ABSTRACT
Where Chapter 1 considered “self” and Chapter 2 considered “other”, Chapter 3 focuses on what might be considered the borderland in between through a consideration of women and women’s desert writing, both of which tend to be marginalised in the history of Arabian desert literature. While accepting that recent feminist theorists such as Lisa Lowe, Sara Mills, and Billie Melman rescue many women writers from obscurity, the chapter addresses gaps remaining in the representation of women both as subjects and as writers in the predominantly white Western male genre of desert literature. It examines whether the texts of women travellers (such as those of Adrienne Brady, Jean Sasson, Geraldine Brooks, Marguerite van Geldermalsen, and the photographer Helen Couchman) speak with the same voice as those written by men or whether any differences occur largely as a result of experience rather than gender. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the way in which the very taxonomy of desert encounter (the categories employed, the vocabulary used, and labels imposed) reflects an inbuilt gender bias that reveals much about the East-West relationship that proves stubbornly resistant to postcolonial attempts to champion the marginal within the predominant discourse.
