Colonial rivalries were narrated through gendered and sexualized metaphors

Evidence

The sexual innuendoes develop more or less naturally thereafter. The Frenchman is all smiles, wit, grace, and fashion; the Englishman is plodding, industrious, Baconian, precise. Cromer’s case is of course based on British solidity as opposed to a French seductiveness without any real presence in Egyptian reality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia critiques of how colonial discourse feminizes and sexualizes both the Orient and rival European powers; gendered power rhetoric recurs across imperial studies. — connects to: Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 402; Literature strategically served race, gender, and empire representation — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 243
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 525