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

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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.