Gender, Science, and Authority in Women's Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History by Michelle Medeiros (review)

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women's Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History intelligently resumes a discussion about women's travel writing that has, over the past few decades, had significant contributions from the works of Mary Louise Pratt, Ángela Pérez Mejía, Mónica Szurmuk, and Nina Gerassi-Navarro, among others, in the field of Latin American studies. Medeiros engages in dialogue with recent works such as Adriana Méndez Ródenas's Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014) and Vanesa Miseres's Mujeres en tránsito: Viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1810-1930) (2017; Women in transit: Travel, identity, and writing in South America). Medeiros's focus is on the role and constant negotiation of authority by female travelers in transatlantic and transnational spaces, particularly in the male-dominated field of natural science in the nineteenth century.

The female travelers examined in Medeiros's monograph are selected not only for their production of knowledge as female scientists (although not fully recognized as such in the field) but also for their roles as facilitators in the circulation of scientific ideas and theories. This second aspect proves relevant to a wider understanding both of female agency and public visibility in the nineteenth century and of the complex mechanisms and intertwining levels of society and science. Medeiros's important unveiling of archival material—in the form of diaries, letters, personal notes, and photographs—offers testimonies of how women in the nineteenth century navigated society and science as mutually interdependent. The archival material makes manifest what Bruno Latour calls the "blood stream of science" to highlight that scientific knowledge is not produced alone in a laboratory but rather through multiple connections with social institutions, politics, economics, and public opinion.¹

Medeiros revises of the concept of the "transatlantic subject," which Méndez Ródenas and Miseres had previously advanced. Adding to Méndez Ródenas's definition of the transatlantic perspective as "the comfort (and dis-ease) of inhabiting two worlds at once" and to Miseres's analysis of the transformative power and effects of both the cultural encounter and the journey of the female travelers, Medeiros proposes that a transatlantic subject is one who is able to establish a presence on both sides of the Atlantic by virtue of her rhetorical strategies, mobility, and privileged social status (p. 10). Female travelers had to negotiate their mobility to establish themselves as transatlantic subjects and thus overcome domestic "gender limitations" (p. 9). Medeiros examines this mobility as "'the ability to encounter, connect, and engage in relationships with other agents, objects and places,' resulting in social mobility and social interaction" (p. 13). At the same time that this female mobility was working to secure a strong presence in social and scientific networks on both sides of the Atlantic, this presence—also perceived as authority and authorization—had to recur to the narrative strategies of alternate visibility (as described by Paola Bertucci²). In the scientific field, alternate visibility—one that does not overtly defy masculine authority—was articulated in female-appropriate genres such as poems, notes, letters, and aesthetic descriptions of nature, which circulated in spaces also traditionally assigned to women.

In chapter one, "Shaping Scientific Knowledge: Maria Graham's Travels in Nineteenth-Century Brazil," Medeiros analyzes the forms of alternate visibility in Maria Graham's correspondence and personal notes from her travels in Brazil between 1821 and 1823. Graham established her transatlantic presence in Brazilian scientific and social networks by asserting the privilege of her class, race, and European origin, which helped her develop a close friendship with Princess Maria Leopoldina. Graham moreover negotiated her alternate visibility in Europe by establishing herself as a witness of the natural phenomena of the places she visited in...