The Potential of Travel as Nomadic Practice. The Situated and Embodied Female Subject in Ulla Bjerne’s Novel to dare being...

Abstract

This article focuses on the novel att våga vara… [to dare being…] (1948) based on the life of the explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), by the Swedish author Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969). Annotations in her diary as well as Eberhardt’s diary and biography, are in addition taken into account, read as examples of female situated embodiment and part of a feminist nomadic practice, as elaborated by Rosi Bradidotti, in Bjerne’s aim to give representation to a new type of woman. It entails resistance to hegemonic, fixed and exclusionary views on feminine subjectivity, the affirmation of movement and the process of becoming, and the construction of new conceptions and images of women. The central hypothesis in the article is that travelling in att våga vara… has a potential to nomadize the female subject both literally and figuratively, in the quest to give representation to a situated, embodied female subjectivity, in both body and word.