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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how fin-de-siècle Russian women travelers in the Far East constructed gendered narratives of landscapes and Indigenous peoples, both reinforcing and challenging imperial hierarchies and male scientific authority at the imperial borderlands. (Remotely)

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Russian women explorers and specialists — Mavra P. Cherskaia (1857-1940), Dina Brodskaia (1864-1943), and Anna Bek (1869-1954)—perceived and narrated the landscapes and Indigenous peoples of Russia’s Far East during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on diaries, expedition reports, and published materials, I explore how their writings commented on Indigenous communities, employing a gendered gaze and access to women’s quarters to establish their scientific practice, authority, and ethnographic capital at the empire’s borderlands.

Brodskaia’s accounts juxtaposed topographic descriptions of the environment with anthropometric studies of Indigenous women, in which bodies appeared as dissected and scientifically objectified. She produced narratives that orientalized the North Pacific climate and terrain, describing the region as “unfriendly like the weather itself.” Cherskaia and Bek similarly recorded journeys across remote territories, blending environmental observation, personal experience, and encounters with Indigenous communities. Their writings portrayed the Far East as a cultural and climatic ‘other’ to be confronted, civilized, and mastered. For these women, nature itself became a marker of alienation, estrangement, and the anxieties of unfamiliar environments. Their notes filtered the region through “Arcticism,” a discourse in which the North “is imagined as either an icy hell or an inhabitable paradise” (Schimanski, Ryall, and Wærp 2010, x). Together, these narratives demonstrate how Russian women explorers strategically employed their gender at the imperial margins to manipulate the boundaries of science and authority, producing texts in which landscapes, bodies, and Indigenous customs were simultaneously scientific objects and instruments of imperial control.