmly in the norm – as ‘true’ adventurers, travelogues are simply the ‘natural’
form of their expression. Women travel writers only enter the picture when
they are rendered doubly extraordinary – rst because they have survived the
rigorous travels that only men are supposedly capable of, and second, because
they have managed to transcend more ‘feminine’ literary genres such as
diaries or journals and accomplish ‘real’ writing (Mills 1991: 108–22). These
insights suggest that the rst guration of gender in travelogues is located in
the genre itself. The literary codes that make travelogues what they are (epic
discoveries of far-away lands) foster endless masculine tropes in the narration
of the journey. The boundaries of genre therefore work to inscribe the
boundaries of gender: men are ‘naturally capable’ of writing travelogues
because men are ‘naturally’ adventurous and able to colonize the foreign. On
the other hand, women must overcome their limitations and become
‘extraordinary’ in order to be manly enough to travel and write travelogues.

Hyper-Mascul inity
Many contemporary travelogues repeat the colonial quest for undiscovered

places (e.g. the heart of Africa) as a way of escaping the encroachments of
post-war global tourism.7 While modern technologies of communication and
information make it possible for the entire world to be under surveillance at
any time, mass tourism enables people to actually visit places they have only
seen or heard about. Acting on a nostalgia for colonial exploration, travel
writers resist the banality of a ‘world-already-known-through-tourists’ by
relating their hyper-masculine exotic adventures. Perhaps the Amazon has
been navigated already, and perhaps even navigated by boat, but not single-
handedly in a berglass kayak. Or, perhaps the Sahara has been crossed, and
perhaps it has even been crossed in a jeep, but it has not been crossed solo,
on foot, in less than x number of days. Travel writers can no longer have
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)

Cahill may not be the rst person to conquer the Argentinean roads, but he
may just be the fastest, the toughest and the best equipped. In short, the most
manly.8 Cahill’s initial battles against other men (e.g. Argentinean drivers who
think they are Juan Fangio, other competitors seeking to break the record and
even his driving partner, Sowerby) are rewritten as a battle against all things
feminine and foreign. For Cahill, ‘mastering’ other men is accompanied by a
mastery of the local customs, as well as a mastery of his ‘feminine’ side. In this
way, Cahill’s masculinity is reproduced over and over again in different
settings: in his mind versus sentimental feelings, in the truck versus the
vigorous Sowerby, on the road versus the Fangio wannabes, through the
jungle versus mother nature, and at various border crossings versus local
guards. No matter what ‘foreign bodies’ he encounters, his approach will be,
above all, manly.
Thinking through Road Fever in Butler’s terms, it is quite easy to
understand Cahill’s story as an obvious expression of the masculine gender

core. But Butler’s explanation of gender coherence is striking in the case of
travelogues because both male and female travel writers are captured so
thoroughly by the man/woman ontology. In other words, the competitive
masculinity exempli ed by Cahill – especially the desire to be rst at a place
– is also found in travelogues written by women. Thinking back to the idea
that women travellers must be rendered ‘extraordinary’ to be taken seriously,
one is reminded of how the discourse of ‘even women can travel’ frames
contemporary travel writing. Even women can travel solo, even women can
travel in Muslim countries, even women can walk or kayak around the world
– imagine that! One may not be the rst person to visit Mali, to kayak up the
Nile, to live in the rainforests of Borneo – but one could certainly be the rst
woman to do so.
One of the most in uential and critically acclaimed contemporary
travelogues is Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), an account of her lone trek
across the Australian outback with four camels and a dog. Like other women
travel writers, Davidson struggles to represent moments in her journey where
being a woman may open up previously uninscribed observations and experi-
ences – but she is continually hampered by the hyper-masculine codes of
travel writing itself. Tracks is an interesting translation of the gender core
because despite the courageous, adventurous and ‘masculine’ nature of her
solo journey, the text still manages to disrupt the overwhelmingly ‘manly’
gaze of the travelogue. When her story was initially covered by photo-
journalists in National Geographic, it was her ‘feminine’ attributes that were
highlighted, such as her long blonde tresses, her ‘available’ status and her
special intuitive connection with both nature and the camels (Hughes 1996:
6). Reacting to the way that the press continued to focus only on these
‘feminine’ characteristics, she acutely states at the end of her book:
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

imagine them coining the phrase ‘camel gentleman’. ‘Camel lady’ had that nice
patronizing belittling ring to it. Labeling, pigeonholing – what a splendid trick
it is.
(Davidson 1980: 237)
Tracks gives us an idea of the powerful discourses of gender that circulate

