ABSTRACT: This essay addresses geopolitical narratives of women’s new gender roles of being a middle-class professional writer, expatriate, and suffragist as well as cross-cultural dialogues within the travel writings and diaries of the British writer and suffragist Stella Benson (1892-1933). This paper reshapes Benson’s perception of home in both China and the metropolis of London as an expatriate female writer and her relationship with the distinct but connected European, expatriate, and global women’s communities to which she belonged. By employing the theoretical frameworks of multiculturalism/feminism, I argue that Benson establishes her new gender identity as one of becoming, the multiplicity and heterogeneity of which is reflected in power struggles in the non-binary paradigms of home and community. Incorporating both local Chinese and global contexts, her position transcends the single role of a white, middle-class, colonial woman. Benson seeks alternative options beyond the binary structures of gendered and imperial spaces and narratives.
Yuzhu Sun (2025) studied this question.