ABSTRACT
Sofie Decock examines the social semiotics of body and clothing practices in the depiction of intercultural encounters in Ella Maillart's and Annemarie Schwarzenbach's travel writing on Afghanistan. Decock demonstrates the importance of these practices in intercultural impression management, relationship building, power dynamics, and the strategic negotiation of social norms. The chapter shows how the female narrator in Maillart's The Cruel Way (1947) reflects on and experiences the gendered performance of herself and her travel companion's bodies and clothes in a foreign environment and how ‘going undercover’ in their case seems to be neither possible nor desirable. They transgress traditional gender norms by strategically exploiting them to their advantage, but, at the same time, both gender ambiguity and a clear female identity have the potential of bringing them into uncomfortable situations in which their bodies are objectified. Secondly, the focus shifts to various instances of ‘othering’ in descriptions of local women by the European female narrators in Maillart's and Schwarzenbach's texts. In this power constellation, the narrators construct themselves as wearing trousers, while the depiction of Afghan women concentrates on (the absence of) veiling practices and body postures associated with them. Central to this ‘othering’ is the dichotomy between tradition and modernity and the norm transgressions regarding this dichotomy.
