Since the 1990s, feminist scholars have strived to ‘recover’ women writers as travelers, Romantic wanderers, and urban voyeurs. Efforts to diversify—and/or to feminize—the study of travel writing have led to foundational reconfigurations of the sublime and women’s encounter with it (see Angela D. Jones, Patricia Yaeger). Where essays like Jones’ (1995) associate women’s wandering with a feminine “communion” with the sublime, postcolonial scholars have elsewhere tracked women’s complex relationship with empire amidst their journeys (see Sara Mills, Billie Melman, Mary Louise Pratt). This panel perhaps treads closest to what Deborah Nord and Kerri Andrews have explored as a walking woman's role as “social investigator” and “pedestrian sociologist,” respectively.

More than meditative, this panel regards women’s walking as productive of philosophical and theoretical thinking. It intentionally strays beyond historical focuses of wandering women in British literary studies, suggesting a broader, transnational history of female “pedestrian theorists,” to adapt Andrews’ term. To preserve ample time for thematic discussion, each participant will prepare a 15-minute paper. Following these talks, panelists will enter into lively discussion with presider and attendees about the intersections between their papers.

This panel begins with Mary Ruth Robinson’s paper (“Without Directions Guide”: Thinking and Walking with Margaret Cavendish), which offers a brisk tour of Cavendish’s fictional and autobiographical strolls through fields, forests, and internal chambers. As she studies Cavendish’s characterization of roving women in Poems and Fancies (1653) and Natures Pictures (1656), Robinson will also draw on work on body techniques by scholars like Seeta Chaganti and Iris Marion Young. Ultimately, she evinces a “feminist poetics” of walking that might be applied to analyses of other early modern women — one that is importantly informed by her engagement with contemporary feminist theory.

Likewise attending to theories of walking, Marina Malli shifts her attention from Michel de Certeau’s implicitly masculine, “everyday philosopher,” to the theoretical promise of María Lugones’ figure of “la callejera,” or the streetwalker. Her paper (“Tantear for Meaning: Theorizing María Lugones’ La Callejera/ Streetwalker”) studies Lugones’ philosophical text in order to consider how queer women of color might achieve spatial resistance through their embodied movement. Malli reads “la callejera” as an on-the-ground theorist, who destabilizes a historically rigid field of spatial philosophy and inspires conversation on women’s walking and sexuality.

From Malli’s analysis of Lugones’ chicana feminist theory, we move to Lu Han’s paper, which recalls the archival and autobiographical wandering of author Cristina Rivera Garza. Her talk (“We decided to go out walking”: A Spatial Reading of Cristina Rivera Garza’s El verano invencible de Liliana (2021)) traces Rivera’s walks through Mexico City, as she seeks legal justice for her sister Liliana, who tragically lost her life to femicide in 1990. Han argues that Rivera’s walking spatializes remembrance and grief, as well as modeling women’s ability to “inscribe their own narratives onto the landscape” through their movement.

Together, these papers excitingly enter conversation with early contemplations of women’s urban “rambling” and the circumstances which might encourage it (Nord). They are presented thirty years after Nord's Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (1995), which sparked years of scholarly engagement with women's pedestrian travel and its political impact. As they walk before and after – near and far – from the Victorian streets, the panelists' case studies further reveal the historically-situated significance of women walking. They suggest walking’s shifting relationships to liberating movement, poetic imagination, state surveillance, and projects that combat and/or contextualize systematic violence.