European women’s gaze on both Ottoman Istanbul and the(ir) other

Abstract

In 1869, the year the Suez Canal was completed, visits to Egypt and, therefore voyages to the Orient were increased. Crowned royals such as Prince and Princess of Wales, French Empress, Prince of Prussia, Austrian Emperor, Prince and Princess of Holland, and Duke of Aosta went on these voyages, which included cities like Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul, and Athens. What makes these crowned royal’s travels to the Orient in 1869 distinguishing and worth investigating is the presence of women. Examining on the Istanbul part of the voyages, this research accepts women as historical actors. It aims to interpret European women’s gaze on both Ottoman Istanbul and their ‘other’, local Muslim women, through their time-space experiences. This paper focuses on travel narratives produced by the women in the suite of British and French crowned royals in the 1869 travels to decipher women’s real time-space experiences. Levant Herald (LH), a local newspaper published daily in Istanbul, was also examined to grasp locals’ perspectives simultaneously. While emphasizing the [un]met expectations of both counterparts’ (guest/local), this paper discovers diversifying positionalities of women towards their other and reveals their heterogeneous gaze. Although women’s gaze -and thus narratives- contain many orientalist codifications, their gender privileged time-space experiences challenge and disrupt some of the stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in the male-dominated literature of the period.

Keywords:

• orientalism
• positionality
• the other
• time-space experience
• travel writings
• women

Acknowledgements

I’d appreciate expressing my gratitude to Defne Oğuz for reviewing the French-English translations conducted by the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bengi Su Ertürkmen-Aksoy

Bengi Su Ertürkmen-Aksoy was born in Istanbul and received her PhD from Gazi University in 2020 with her dissertation ‘Network and Modernity of ‘High Society’ in Urban Spaces of Istanbul, 1856-1896’. Her academic career as a Research Assistant at the Department of Architecture at Gazi University started in 2012 while working on her master thesis which is about the Jewish Quarter in Ankara. Her research in the fields of architectural and urban history mainly focuses on the modernity and daily life in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. She was awarded together with her colleagues the VEKAM Research Award in 2021 with their project ‘Transformation of Ankara Sports Club Activities into Leisure Activities and Construction of New Locales: 1922 – 1946’. Apart from her academic research she has various degrees in architectural design competitions.