Orientalist discourse covertly reduces Arabs to unexamined sexual and biological potency.
Evidence
Two things: number and generative power. Both qualities are reducible to each other ultimately, but we ought to separate them for the purposes of analysis. Almost without exception, every contemporary work of Orientalist scholarship (especially in the social sciences) has a great deal to say about the family, its male-dominated structure, its all-pervasive influence in the society. … Yet the absolutely inviolable taboo in Orientalist discourse is that that very sexuality must never be taken seriously. It can never be explicitly blamed for the absence of achievement and “real” rational sophistication the Orientalist everywhere discovers among the Arabs. And yet this is, I think, the missing link in arguments whose main object is criticism of “traditional” Arab society, such as Hamady’s, Berger’s, and Lerner’s. They recognize the power of the family, note the weaknesses of the Arab mind, remark the “importance” of the Oriental world to the West, but never say what their discourse implies, that what is really left to the Arab after all is said and done is an undifferentiated sexual drive. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 788
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the biopolitics/necropolitics module: the reduction of a people to ‘mere biological beings’ whose only count is numeric reproduction prefigures Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics framing of populations.
- DEFINE: Identifies the mechanism by which Orientalist discourse secures its reduction of the Arab: an undercurrent of sexual exaggeration that cannot be spoken.
Related
- Orientalism reduces Arab presence to biological reproduction and sexual drive (similarity 0.92)
- Orientalist myth construes the Arab as simultaneously hyper-sexualized and passive. (similarity 0.80)
- Latent Orientalism produced a gendered, patriarchal framing of the Orient (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist etymology reduces Arab political action to neurotic sexuality (similarity 0.79)
- Discourse about ‘the Arab’ erases individual Arabs and their narratable histories. (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship reduces lived behavior to a few explanatory categories (similarity 0.79)
- Said held that Orientalism cannot be corrected by factual research because it is power. (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship framed revolution as pathology attacking human nature. (similarity 0.78)