This paper explores how the trope of feminine visibility was used in two texts from the 1720s, Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi’s Fransa Sefâretnâmesi (French Embassy Letters) and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters). Scholars of early eighteenth century Ottoman society have suggested that in this period (the so-called “Tulip Era”) public displays of openness, consumption, and pleasure replaced the more common displays of piety, loyalty to the Sultan, and of obedience to imperial power. Similarly, scholars of French history have highlighted the changing practices of consumption and royal power. These changes also brought about an increasing attentiveness to the ways in which other political orders were organized and legitimized. Focusing specifically on these two contemporaneous yet generically distinct texts, the paper argues that gendered images and tropes were key components how ideas of “otherness” were formulated in, and circulated across, Ottoman and French contexts. Further, the paper suggests that despite differences in genre and local sociopolitical contexts, Mehmet Efendi and Montesquieu used similarly gendered tropes to articulate what they deemed to be incommensurable differences between the so called “East” and “West.” At a time when the contemporary political meanings that are often attached to these two geographic markers were still in the making, both authors used the contrast between the “publicly visible French woman” and the “inherently private and emotional Eastern woman” to make normative claims about the organization of political power in the Ottoman Empire, and France, respectively. Moreover, they contributed to the emergence of a transnational imaginary in which the figure of the “silent and docile Eastern woman” came to mark the limits of politics. In order to fully explore the political work that representations of femininity and otherness are doing in both texts, the paper first looks at the local and transnational historical context of the period in which French Embassy Letters and Persian Letters were produced. Then, it turns to the distinct generic conventions of each text in order to elucidate some of the formal differences and overlaps between Mehmed Efendi’s and Montesquieu’s writing. Finally, it offers close readings of the two texts, and suggests that while French Embassy Letters and Persian Letters attached contradictory values to the figure of the “silent and docile Eastern woman,” both texts mobilized this figure to mark the boundaries of the political.