Traveling as a woman in the 21st century is still a conquest. To get started, you have to arm yourself with confidence, words and female role models. The author Lucie Azéma has recently worked on this, by unraveling the myths in her essay, by deconstructing the sexist and misogynist biases that have largely prevailed in travelogues and by summoning sacred adventurers.
“Men have journeys, women have lovers. said André Malraux. This phrase alone sums up the place long reserved for women, reduced to their interiors and to whom the only adventure that was perhaps granted was that of the heart. And then there is this persistent myth of Penelope, a sedentary, faithful figure, who weaves and unweaves her work while Ulysses travels the world. To the woman waiting. To the man, the adventure!
However, from the middle of the 19th century, intrepid Westerners decided to take the plunge and travel the world to tell the story better. Some had to leave incognito, disguised as a man, others awaited the mourning of a husband or a father to dare to travel. Still too little known, these pioneers remain essential sources of inspiration for all those who today plan to travel alone.
After years of traveling and reading, Lucie Azéma decided to write the book she would have liked to read as a young girl, a feminist rereading of the trajectory of these pioneers, their writings and also those of their male counterparts, travel writers.
In his essay “The women are also traveling. Emancipation by departure»the French journalist engages in a brilliant and documented deconstruction of the feminine journey, highlighting to what extent the story of the world was written between men, white moreover, and how this famous “male gaze” or “masculine gaze has long endeavored to eroticise the elsewhere, overplaying the virilist feat and inventing the Other, the foreigner, in a necessarily unequal, dominant and colonialist relationship.
Based on her own experiences as a traveler and reader, Lucie Azéma encouraged women to immerse themselves in the stories of Isabelle Eberhardt, Nellie Bly, Jane Dieulafoy, Odette du Puigaudeau, Isabella Bird, Alexandra David-Néel, Anne-Marie Schwarzenbach and so many others, to draw on their strengths as well as their doubts, the better to leave and access this powerful freedom that only the road can offer us. Everyone!
(Rebroadcast April 11, 2021).
To read / To listen :
– “The women are also traveling. Emancipation by departure» by Lucie Azema. Flammarion Editions
– “The world is theirs. Adventurer’s stories» : The choral and literary program that we devoted to these pioneers in 2019. You will find several ideas and reading references
– “Feminist walk in Paris: in search of women” : A sound and committed wandering in eastern Paris, in 2021, with Charlotte Soulary, founder of La guide de voyage, which revisits Paris by putting women at the center.
– “Isabelle Eberhardt, a nomadic destiny” : A radio and literary portrait of the great writer in love with the desert, produced in 2019, from her native lands in Geneva.
– “Odette du Puigaudeau and Marion Sénones, sand adventurers» : Meeting in 2020 around these two singular and largely forgotten travellers, with Marine Sanclemente and Catherine Faye, who sought their traces in the Mauritanian Adrar and in Morocco.
– “In the footsteps of Alexandra David-Néel” : From the Himalayas to Digne-les-Bains, a journey and report to discover the greatest explorer of the 20th century.
– “Nellie Bly. In the den of madness» by Virginie Ollagnier. Glénat Editions. A recent comic strip that traces an exciting episode in the life of the nomadic reporter, pioneer of immersion journalism, here in a psychiatric hospital.
