COMPLICATING THE COLONIAL GAZE: WOMEN TRAVELERS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF CENTRAL ASIAN WOMEN

Abstract

This thesis examines the representation of Sart and Kazakh women in the travel narratives of Russian and British women travelers to Central Asia during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. While much scholarship on colonial travel writing has focused on male-authored texts, this study addresses the underexplored role of women in constructing colonial knowledge. Drawing on the works of figures such as Lucy Atkinson, Maria Nalivkina, Annette Meakin, Anna Rossikova, and others, the thesis identifies two dominant narrative strategies among women travelers: imitation of male-authored colonial discourse and the development of more nuanced portrayals informed by gendered access to indigenous women’s spaces. While some women travelers replicated dominant tropes of imperialist literature—depicting Central Asian women as idle, overworked, or veiled victims—others offered more humanized and layered depictions that complicated the colonial gaze. Using a theoretical framework grounded in the work of Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri Spivak, and Rosalind O’Hanlon, this study interrogates how gender shaped travel writing and influenced the production of colonial knowledge. Through discourse analysis and close reading of travelogues and ethnographic accounts, it explores how the unique positionality of women travelers both constrained and enabled their representations of indigenous women. Ultimately, the thesis argues that women-authored narratives, while still embedded within imperial ideologies, occasionally disrupted dominant masculine frameworks and expanded the scope of representation in colonial literature.