“Gérôme suggests that this oriental world is a world without change, a world with
“Gérôme suggests that this oriental world is a world without change, a world with timeless, atemporal rituals, untouched by the historical processes that were ‘afflicting’ or ‘improving’ but, at any rate, drastically altering Western societies at the time. Yet these were in fact years of violent and conspicuous change in the Near East as well, changes affected primarily by Western power–technological, military, economic, cultural–and specifically by the very French presence Gérôme so scrupulously avoids.” - Nochlin, Linda. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society. p. 35-36I’m interested in how the West genders different parts of the world through its artistic representations of them, and when I read what Lila Abu-Lughod said on p 88 of Do Muslim Women Need Saving? about art being used to designate difference in the 19th century, I decided to follow a footnote which led me to an essay by Linda Nochlin. I felt it was important to understand art’s prior implications in the gendering of the “victims” and “villains” in “Islamland”, now that ads (like the German ad p. 9) are being used so strongly to paint one-dimensional portraits of the “oppressed muslim woman” in a post 9/11 world.imgquoteHEM -- source link
#globgendersexuality#gendered orientalism