in and around contemporary travel writing. Whereas Cahill can simply get on
with his adventures, women travel writers like Davidson still bear the burden
of proof: before they can ‘get on’ with their respective journeys, they must
demonstrate that they have a right to be there in the rst place. As the ‘regular
guy’ on a modern adventure, Cahill illustrates how appropriate manliness is
the only requirement for the modern travel writer. As a woman traveller,
Davidson must contend with being categorized as something special, some-
thing mythical, and something extraordinary in an effort to be taken seriously.
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.
Reco vered Femininity
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:
It seems as if anyone does something unusual a whole machine goes into

operation to try to make sure that she never does it again. You turn her into a
myth, you misinterpret what she’s done, and then you turn it into a love story.
There’s all sorts of ways of taking the balls off it.
(Davidson quoted in Hughes 1996: 6)

As the last sentence suggests, women travellers are threatening when they
presume to have the balls to travel the way men do. With this kind of metapho-
rical prosthesis, women not only inhabit the sacrosanct domain of masculine
identity, they also begin to disrupt it. And one of the ways to prevent the
threatening disruption of ‘ballsy women’ is through strategies of refeminization.
A similar but more recent book in the vein of courageous women is
Ffyona Campbell’s The Whole Story: A Walk Around the World (1996). After
publishing stories about her walks across Australia and Africa, Campbell
decided to write a comprehensive travelogue explaining the charges that she
‘cheated’ in her quest to be the rst woman to walk around the world. During
her journey across America, things began to unravel for Campbell when she
realized she was pregnant and chose to have an abortion. Her ‘cheating’
consisted of accepting a lift during her four months of pregnancy. Campbell’s
episode of pregnancy and subsequent attempts to disprove allegations of
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

Campbell’s journey – as if to reassure the reader that actually, she is not really
all that tough. While she can certainly walk for long distances, the most
important thing at the end of the day is that she can also cook and clean and
shop. But it is the capitulation to biology (i.e. balls, pregnancy, and hormones)
that makes this process of re-feminization complete. Ballsy women like
Davidson and Campbell can be ‘brought back into the fold’ through reference
to their uncooperative female bodies. The ‘natural’ weakness of the female
body, especially its habit of getting pregnant, keeps women out of the running
in the travelogue machismo stakes.10
Genderless N arrators/Gendered Others
Women travel writers begin to resist the limits of the masculine gaze through
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

present (which is not very often given the ubiquitous and pestering nature
of the men) do not fair much better. When Dew is invited to dinner by
Mohammed in Morocco, she displaces both masculine and feminine codes
away from her own subject position and onto her hosts:
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)
As the last sentence illustrates, Dew is able to leave those awkward

negotiations of gender behind as if they do not affect her, as if she – as
traveller – is always one step ahead. By placing herself outside of (or ahead of)
questions of gender, Dew also hopes to escape the dif cult questions of devel-
opment, inequality and cultural encounter that travel produces. By refusing to
examine her own construction as a ‘woman traveller’, Dew is complicit not
only in the masculine coding of the genre, but also in its colonial heritage.
Although Dew’s journey can be read as proof that women can travel
anywhere men can without making a fuss about it, the poverty of the ‘even
women can travel’ story becomes explicit in the face of the structural and
global inequalities faced by developing countries. For example, Dew’s relation
to the ‘shrew-like little wife’ is constructed within an unexamined discourse
of development in which the Moroccans are much farther back in the queue
of ‘progress and enlightenment’. Lurking in the subtext of this dinner
engagement are the many colonial struggles for independence and statehood
that the men and women of Morocco have waged. But from Dew’s subject
position, the negotiations of gender, power and development are over – she
has already achieved equality and enlightenment. Therefore, any relation
beyond the economic dependency of her hosts must wait until Morocco
becomes ‘more civilized’ and provides the opportunity for modern western
ideas like ‘gender equality’ that Dew enjoys. Gender politics are not only
displaced here, they are subordinated to powerful discourses of development
and modernization. By not examining her own complicity in the masculine
gaze of travel writing, Dew is unable to engage with other dif cult questions
of inequality that script her Moroccan encounter. Facing the combination
of poverty, the ‘mute work-dog role’ of the wife and the aggression of the
husband, all Dew can manage by way of engagement is the temporary salve
of hard currency and a hasty retreat.
The practice of displacing gender onto the local subject is also apparent in
Monica Furlong’s Flight of the Kingsher: A Journey Among the Kukatja

