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

t·e·劳伦斯（T. E. Lawrence）和乔治·n·寇松（George N. Curzon）等人写的关于中东的西方男性游记是众所周知的；同时期西方女性关于同一地区的旅行写作，尤其是关于库尔德斯坦的，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不太知名的女性旅行作家被忽视的文本，并提供新的方法方法。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，既将女性旅行者视为东方主义者，又将她们视为女性从僵化的性别角色中解放出来的倡导者。我将探索英国女性在前往库尔德斯坦的50年间（1890-1940）所接受的机会，记录她们对库尔德人和其他民族的观察，同时表现出她们的性别认同。我的论文将论述，这些女作家的自我塑造是由一种矛盾心理策略促成的：她们同情并认同库尔德人；它们还强化了我们与他们的二分法。我将把性别表演性（即性别作为一种被表演的社会结构）的概念与西方文学中的矛盾心理、他者和第三空间的后殖民概念结合起来，展示这些女性作家通过叙事和图像的遭遇、冲突和转变来表演或构建身份的方式。她们的矛盾心理使她们区别于上述男性作家，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、图像学研究和旅行文学等新兴领域，为这些领域的性别分析提供新的方法。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，从而影响今天与该地区相关的关于女性自主性和流动性的辩论。

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.