Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 229–240, 1998 Voices from the Margins: gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco MARIA-DOLORS GARCIA-RAMON & ABEL ALBET-MAS, Universitat Auto `noma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain JOAN NOGUE-FONT, Universitat de Girona, Spain LLUI ´ S RIUDOR-GORGAS, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain ABSTRACT The main goal of this essay is to study a book— El Marroc sensual i fana `tic—of travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The contradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple ‘Othering’ as presented in Said’s works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colonising Self and the colonising Other. The contemporary Spanish ofcial discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an ‘altruistic’ colonial presence. The author’s position is very different from this ofcial discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and also from her positioning in Spanish politics. The confrontation between different cultures and traditions is sharply delineated in her accounts on Moroccan women, the primary aim of her travel. The (cultural) impermeability of the Others, with whom she would like to identify deeply, yet with whom she cannot really communicate, forces her to construct her own vision of the identity of these Others, projecting her own view of (Western) feminism. The essay demonstrates the importance of focusing on narratives that come from the margins (and particularly from female authors). These provide new perspectives which can destabilise established conceptions of the colonial relationship and, at the same time they can broaden the conceptual and factual history of our disciplines. The aim of this article [l] is to analyse a book of travel writings produced by a woman, Aurora Bertrana, and to set it within the context of recent scholarship relating, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The book, El Marroc sensual i fana `tic , was written in Catalan and published in Barcelona in 1936, only a few weeks before the onset of the Spanish Civil War. With a few exceptions (Zinguer, l991; Monicat, 1994, 1996; Vanzan, 1996; Olafsdottir, 1996), research on women travellers has been carried out by English- speaking authors and on English-speaking women travellers. Our essay, then, tries to contribute to this eld by providing material from the margins, a book written in Catalan, a minority language, and mainly dealing with a minor (in this century) colonial power, and a small, and again marginal, colony, the Spanish Zone in Northern Morocco. Correspondence: Maria-Dolors Garcia-Ramon, Professor in Geography, Universitat Auto `noma de Barcelona, Dpt. de Geograa, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain. 0966-369X/98/030229-12 $7.00 Ó1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd 229