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Orientalism and Its Challenges: Feminist Critiques of Orientalist Knowledge Production

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Orientalism and Its Challenges: Feminist Critiques of Orientalist Knowledge Production ORIENTALISM AND ITS CHALLENGES: FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF ORIENTALIST KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION SAMEHA ALGHAMDI A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO DECEMBER 2020 © Sameha Alghamdi, 2020 ABSTRACT Orientalism has shaped conventional Euro-American epistemologies, approaches and thinking towards non-US/European people. Orientalism, as a set of epistemologies, and approaches has enabled the co- production of multiple violence and imperial domination. The production of Orientalist knowledge is not only an archive; but rather it is still inscribed and alive in much of the knowledges produced about a notion of the Arab world. Problematic and violent portrayals and representations of Arab and Muslim women are inscribed in contemporary knowledge systems. This thesis aims to examine how can feminist critiques of the concept/notion/system of epistemes and approaches about the other of Orientalism open up new ways of understanding knowledge production. In what ways do such insights contribute toward decolonizing the dynamics of Eurocentric knowledge and power relations in literature and representation? This dissertation grapples with a number of feminist critiques of Orientalism in order to theorize and articulate notions of female agency and problematize depictions of passivity, sexuality and dominant gendered systems. Analytically, I concentrate on the work of Edward Said. I draw extensively on different feminist critiques of his work and show how orientalist knowledges and understandings co-construct Orientalism and Eurocentric genealogies of knowledge and power which in turn allow us to understand their role in thinking and understanding Euro-American domination. Feminists have problematized Said’s literal inattention to the role of sexuality and gender in Orientalist discourses. However, Said’s work has contributed to the discussions about the human of modernity by arguing that this human is a man whose masculinity has been pivotal in domination of others and the other women. Said’s work has been important in allowing me to grapple with the debate on women’s role in Orientalism and the ways in which Orientalism itself was/is gendered. To examine the saliency of gender in Euro-American discourse and media, I read Edward Said in conjunction with Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem (1986), Lila Abu-Lughod Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013), Rana Kabbani Imperial Fictions, Europe’s Myths of Orient (1986) ii and Meyda Yeğenoğlu Colonial fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism (1998) to trace how Orientalism allows for certain notions of domination and become entangled with Orientalist notions of oppression, with catastrophic gendered effects. Ultimately, I draw on these texts to point to the limits of Said’s understanding of Orientalism and stretching it to include deliberations about women and more broadly gendered subjects by pointing to how imperialism depends extensively on sexuality and gender for its viability. I produce a feminist analytic by stretching Said’s Orientalism through a reading that points to how Orientalism is a set of complex relations between knowledge (i.e., representations) and power and has concrete material implications on how we think, understand, and organize subjects to challenge the representation of Arab and Muslim women as passive or exotic some representations that have come to be normalized and universalized. Key words: Orientalism. Knowledge production. Gender. Representation, Feminist Orientalism iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Anna Agathangelou for giving me the opportunity to work on this subject, for her great patience, guidance, and direction throughout the process of my research, which allowed me to successfully complete this project. I am externally fortunate to have two amazing committee members, Prof. Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Prof. Walid El Khachab; I want to extend my most sincere appreciation to them for serving on my committee and for their assistance through this project. I am grateful to them for their constant guidance, support, and the time they have invested to help me improve my work. Thanks to my sister Shuruq, for being my backbone during the tough times, I am so blessed to have been gifted a sister like you, thank you for everything. Thanks to Sara for being a friend, a sister, and for sticking by me even when it was hard. Thanks to all my friends for their support. Thanks to my wonderful family, for their love and support throughout this entire journey, through them, I have learned that hard work, dedication, and integrity are the keys to success. It would have been a long road without all of you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................................. II ACKNOWLEDGMENT ........................................................................................................................ IV TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................................... IV INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................... 1 ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE AS KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND POWER ...........................................................................................1 RATIONALE: WHY STUDY THE PRODUCTION OF THE DISCOURSE OF ORIENTALISM? ...............................................................3 THEORETICAL CRITIQUES AND APPROACHES TO ORIENTALISM ...................................................................................................... 12 GENEALOGY OF ORIENTALISM .................................................................................................................................................................... 12 SAID’S ORIENTALISM .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 15 THE FEMININE ORIENT ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 21 CRITICISM OF SAID'S ORIENTALISM ................................................................................................................................................................... 24 THE POLITICAL REPRESENTATION OF GENDER .......................................................................................................................................... 27 RESEARCH QUESTION ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 34 METHODS: DISCURSIVE AND TEXTUAL ANALYTICS .................................................................................................................................. 35 GENERAL STRUCTURE OF THE DESSERTATION .......................................................................................................................................... 41 CHAPTER ONE: THE NEXUS OF KNOWLEDGE AND POWER................................................ 43 EPISTEME AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 44 KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND THE DISCRIMINATORY DISTORTIONS .......................................................................... 49 QUESTION OF DIFFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................................................. 57 RACIST DISCOURSE ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 63 CONTRASTING THE NOTION OF SUBJECT ................................................................................................................................................ 67 DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE ......................................................................................................................................................................... 70 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 72 CHAPTER TWO: THE GENEALOGY OF ORIENTALISM .......................................................... 74 SELF AND OTHER: CONCEPTUAL BASIS .................................................................................................................................................... 75 REPRESENTATIONS OR MISREPRESENTATION .................................................................................................................................... 77 SELF-ORIENTALISM – ASSIMILATING THE WESTERN “TAGREEB” ........................................................................................ 93 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................
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