Performing the Self through Orientalizing the Kurds in Isabella Bird’s Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan

Abstract

This article fleshes out the various ways Isabella Bird performs the self in her travel account, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), mainly in her engagement with the Kurdish people. Deploying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity of gender, we argue that travel writing is empowering for Bird because it offers her a viable platform to perform a variety of selves through which she can voice her complicated and nuanced socio-political views and promote her image. Moreover, we contend that Bird’s representation of the Kurds and their region is informed by Orientalist ideology of the time as well as her own complex subject position. The fluidity of Bird’s identity, which is represented through performing a rich diversity of masculine and feminine selves in her account, exposes the constructed nature of gender. Bird not only undermines the prescribed gender boundaries of her time, but also demands the right for herself, as a woman writer, to be both caring and daring by playing the roles of a brave traveller, intellectual explorer, devoted Hakim, shrewd political analyst, religious commentator, and receptive ethnographer in Journeys.