This project investigates discourse on travel from 1700 until c. 1830 by focussing on the (dis-)ambiguation of gender. Travel reports of the eighteenth century subjected the Ottoman Empire to obsessive observation, categorisation, description and fictionalisation. They thus serve as a medium of differentiation, continuously drawing boundaries between Self and Other, Orient and Occident, Enlightenment and despotism, modernity and tradition. Seemingly at odds with this binary discourse are acts of trangression, mimicry and transculturation. Reports on the multireligious, multiethnic and multilingual Ottoman Empire reflect on people, places and practices that are ambiguous and non-binary, including converts, hermaphrodites and eunuchs. Travellers themselves transgress arbitrary boundaries: women challenge the hitherto maledominated genre of travel writing with their perspectives, others perform acts of cross-dressing involving masquerade, disguise and veiling. Such controversial acts of cultural appropriation were by no means singular events; they played a role in networks and institutions within the metropolis, in clubs, learned societies and informal groups, on the London stage and in the fine arts.

This project will investigate the observation, reception and classification of ambiguity across different genres and media. While such perceptions have to date generally been associated with exoticism and thus regarded as expressions of cultural difference, this project interprets them as explorations of specific norms and values that may extend, critique and subvert European moral values and gender concepts. Orientalist discourse on travel thereby relates to a complex and dynamic cultural exchange that is reflected in works of literature and fine art; it also leaves its trace in social practices and institutions in Britain during the long eighteenth century. This project explores the relationship between the observation and evaluation of 'oriental' ambiguity, and the emergence of a concept of gender based on difference. Is there evidence of increasing intolerance towards ambiguity as a result? How does this reflect on the notion of the eighteenth century as an age of tolerance and cosmopolitanism? Ultimately, the project aims at a critical revision of the concept of Orientalism.