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This work investigates the construction, heterogeneity, and multivocal nature of gendered and sexualised Orientalisms in travel literature. The issues addressed centre on the role played by the traveller´s gendered and sexualised positions in the West, the contestatory nature of travelling, and the impact of historical developments pertaining to the end of empire and the sexual revolution´ in the West. The question is how these three factors shape cultural productions of gender and sexuality in travel accounts on the Middle East and North Africa. A hermeneutical analysis of the representations of gender and sexuality in travel narratives written by Westerners allows for a more nuanced understanding of the complex relations between the Orient and Occident. Through the examination of representations of gender and sexuality, Orientalism emerges, in this genre, not as a monolithic and homogenous pronouncement on what the East is, but as a discourse that is informed by, and in turn informs, subject positions defined by constructions of gender and sexuality, resulting in a complex matrix of interpretation and meaning that is often contestatory and far from hegemonic.

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Trent S. Newmeyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

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