Women’s travel writing

As  the italian feminist critic Paola Melchiori , a passionate nomad, observes dislocation has always marked the terrain of the female traveler. Analyzing the literature of travel as a site of sexual difference, she writes: Reading women’s travel writing, one notices an absence of the past. Women who leave are not nostalgic. They desire what they have not had, and they look for it in the future. The desire does not take shape as “return” but rather as “voyage”. Nostalgia is substituted by dislocation*. Thinking as a voyageuse can trigger a relation to dwelling that is much more transitive than the fixity of oikos, and a cartography that is errant. Wandering defines this cartography, which is guided by a fundamental remapping of dwelling. A constant redrafting of sites, rather than the circularity of origin and return, ensures that spatial attachment does not become a desire to possess. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “the nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it**”.

*Paola Melchiori, “Un sentimento senza oggetto”, Lapis no.19, September 1993, p.22

**Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects:Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought, New York:Columbia University Press, 1994, pp.35-36

from Gender Nomadism: The Journey of Dwelling