Between Visibility and Silencing: Gendered Epistemologies in Colonial and Postcolonial Travel Narratives

Abstract

This article examines the gendered epistemologies embedded in colonial and postcolonial travel narratives, highlighting how women are simultaneously hyper-visible and epistemically silenced. While women frequently appear in travel writing through detailed descriptions of dress, domestic labour, and social roles, they are rarely granted narrative agency or credibility, functioning as objects rather than producers of knowledge. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory and Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, the study frames women’s representation as a structural question of knowledge production, authority, and exclusion, rather than merely a matter of stereotype or distortion. Using a qualitative, theory-driven approach, the article analyses canonical texts such as Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) and Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), alongside postcolonial and feminist travel writings. Key insights include: (1) women’s visibility is systematically decoupled from epistemic authority; (2) travel writing operates through a masculinized epistemology, privileging observation, mobility, and interpretive mastery; and (3) postcolonial and feminist rewritings reclaim voice, reflexivity, and epistemic agency, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. By situating women’s marginalization within broader structures of power and representation, the study contributes to debates in literary, gender, and postcolonial studies, offering a conceptual framework for understanding the politics and ethics of knowledge production in travel literature.