Wandering Women, (Re)wondering Literary Landscapes: Mapping the Sites and Trouble Spots of Gendered Journeys in Contemporary Travel Writing from and About Australian Women

Overview

Project status: In progress

This project is a mapping exercise in women's travel writing that seeks to contribute new knowledge to life writing scholarship through the development of a feminist geography for voicing women's literal and metaphorical journeys.

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Research leader
Organisational unit
Lead unit Creative Industries Faculty
End date
1st March 2012
Research area
Digital media, communication and culture
 

Details

Project description

This project is a qualitative study in literary criticism and textual analysis that employs dialectic methods of enquiry within a broad cultural studies framework. Filtered through a feminist lens, the research investigates hybrid spaces that are intersected when women make intentional and accidental border crossings.

Creative Industries linkage

Travel is a fashionable metaphor for the slippage and displacement of cultural knowledge. How can I (as a border woman at the cross roads of the creative and critical) map these movements using creative writing as a method of inquiry, and travel as a medium for textual turbulence and cultural translation?

Publications and output

Travel memoir Things Past, and an accompanying exegesis, An Itinerary for Wandering. The creative employs the gendered journey as a narrative strategy in a collection of travel stories, each of which flags gender specific boundaries. The exegesis investigates how this subversion creates sites and trouble spots where women can write back from the borders that have traditionally defined them.