Orientalist paintings sexualized and humiliated women to justify Western rescue narratives

Evidence

The idea that Islam is inherently antimodern has been a construct in the making for more than two centuries. In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, where he examined cultural representations of the East—which included parts of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East—in literature and showed how Western scholarship constructed knowledge about these regions, which he called “Orientalism.” Said argued that this knowledge was used to support an imperialist agenda, pointing to the ways in which foreign policy was influenced by Western scholarship that produced an understanding of the Middle East as savage, untamed, and uncivilized. These cultural images painted Arab and Muslim men as barbaric by showing Arab women in subservient and hypersexualized roles, such as in a harem. These Orientalist images have always been gendered, with men depicted as having innate violent tendencies toward their own women. The portrait of men as inherently abusive was used to justify the conquest and colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the grounds that it would benefit from a civilizing hand (Said 2014). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 28 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Art provides a hypocritical aesthetic alibi for selling female sexuality — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1682; Orientalist depictions eroticized the torture and death of Eastern women; Orientalist paintings fused titillation with disgust to justify Western rescue missions (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalist art eroticized dying women to make violence consumable #expands (0.93)
• Orientalism’s gendered images legitimized Western colonialism of Muslim lands. #corroborates (0.92) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 28