Limbă, Literatură, Folclor

Abstract: This paper aims to analyse the gender codes, discourses, rhetoric, stereotypes, and the misogynistic and discriminatory attitudes of three patriarchal and phallocentric communities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the biography of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), a woman who defied the social norms and expectations of her time. The first one was the Victorian English society in which Bell grew up, a socio-cultural space marked by a whole network of norms, established codes of behaviour and specific labels assigned according to religion, race, gender and social status. The second group, with whom Bell interacted between 1888 and 1914, consisted of Bedouin tribes of the Arabian deserts, in which deeply rooted traditions clearly delineated gender roles. The third consisted of the military, scholars, linguists, archaeologists and politicians active within British power structures in the Middle East in the first decades of the 20th century, an Orientalist milieu marked by overt misogyny.

Keywords: Gertrude Bell, patriarchal societies, phallocentrism, gender codes, misogynist rhetoric, desert, orientalism