Orientalism and Gender (2 credit course)
Department of Gender Studies, CEU
Winter 2004-05
Instructor: Francisca de Haan
SYLLABUS
Course Description:
In 1978 the writer and critic Edward W. Said (1935-2003) published his by now classic book Orientalism, about
Western conceptions of "the Orient," in particular the Arab and Islamic world. Most of today’s colonial and
postcolonial studies initially emerged from engagements with, and elaborations of, Said’s book, which has been
translated into more than 30 languages. The course begins with an introduction into the work of Said and its
reception. Feminist scholars have criticized Said for the gender-blindness of Orientalism. This gender-blindness
refers not only to a literal blindness to the centrality of sexuality and gender in Orientalist discourse, but also to
Said’s assertation that Orientalism was "an exclusively male province" (Orientalism, p. 207). Scholars such as Billie
Melman and Reina Lewis, to name but a few, have undermined this view by exploring and documenting the ways in
which women historically have participated in the construction of Orientalism. An important question raised by their
work is whether "women’s Orientalism" is different from men’s. As we will see, opinions about this diverge.
After a brief excursion into Orientalism in films, we will read about "feminist Orientalism." This concept, coined by
Joyce Zonana in 1993, refers to the way in which assumptions about "the East" have been used to further "the"
Western feminist project. An early and highly influential example is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), regarded as a founding text of Western feminism. Another famous example is Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), criticized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her path-breaking 1985 article ‘Three
Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’.
Said’s work has not only led to scholarly debate about women’s role in Orientalism and the ways in which
Orientalism itself was/is gendered, Orientalism has also been part of the inspiration behind important new
scholarship about women and gender in the Middle East and in Islam, work that is sensitive to women’s
experiences. We will read parts of this recent work, for instance that of Lila Abu-Lughod.
Two sessions will be devoted to the controversial Dutch film "Submission I" (2004), written by a Somali-Dutch
woman politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with the intention to show that the Koran allows men to use physical violence
against women, and the events following the murder of the film’s director, Theo van Gogh, in November 2004.
By the eleventh session we should have a thorough sense of what Orientalism is and how it works. We will then
read and discuss parts of work that has applied the concept of Orientalism to Eastern Europe. Finally, in the last
session of the course we will revisit Orientalism.
Course Requirements:
* Full and active participation in class, based on a thorough preparation. In addition, you must always bring at least
one question or comment about the required reading with you to class (in hard copy).
* In order to help you prepare your thoughts for class and to further develop your writing skills, you must write five
short reaction papers of one to two pages. Make sure always to add your name, the date, the title of the course, and
the literature the reaction paper is about.
* Preparation of at least one class discussion.
* A term paper of about 10 double spaced pages. You are required to hand in the title of your paper and a short
abstract (100-200 words) by the sixth class. Your paper is due by the last class.
Course Grading:
1) active participation in class and weekly reaction paper 30 %
2) preparation of class discussion(s) 20 %
3) term paper 50 %
Terminology:
Required reading must be read by everyone.
Additional reading serves as basis for the oral presentation.
Course Structure:
Week 1: Introduction: Said and Orientalism
Required reading:
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Penguin 1995; orig. 1978) 1-55
In the first session we will also watch some interview fragments with Edward Said on video.
Week 2: Gendering Orientalism
Required reading:
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London and New York 1996) 1-22.
Additional reading:
Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge 1998) 1-38.
Week 3: Women’s Participation in the Construction of Orientalism (1)
Required reading:
Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work
(Basingstoke and London 1992)
* Introduction, 1-22
* Conclusion, 306-317.
Additional Reading:
Susan L. Blake, ‘A Woman’s Trek: What Difference Does Gender Make?’, in: N Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (ed.),
Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington and Indianapolis 1992) 19-34.
Week 4: Women’s Participation in the Construction of Orientalism (2)
Required reading:
Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India. The Power of the Female Gaze (Oxford 1998) Ch. 1: Women
Travellers and Orientalism (19-37) and Conclusion (158-166).
Additional reading:
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London and New York 1996)
* Ch. 4: ‘Only Women Should Go to Turkey’, 127-184
* Afterword: Gendering Orientalism, 236-240.
Week 5: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) and her Letters from Turkey: "Setting the Terms of an
Alternative, Gender-specific Discourse on the Middle East?"
Required reading:
Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford 1999) xvii-xxiii, 134-151.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters. Introd. by Anita Desai (London 2000; first ed. 1993)
Letter XXVII and XXX
Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918, Ch. 3: The Eighteenth-Century
Harem (1717-89) 77-98.
Additional reading:
Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge 1998) Chapter 3:
Supplementing the Orientalist lack: European ladies in the harem, pp. 68-94
Week 6: Orientalism in Film
You hand in the title of your term paper and a short abstract (including your central question and the
literature/sources you intend to use).
Required reading:
Ella Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema’, in: M. Bernstein and
G. Studlar (ed.), Visions of the East. Orientalism in Film (London 1997) 19-66.
Documentary about women in Iran, 25 minutes
Week 7: Feminist Orientalism (1)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in: C. Belsey and J. Moore, The
Feminist Reader. Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (1997, 1st ed. 1989). 148-163. (Spivak’s
text first appeared in Critical Inquiry 12 (1985)).
Francis Wyndham, Introduction to the 1982 edition of Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (NY and London 1966; reprint
1982) 5-13.
Additional reading: Parts from
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and from
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (NY and London 1966; reprint 1982)
Week 8: Feminist Orientalism (2)
Required reading:
Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’, Signs 18 (Spring
1993) 592-617.
Additional reading:
Parts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (also discussed extensively by
Zonana)
Himani Bannerji, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminism and Humanism. A Spectrum of Reading’, in: E. J. Yeo (ed.),
Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms (London/New York 1997) 222-242.
Week 9 and 10: Contemporary (feminist) Orientalism
Viewing and Discussion of the film ‘Submission I’, 2004
Required reading:
Leila Ahmed, ‘Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,’ Feminist Studies 8 (Fall 1982) no. 3, 521-534
Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism
and its Others, American Anthropologist 104 no.3 (2002) 783-790
Week 11: Imagining the Balkans
Required reading:
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford 1997) 3-20, 184-189.
Additional reading:
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford 1994)
1-16, 332-374 (plus notes: 377-379 and 403-406).
John B. Allcock, ‘Constructing the ‘Balkans’, in: John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, 217-240.
Week 12: Orientalism Reconsidered
Required reading:
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Penguin 1995): ‘Afterword to the 1995 Printing’, 329-354
Additional reading:
Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies’, Feminist Studies 27 (Spring 2001) no. 1, 101113.
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Further reading/More additional reading:
Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women. Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton 1998), esp. the
Introduction: ‘Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions’, 3-31.
Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said. Routledge Critical Thinkers. Essential Guides for Literary Studies
(London 2001; 1999 1st ed.).
Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (ed.), The Edward Said Reader (New York 2000).
Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies. Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford 2001).
Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden. Western Women and South Asia During British Rule
(New York and London 1995).
Saree Makdisi, ‘Reflections on "Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental" (E.
Said)’, in: Ph. Essed and D.T. Goldberg (ed.), Race Critical Theories. Text and Context (Malden and Oxford 2002)
437-440.
Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference. An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New
York 1991).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993).
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