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15 - Clothing
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- By Dúnlaith Bird, English at the Université Paris 13.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 43-44
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Summary
Clothing, derived from the Old English clāth or cloth, is a collection of garments used to cover the body. Beyond this practical function, it can be seen as a form of sartorial semantics, communicating cultural identity, class affiliation or gender (Bird 2012, 120). Clothing's crucial relation to travel is reflected in the sartorial choices of the traveller, the costume of the inhabitants of the host country and the representations of both within the travelogue, dressed up for the delectation of readers back home.
Clothing for travel should be practical, adapted to the climate, environment and culture of the host country. In The Art of Travel; Or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (2000 [1872], 111), Francis Galton devotes an entire section to the subject, and insists that when determining clothing the traveller ‘looks more to serviceability than to anything else’. Galton pretends to impartiality, yet the guidebook is dedicated uniquely to the male European traveller and native clothing is ridiculed, which is consistent with the logic of a text that presents everything outside of Britain as ‘wild countries’ to be discovered and conquered (112).
Although Galton is a particularly egregious example, the choice of ‘serviceable’ clothing for the traveller is rarely anodyne, even when presented in practical terms. T. E. Lawrence (1973 [1926], 662) claims his use of Arab robes not only protects him from the intense desert heat, but allows him to infiltrate enemy territory as ‘an unconsidered Arab’. In temperatures of -30° in Spitzberg, the French nineteenth-century traveller Léonie d'Aunet (1995 [1854], 16) feels more than justified in adopting men's clothing, which she describes as ‘very convenient and perfectly disgraceful’. Discourses of race and gender are often interwoven in the traveller's choice of clothing.
Clothing can be seen as a form of performance art, signalling identity and cultural belonging, as Marjorie Garber (1992) notes. Garber particularly focuses on ‘the way in which clothing constructs (and deconstructs) gender and gender differences’ (3). Nineteenth-century French traveller Jane Dieulafoy (1887, 133) almost creates a diplomatic incident when the Persian Shah takes her disguise as a young, smooth-faced Frenchman for reality. Such cross-cultural cross-dressing can send dangerously mixed messages, with clothing becoming the catalyst for new forms of gender trouble.
34 - Gender
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- By Dúnlaith Bird, English at the Université Paris 13.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 99-101
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The American Psychological Association (2011) currently defines ‘gender’ as ‘the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours that a given culture associates with a person's biological sex’. Although this definition is indicative of the progress made over the past decades in terms of our understanding of gender and gender identity, it remains inherently problematic. Such definitions imply that the relation of gender to culture is straightforward, that gender is dependent on culture and inextricably linked to biological sex. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (2006 [1990], viii) rejects strict definitions which reduce gender to ‘received notions of masculinity and femininity’. For Butler, as for many recent researchers including Efrat Tseëlon and Lois McNay, the notion of gender resists categorization and indeed part of its power lies in its mutability. If gender, cultural norms and biological traits are interconnected, then travel can be argued to set gender in motion.
Travel and travel writing were traditionally seen as masculine domains, with official proclamations such as the King James I ‘Proclamation touching Passengers’ (1606) forbidding women to travel overseas without royal licence. As Karen Lawrence (1994) notes, up to the twentieth century women were largely written out of critical analysis on travel writing. In the 1980s and 1990s feminist research on gender and travel largely focused on women's travel writing; that work included Jane Robinson's anthology, Unsuitable for Ladies (1994), and the writing of Pat Barr and Billie Melman. Though this research was essential in broadening the field of travel and gender, in recent years gender has increasingly been seen as part of a wider nexus of intersecting discourses including race, classand spatial theory.
This trend is illustrated in the selection of texts made by Shirley Foster and Sara Mills (2002) in their anthology of women's travel writing. Their aim is ‘to demonstrate the contextually and historically specific nature of gender conditions’, while at the same time acknowledging the continued importance of gender as a determining factor in travel and travel writing (1). Mills (2005, 11) has repeatedly argued for a more materialist understanding of gender, which would focus on the lived experience of the traveller. This insistence on the specificity of gendered experience, which acknowledges the power but also the contingency of gender, has provided a guideline for researchers such as Kristi Siegel (2004).