Framing the Other’s political vocabulary through eroticized etymology infantilizes and discredits them

Evidence

Lewis’s association of thawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most part it is a “bad” sexuality he ascribes to the Arab. In the end, since Arabs are really not equipped for serious action, their sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel’s rising up. Instead of revolution there is sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty, and more excitement, which is as much as saying that instead of copulation the Arab can only achieve foreplay, masturbation, coitus interruptus. These, I think, are Lewis’s implications, no matter how innocent his air of learning, or parlorlike his language. For since he is so sensitive to the nuances of words, he must be aware that his words have nuances as well. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 800

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This is the mechanism by which Orientalist etymology degrades the Other politically — directly scaffolded onto the later Islamophobia readings about how the field’s linguistic ‘authority’ naturalizes the inferiority of its subject.
• DEFINE: Demonstrates the discursive technique whereby the Orientalist’s philological ‘innocence’ carries a sexualized degradation of the Arab subject.

Related

• Orientalist etymology reduces Arab political action to neurotic sexuality (similarity 0.89)
• Etymology is weaponized to strip modern Arab politics of legitimacy (similarity 0.82)
• Political rhetoric weaponizes sex and disease metaphors to racialize whole peoples. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Essentialized etymology discredits a people’s political agency while posing as neutral scholarship #corroborates (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 799
• Depicting the Other’s politics as sexualized madness marks them as an inferior race #complicates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 794