Chapter 9 - The Harem: Gendering Orientalism

Summary

Much of the work that sought to redress the masculinist approach of Said’s original polemic Orientalism took the harem as a starting point. The harem¹ – and its mobile corollary the veil² – was, I argued in 1996, the pivot of the Western Orientalist fantasy.³ While many accepted Said’s central tenet that Orientalist knowledges and cultural forms served to produce a situational superiority for the West in which the East was rendered as feminized, supine, civilizationally inferior and available for (imperial and capitalist) penetration, the gendered presumptions and exclusions which underlay Said’s formula have in the last four decades come under sustained and fruitful investigation.