Were La Monja Alférez, Jeanne Baret, Jeanne Dieulafoy (and others) hidden women travellers searching for other identity?

Abstract

La Monja Alférez, Jeanne Baret and Jane Dieulafoy did not coincide in the historical period, but they had travelled in crossdressers. The motivations to undertake travel, pilgrimage or to be a globe-trotter, depended on personal causes that transcended the women or, on the contrary, corresponded to hidden goals. It happened with the three traveling around that we intend to fulfil paradigmatic situations that will allow us to understand other cases mapped in the theory and literature of women's travel in the occidental in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In travels as for their residences, the three travellers liberated themselves from the restrictions of their countries. Depending on their nationality, they had different welcoming for historical, diplomatic and geostrategic reasons. For the 19th century Frenchwoman Jane Dieulafoy, who participated at archaeological missions in Persia, it was different from the woman voyager dressed as a sailor, Jeanne Baret, who crossed the seas at the 17th century and was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. More so ever, they differentiated themselves from Catalina de Erauso, who, escaping from Spain, survived against all odds. In fact, she lived a risky adventure – either woman or man. Crossdressing, while traveling and living abroad, had implications of gender, reason, profession and intellectual culture, also in a colonialist plan. Circumstances meant for each one, different types of intersubjective relationship and with their communities. For their conviction and inner strength, they request interdisciplinary studies, expanding critical axiologies in the present time.