Women with Passports, Words without Value: Contemporary Female Travel as a ‘Promiscuous’ Excursion

This paper maps trouble spots and sites of turbulence in contemporary works of female travel. Since travel is a metaphor for the slippage or displacement of cultural knowledge, there is need for closer and more complex readings of the female practice. This paper locates the contemporary female traveller on ground and on page, and flags some of the cultural myths and misconceptions that affect how she moves through space. When women travel, they inscribe themselves across landscapes that have been previously overlooked, openly discarded, and even unexamined. In doing so, they travel an intricate course due to historical connections between wandering and promiscuity, and continuing confusions between issues of mobility and morality. Taking gender, then, as its interpretative parameter, and following a post-modern line of enquiry, this paper considers the troubled terrains of female travel, from early fairytale to modern outback adventure. In considering how gendered journeys through these landscapes may intersect the hybridities of private and public space, this paper explores the disruptive nature of female travel and how it may shape the narratives of wandering women.