Feminizing and Sexualizing the Orient as the Mysterious Other in Nineteenth Century Orientalist Art

This essay studies the creation of identities, through means such as art and literature, of colonizers and especially the colonized, in context of the ‘Occident’ and the ‘Orient’. ‘Orientalism’, a Western systematic, organized creation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and discussion about the Orient, informed, governed, and authorized the various modes of representation of the Orient as the ‘Other’. Orientalism was driven by a Western sense of cultural superiority and corporate, political and military interests in the East with the aim to con-trol, restructure and dominate it. Hence, the creation of a certain image of the Orient to justify the European presence as the white man’s burden to civilize and tame the uncivilized, the inferior. The focus of this paper is specifically on 19 th century Orientalist art, wherein the Orient was perceived and represented not only as backward, mysterious, and exotic but also as feminine, sexual, erotic, and sinister. The emphasis will particularly be on the famous odalisque and harem paintings that betrayed underlying Western ideological assumptions of power in relation to ‘woman’ as the ‘Other’, the object, the weaker in the heterosexual equation. and, white man’s racial, cultural and moral sense of superiority and power over inferior, darker races of the Orient. Thus, I will be analysing contextual history, representation of the female body in Western art and European social attitude towards women, to understand why the Orient was feminized/sexualized in art and how Orientalist art served as an aesthetic branch of political documentation, and, means of social propaganda and cultural imperialism.