Orientalists invented the Orient as a masculine adventure fantasy

Evidence

Early Orientalists were predominantly men, with only a few female exceptions like Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell. These individuals invented the Orient—the “romantic projection of Western masculinity upon the East, the expression of a boyish love of adventure upon the territory and body of the natives. Orientalism has an incredible power as the discourse “embedded in a long intertextual chain” that begins in the Middle Ages and continues to be expressed today in everything from political science to contemporary art. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Directly invokes Edward Said’s Orientalism — the core theoretical scaffolding of the reader’s whole inquiry.