The authorship of Ulla Bjeme (1890-1969) is almost forgotten in Sweden today. This essay has the overarching aim of recovering her work and restoring it to the gendered contributions of Swedish twentieth-century literature, and in turn to assert its general importance. The analysis revolves around the significance of the body to literary representation and reception. In order to claim the authority to speak as a woman and outsider, Bjerne performed a new type of woman and testified to her experience. She asserted the significance of the body which devalued her, challenging the false claims to the universalism and transcendence of male subjectivity, and hence the literary values based on them. Bjerne aimed to give literary representation to unrepresented female embodied experience and to render an alternative female subjectivity, making a new type of woman accessible to thought. The analysis of her autobiographical trilogy shows how a feminist critique leads to an affirmation of female embodied experience through the political power of testimony, given literary representation through narrative form and imagery. At the end of the third volume, Botad oskuld (Innocence Remedied), radical non-belonging and constant movement become the prerequisites for the female subject in genesis. This is the foundation of Bjerne's authorship, devoted to the communication of the unspoken female experience through the experience of her embodied self, in order to write as a woman and make herself, and thus the voice of a new type of woman, heard.

This article focuses on the novel att våga vara… [to dare being…] (1948) based on the life of the explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), by the Swedish author Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969). Annotations in her diary as well as Eberhardt’s diary and biography, are in addition taken into account, read as examples of female situated embodiment and part of a feminist nomadic practice, as elaborated by Rosi Bradidotti, in Bjerne’s aim to give representation to a new type of woman. It entails resistance to hegemonic, fixed and exclusionary views on feminine subjectivity, the affirmation of movement and the process of becoming, and the construction of new conceptions and images of women. The central hypothesis in the article is that travelling in att våga vara… has a potential to nomadize the female subject both literally and figuratively, in the quest to give representation to a situated, embodied female subjectivity, in both body and word.