Orientalist writers framed Muslim women’s bodies as commodities to be classified and acquired.

Evidence

Orientalist descriptions of Muslim women are an extension of the Orient as a commodity. Muslim women were described as exhibiting a “revolting immorality,” and exhibiting their unrestrained sexuality in public, much like the depictions of other desirable non-European females. In one description, Muslim dancers perform in “a blaze of Oriental vice,” “heads and breasts now thrown back, now thrown forward to within a hand’s breath of my face, their flesh quivering.” Classification and acquisition were key processes in the Orientalist project, and “the desire to sexually possess the other” was a key “part of [the] colonialist heritage.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the ‘fear without object’ thesis into the sexual register — connects to Said’s Orientalism concept and the reader’s monster-manufacture inquiry.