Aborigines (1996). Furlong spends some time with women in Balgo, a settle-
ment in the Australian outback, and compares their role to one she recognizes
from home:
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)
Furlong gestures to the global dimension of gender inequality by suggesting

that women in both Europe and the outback of Australia are connected to the
extent that they share ‘the traditional female role’. But again, that ‘global’
experience of patriarchy is somehow held apart from the violent colonial

histories that surround places like Balgo – histories that make it possible for a
western travel writer like Furlong to follow in the footsteps of her colonial
predecessors. 11 By the end of these journeys, the reader is clear about how
masculinity and femininity reside in the men and women of these ‘other’
countries, but not in the narrator. By displacing gender onto those who are
observed, it can be said that the androcentric foundations of the genre are
slightly shifted. But that shift presents its own collusions with power: gender
attachments have only moved laterally from one object (woman) to another
(native). By refusing to address this cunning displacement of gender, travel
writers are unable to disrupt or resist the intertwining discourses of patri-
archy, development and colonialism that continue to shape travelogues. In
other words, shifting gender stereotypes onto ‘other’ people and places allows
a more general silence about global inequality to proliferate.
Contemporary travelogues stabilize the gender core in four ways: rst, the
genre itself requires androcentric literary standards (i.e. objectivity, descrip-
tion, order); second, those standards produce a discourse of hyper-masculinity
that captures both men and women travel writers; third, extraordinary women
that do achieve these standards are refeminized, mythologized and otherwise
rendered unthreatening; and fourth, masculine and feminine traits that arise
in these texts are evacuated from the narrator and displaced onto the ‘native’
subject. All of these practices serve as a kind of textual and authorial
protection: objective observation, non-threatening ‘mythical’ adventuresses
and genderless authorship maintain and reproduce the strict attachments of
gender that Butler explains. In this way, the gender core remains uncontested.
Some women may be pushing against their traditional spatial locations (i.e.
they may be travelling in Australia, in Africa, in India) but in the end, they are
still women, and thus only able to operate within the con nes of ‘femininity’
that the prevailing order of gender places upon them. Butler’s explanation of
gender cores and their attachments is useful in the rst instance because it
locates the ways in which masculine and feminine identities are represented

in travelogues. More generally, it suggests that because of the overwhelming
expression of ‘masculinity’ in travelogues, both writing and travelling become
acts of repetitive colonization. But as some travel writers begin to show us,
that masculine gaze is not wholly seductive – even if it means the writer is
evacuated of her own gender, at least the endless expressions of masculinity
are somewhere else. And it is precisely this shift that leads us further into
Butler’s formulation.
PERFORMING GENDER: ANOMALIES, REGULATIONS

AND FICTIONS
Gender Trouble is provocative not only because it explains the gender core,
but also because it destabilizes the essential founding ontology. Under-
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

man might have some advantages, but it can be unsettling to feel excluded as a
bad in uence or un t companion for sisters or daughters.
(Jansz and Davies 1995: xiv–xvi)
Clearly, becoming an honorary man does not alleviate the complex

negotiations of gender that occur when travelling in foreign countries. Simply
adding women to the existing generic structures of the travelogue does not
secure the man/woman ontology, nor does it allow the colonizing elements of
travel writing to continue unquestioned. Instead, the title of honorary man
destabilizes the genre because it demonstrates how subjects are not always
captured by the overwhelming nature of the man/woman ontology. As Robyn
Davidson comments, the fact that women travel writers can occupy both sides
of the dichotomy upsets usual gender hierarchies:
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
Second, the existence of anomalies illustrates that the ontology is unable to

con ne the attributes it generates in an orderly fashion. Therefore, the
ontology itself must generate complex mechanisms of regulation as a way to
discipline men and women into their proper roles as masculine and feminine.
By disseminating norms and rules of the ‘do’ and ‘do not’ kind, and bolstering
those rules with various disciplining mechanisms, the man/woman ontology
is able to ensure its survival and reproduction. Because travelogues are
governed by codes of masculinity, the subject position of the traveller/author/
hero is disciplined accordingly. In this way, travel writers script their own
subject position through the continual repetition and reproduction of ‘man-
liness’: Iyer through a catalogue of ‘objective’ observations; Cahill through
carefully controlled determination; Campbell through physical stamina and
endurance; and Dew through a refusal to be sentimental about foreign
places. A circular regulation thus develops: only ‘manly’ men and women go
on adventures in far away and exotic places, and those journeys are in turn
disciplined by attending tropes of masculinity. But travelogues also regulate
images of femininity. At the end of Tracks, re ecting upon her new (and un-
wanted) identity as ‘camel lady’, Davidson explains how girls are disciplined
into their familiar feminine roles:

