Curious Travellers and Ambivalent Performers: British Women Travellers and Orientalism in the Kurdistan (1890-1940)

好奇的旅行者和矛盾的表演者：英国女性旅行者和库尔德斯坦的东方主义（1890-1940）

• 批准号: 2895103
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Roehampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2895103
• 关键词: Curious; Travellers; Ambivalent; Performers; British

Western male travel writing about the Middle East by the likes of T. E. Lawrence and George N. Curzon iswell known; contemporaneous western female travel writing about the same region, especially on theKurdistan, has been overlooked, yet it can reshape our understanding of the authors and the Kurds alike.This project will explore neglected texts by well-known and lesser-known female travel writers and offernew methodological approaches to them. I will argue that female accounts of travels in Kurdistandeployed an ambivalent strategy, establishing women travellers as both Orientalists and as advocates forwomen's emancipation from rigid gender roles.I will explore the opportunities British women embraced when travelling to the Kurdistan over a 50-yearperiod (1890-1940), recording their observations of Kurdish people and other ethnic groups, whileperforming their gender identities. My thesis will contend that these female writers' self-fashioning ismade possible by a strategy of ambivalence: they sympathise and identify with the Kurds; they alsoenforce the dichotomy of us vs them. I will combine the concept of gender performativity (i.e., of genderas a performed social construct) with postcolonial concepts of Ambivalence, Othering, and Third Space inWestern literature to show the ways in which identity is performed or constructed by these female writersthrough narratives and images of encounter, conflict, and transformation. Their ambivalence distinguishesthem from the male writers mentioned above and reveals the surprisingly contradictory voices andideologies at play in colonial texts.This project will contribute to the expansion of the burgeoning fields of Kurdish Studies, ImagologyStudies, and Travel Literature to offer new ways of analysing gender within these fields. It will furtherelucidate the connections between travel, empire, and the struggle for female self-fashioning to impactdebates about female autonomy and mobility relevant to the region today.

T. E. 劳伦斯 (T. E. Lawrence) 和乔治 N. 柯松 (George N. Curzon) 等西方男性写关于中东的游记是众所周知的。当代西方女性关于同一地区，尤其是库尔德斯坦的旅行写作一直被忽视，但它可以重塑我们对作者和库尔德人的理解。这个项目将探索知名和鲜为人知的女性旅行作家被忽视的文本，并为它们提供新的方法论途径。我认为，女性对库尔德斯坦旅行的描述采用了一种矛盾的策略，将女性旅行者塑造为东方主义者和女性从僵化的性别角色中解放出来的倡导者。我将探讨英国女性在 50 年期间（1890-1940）前往库尔德斯坦旅行时所接受的机会，记录她们对库尔德人和其他族裔群体的观察， 同时表现出他们的性别认同。我的论文将认为，这些女性作家的自我塑造是通过一种矛盾的策略成为可能的：她们同情并认同库尔德人；她们对库尔德人的同情和认同。他们还强化了我们与他们的二分法。我将把性别表演性的概念（即性别作为一种表演的社会建构）与西方文学中的矛盾心理、他者化和第三空间等后殖民概念结合起来，展示这些女性作家通过遭遇、冲突和转变的叙事和意象来表演或构建身份的方式。他们的矛盾心理使他们有别于上述男性作家，并揭示了殖民文本中令人惊讶的矛盾声音和意识形态。该项目将有助于扩展库尔德研究、形象学研究和旅行文学等新兴领域，为分析这些领域内的性别提供新的方法。它将进一步阐明旅行、帝国和女性自我塑造的斗争之间的联系，以影响与当今该地区相关的女性自主权和流动性的辩论。