2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

To evoke ‘the Muslim woman’ in the contemporary political climate is to conjure images of black veils and shrouded faces. The hijab becomes a symbol of clipped horizons and curtailed movement. And yet Muslim women throughout history have countered these omnipresent images by participating in that typically liberating form of movement: travel. Established patterns of movement within the Islamic world have historically offered Muslim women access to prescribed frameworks and networks of mobility. How, then, to gain access to the gendered nature of these Muslim cultures of travel that so challenge preconceptions about Muslim women’s movement? One answer, this panel proposes, is through travel writing. Muslim women have been writing accounts of their travels for centuries and from across nearly the entire geographical space of Islam, from North Africa to Southeast Asia. However, much of this literature is almost entirely unknown within the fields of Islamic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, and even within the linguistic or cultural traditions that produced them. The papers in this panel each seek to recuperate these lost histories of Muslim women’s travel, first, by drawing attention to this rich literary tradition and making accessible hitherto forgotten accounts, and secondly, by opening up a space to explore the possibilities that these accounts create for us to rethink the intersections of Islam, gender and mobility.