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more
fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful,
watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange
men. Listen but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snails’ antennae
grow, watching for this and looking for that, the underneath of things.
The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those
circuits, to push up the millions of thumbs that have tried to quench energy and
creativity and strength and self-con dence; that have so effectively caused her
to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her
imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness.
(Davidson 1980: 237)
While Davidson’s sentiments apply to a much larger context than travel

writing, this passage illustrates the powerful disciplining practices that work
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
No matter how complex or rigorous those regulatory mechanisms of gender

are, they still fail to make us completely adhere to the man/woman ontology.
In this breakdown of coherence, the whole edi ce of gender becomes insecure.
And this is Butler’s third point: a stable gender ontology is, in fact, a ctive
construction. There is no such thing as a gender core if it is not disciplined
and held in place by its own regulatory mechanisms. Butler argues that the
very necessity of its regulation renders any original ontology of gender
articial. There is no such thing as a transcendental, natural and innate ‘man’
or ‘woman’ that makes a subject one thing and not another. Subjects are made
to the extent that they are disciplined by a much wider set of social, political
and discursive regulations. As Butler explains, we are ‘compelled’ by the
regulatory practices of gender, and thus directed into the already determined
sequential ordering that emanates from our ctive gender cores (Butler 1990:
24). Not only does Butler explain how and why our gender cores are ‘ctive’,
but she also explains the process of taking identity away from stable and
‘irreducible’ locations such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’.
As Butler argues, the idea of gender as an essence or a core automatically
requires a whole series of gendered coherences, just as a noun (e.g. woman) is
tted with an attending sequence of adjectives (e.g. feminine, nurturing,
servile). An easy way to make sense of this coherence is to envisage the
gender core as the causal agent, and the attending attributes as the effect. But,
as Butler argues, gender itself is an effect of the coherence between man =
masculine and woman = feminine: ‘There is no gender identity behind the

expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very
“expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 25). In this way,
Butler presents a reversal: it is the performance of gender that constitutes the
core identity (man or woman) that it is supposed to be expressing in the rst
place. Therefore, if anything can be said to be causal, it is the performance of
gender and not its core. Butler explains this reversal in Nietzschean terms
by problematizing our usual ways of nding the ‘doer behind the deed’. If we
understand that a gender core is created and held in place by a series of
‘regulatory ctions’, we can correspondingly understand that the doer (sub-
ject) is created and held in place by a series of performed deeds. But in Butler’s
reformulation, there is no ‘being’ behind the ‘doing’ or effecting – there is no
stable or pre-existing subject that is causally attached to the ‘doing’ (Butler
1990: 25, 1997: 63–82). And this is where Butler’s most innovative political
suggestion emerges: all subject positions confound the man/woman ontology
because all subject positions are a sequence of identity performances.

To this end we can say that the existence of anomalies (e.g. honorary men,
genderless authors), complex regulating mechanisms (e.g. hyper-masculinity)
and the ontology’s ctive security all serve to make gender performative
in travelogues. Making sense of these texts through performativity is to call
attention to and deconstruct the prevailing notions of gender that are
embedded in travelogues. Using Butler’s reformulation of the gendered
subject, it becomes possible to understand how adventures in far away places
(e.g. trekking in Nepal, cycling in Morocco, driving up the Andes) are a
sequence of identity performances aimed at the repetitive colonization of
gender and cultural difference. For example, Josie Dew observes the following
while in Northern India:
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)
This passage is an interesting moment of interruption: no matter how

masculine the trekker is, the realization of the ‘journey into manhood’ will
always be disrupted by the appearance of anomalies. In this case, it is so
much more distressing because these anomalies are ‘less equipped’ than the
trekkers – after all, they are only native women and children. The ‘journey’
is scripted by a series of regulatory masculine codes, for example, one must
have the right ‘gear’ (e.g. goretex) in order to complete the macho adventure
of trekking, and prove that one is truly ‘manly’. And it is precisely these
complex regulations that are used to prevent the appearance of anomalies

and convince the trekkers of their stable masculine identities. Despite the
repeated ‘macho’ preparations of the trekkers, their subject positions are con-
tinually threatened and proven ctional by the appearance of the Nepalese
women and children. By reading this brief passage as a performance of
identity, it is possible to deconstruct its governing tropes of masculinity and
femininity.
RETHINKING GENDER: AN INCOM PLETE JOURNEY
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
repeats gender stereotypes. In that construction, complex questions of global

inequality are simpli ed into the sequential ordering of masculine and
feminine – the West is valued as masculine, Asia is devalued as feminine.
Securing foreign territory by reference to gender difference is an effort to
continue the masculine colonizing gaze so prevalent during the Imperial
age. Indeed, the gender core is an increasingly useful interpretive tool in
contemporary travelogues, for it reintroduces difference to an already-known,
already-colonized world. This article illustrates how representations of
masculinity and femininity in contemporary travel writing are repetitive
colonizations of identity. As such, it calls attention to the continuing
exclusions and hierarchies that emerge in the intersection of gender and
travel.
But what of Iyer’s framing of India as a hermaphrodite? Perhaps this image
best illustrates the always-present disruptions at the heart of the gender core.
Although this article illustrates how the prevailing codes of masculinity and
femininity are positioned in travelogues (e.g. a masculine West and feminine
Asia), it also illustrates how the gender core is always disrupted (e.g. the
hermaphrodite). By using Butler’s interruptive formula of identity, it is
possible to deconstruct those attachments and take away the familiarity of
prevailing gender stereotypes.14 As a consequence, alternative orderings of
gender like the hermaphrodite are able to appear. If texts about crossing
borders are read through Butler’s idea of performativity, they have the
potential to interrupt the well-worn attachments of man = masculine and
woman = feminine. In the end, I think travelogues are politically interesting
because they illustrate how our identities are so profoundly shaken up by
movement. Journeys can be many things, but they are at their most interest-
ing when motion is allowed to instigate a destabilization, an interruption, a
displacement. Butler’s reworking of gender points towards that kind of
disruption. Her work demonstrates how a complex, uid and unfamiliar
formulation of identity is more appropriate in an era when our journeys
across the world are multiplying.

Debbie Lisle
Department of International Relations
Keele University
Staffordshire,
ST5 5BG, UK
Tel: (01782) 584-218
E-mail: ird01@keele.ac.uk
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
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

the representations of gender in contemporary travel writing (Butler 1990). Butler’s
work on performativity has recently been introduced to International Relations
and world politics by scholars keen to analyse the linkage between state practice
and the construction of identity (D. Campbell 1992: 8, 259; Weber 1998). However,
by focusing on Gender Trouble in this article, I do not mean to suggest that Butler’s
subsequent texts on political theory, bodies and psychoanalysis are not equally
fertile ground for a discursive examination of travel writing (Butler 1993, 1997).
For example, one could follow Kaplan and trace the way political theory travels
across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries; one could describe how the
moving bodies of tourists and others exemplify gender performance; or one could
explain how representations of travel often disrupt the conscious/unconscious
barrier so revered in the modern subject (Veijola and Jokinen 1994; Kaplan 1996).
Although the potential for research in this area is growing, I have found Gender
Trouble invaluable in understanding the initial linkages between gender, travel
and power that this article seeks to explore.

5 This brief formulation points to an extensive literature in International Relations
and World Politics. See for example Elshtain 1987; Enloe 1989; Tickner 1992;
Steans 1997.
6 As Mills goes on to explain: ‘These texts are analysed as if in a vacuum. Few critics
seem to be concerned with the fact that, in contrast to men’s travel writing, most
of these women’s texts are accused of exaggeration or lying’ (Mills 1991: 108).
7 This search for remote and primitive places rests upon the gure of the traveller as
opposed to the tourist. It is the traveller who escapes the tentacles of globalization
and mass tourism, identi es authentic locales, and is nostalgic for a world that
remains open to discovery (Urry 1990; Buzard 1993; Urry and Rojek 1997). But the
marking of identity here is also gendered: the ‘feminized’ tourist is not as tough,
autonomous or independent as the ‘masculine’ traveller is. The passive tourist is
guided along a prescribed route well travelled by other docile tourists, whereas the
lone traveller avoids the ‘beaten track’ in order to discover and explore the ‘real’
country behind the super cial facade of tourism.
8 The competitive nature of this passage calls upon other well-known tropes of
masculinity, for example, Second World War ghter pilots (toggles, outgunned)
and famous racecar drivers. The ‘regular guy’ dreams of racing at the Indianapolis
500 and off-roading are exempli ed by another popular travel writer and
journalist, P. J. O’ Rourke (O’ Rourke 1996).
9 Campbell’s adventure is also dampened by her chosen mode of transport – she is
walking as opposed to running or boating or driving. The con guration of
transport along gendered lines is a common feature of contemporary travel writing
(e.g. Campbell on her feet, Davidson on her camels, Dew on her bicycle versus
Cahill in his GMC, Theroux on his steam train). It is as if walking, travelling on
camels and riding bicycles do not really count as adventure because they are not
mechanized, modern, manly forms of transport.
10 This is the point at which Butler’s work in Bodies that Matter is more appropriate
for locating those moments when contemporary travelogues reify gender
difference through the body (Butler 1993). While Gender Trouble explains how the

gender core is constructed, reproduced and performed, Bodies that Matter explains
how the physical body becomes the inviolable and irrefutable container for gender
identity. Addressing how gender coherence attaches itself to the bodies of men and
women in the area of travel involves analysing how the moving bodies of tourists
are continually scripted by the prevailing orders of masculinity and femininity
(Veijola and Jokinen 1994).
11 Furlong’s position raises important questions about the identity of travel writers as
a whole. The continuing imperialism of these texts is explicit when one considers
the overwhelming numbers of western writers travelling to and writing about
previously colonized places. While there are certainly stories about journeys to
western places, and travelogues written by authors from ‘other’ countries (e.g.
V. S. Naipaul), one cannot ignore Tzvetan Todorov’s reminder that most travel
writers are from western, developed, industrialized nations writing about non-
western, developing, previously colonized places (Todorov 1995).
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.

Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the following: Simon Bainbridge, Martin
Coward, David Mutimer and Jan Jindy Pettman for reviewing early versions
of this article; those who gave me provocative comments/questions during
presentations at the 1998 ISA conference, the IR research seminar at Keele
University and the BISA gender working group; and nally, two anonymous
reviewers for the International Feminist Journal of Politics for their patient
and constructive suggestions on the nal draft.
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Gender at A Distance 2

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This article was downloaded by: [Vienna University Library]

On: 21 January 2011

International Feminist Journal of Politics

Online publication date: 07 December 2010

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IDENTITY, PERFO RMANCE AND CONTEMPO RARY

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1:1 June 1999, 66–88

if the West often struck me as a masculine culture, dedicated to assertion, virility

By employing more accessible and generally understood differences between

Asia. Indeed, translating foreign places through more universal categories

COMBIN ING GENDER, POWER A ND TRA VEL WRIT IN G

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 67

As students, scholars and practitioners of world politics, the arrangement

68 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

Relations positions sovereign states in an anarchical system. Those seeking to

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 69

ASSUMING THE GENDER CORE: CONSTRA IN T, RECOVERY

In Gender Trouble, Butler describes how the privileged ontology of man/

Gender coherence in travelogues is primarily  ltered through the masculine

70 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

In order to achieve recognition in the literary establishment, women travel

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 71

Many contemporary travelogues repeat the colonial quest for undiscovered

72 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

understand Cahill’s story as an obvious expression of the masculine gender

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 73

Tracks gives us an idea of the powerful discourses of gender that circulate

Reco vered Femininity

It seems as if anyone does something unusual a whole machine goes into

74 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 75

Genderless N arrators/Gendered Others

76 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

As the last sentence illustrates, Dew is able to leave those awkward

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 77

Furlong gestures to the global dimension of gender inequality by suggesting

experience of patriarchy is somehow held apart from the violent colonial

78 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

PERFORMING GENDER: ANOMALIES, REGULATIONS

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 79

Clearly, becoming an honorary man does not alleviate the complex

Second, the existence of anomalies illustrates that the ontology is unable to

80 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

While Davidson’s sentiments apply to a much larger context than travel

No matter how complex or rigorous those regulatory mechanisms of gender

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 81

because all subject positions are a sequence of identity performances.

This passage is an interesting moment of interruption: no matter how

82 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

RETHINKING GENDER: AN INCOM PLETE JOURNEY

repeats gender stereotypes. In that construction, complex questions of global

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 83

84 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

and power that this article seeks to explore.

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 85

86 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

Debbie Lisle/G ende r at a distanc e 87

88 Inte rnational Feminist Jo urnal of Politics

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Gender coherence in travelogues is primarily ltered through the masculine