Orientalism encompasses an academic discourse featuring a patronizing attitude by Westerners towards Asian and African societies. The West perceives Asian and African societies as undeveloped and static and in this way, creates a fallacious oriental culture by which Asians and Africans can be studied, shown and reproduced. On the other hand, in this fabrication by the Westerners, the West is taken to be developed, flexible, dynamic and superior. An etiological analysis of this term will suffice. Orientalism finds its origins in the word “Orient” which translates to the East, as seen by the West. Further, the term Orient has its origins in the French word ”oriens” which means the eastern part of the world or the side of the rising sun. To put it bluntly and simply, the West has viewed the East with disdain especially in the past, on matters of gender, race and sexuality. It may well be said that orientalism has continued to impact the way gender and sexuality is perceived in the world. In this paper, we argue that orientalism has impacted the way gender and sexuality is perceived and we demonstrate the same through evidence from literature review of various authors. In order to illustrate and reinforce this very thesis, we explore the views of three authors. I examine the writings of Saidiya V. Hartman in her article “Seduction and the Ruses of Power” and those of Michel Foucault in his article translated into English titled” The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”. Another author that is the subject of this exploration is Hortense Spillers in her African American criticism, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Baby Maybe: An American Grammar Book”.
In the article, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power”, Saidiya Hartman espouses this concept of orientalism quite vividly where she lays bare the state of discriminatory laws that favored the whites while treating the blacks as non-entities and as slaves. This perception of the whites towards the Blacks still continues to pervade the perception of people towards gender and sexuality. Hartman makes the case that the white women in particular were infuriated by the sexual arrangement of slavery. Nonetheless, the white women had a significant propensity to target the slave black women as agents of the downfall of their husbands. She argued that there was no kind regard that was extended towards the black women or slaves by the white women whom they considered as excessively seductive. As such, this overly seductiveness on the part of the slaves led the husbands of the white women who were the masters of the slaves as guilty-free in the society. Hartman also stated that antebellum laws that subsisted at the time in the society tended to protect the white women from sexual advances from the black men. At the same time, the antebellum laws never showed any legal concern for the black women who were considered slaves and were frequent victims of sexual abuse by the white men or masters. This is a clear demonstration of orientalism that existed at the time where the whites considered the blacks as inferior and non-human. Ironically, though the society never regarded the slaves as human beings for the purposes of protection by the law, they were nonetheless regarded as having the will to commit crimes and thus, liable for any criminal wrongdoing. In this text, Hartman begins her conversation with a defendant named Celia who had been sexually abused in the form of rape by her master. This followed from the case of State of Missouri v Celia where a slave woman named Celia was sentenced to hang for killing a white man who had attempted to rape her. It is however notable that the offense of rape against a slave was not captured by the law and as such was no crime. The black women underwent terrible conditions during this time with slave owners or masters visiting sexual violence on the African American women. Further, the offspring that were the result of the rape of the slave women contributed to an increase in the number of slaves and the holding of the white masters. Indeed, up and until the abolishment of slave trade, the slave women had no recourse to law whenever they suffered sexual violence, much as was the case in the Celia case. In the instant Celia case, we learn from the exposition offered by Hartman that her master named Newsome first raped her on the day that he purchased her. This only stopped with the killing of the master by the slave, Celia. Just like Hartman concludes in this article, we also posit that the Celia case raises serious questions with respect to sexuality, agency and subjectivity. The article by Hartman serves to demonstrate the torrid conditions of the enslaved women during the slave trade period. More importantly, it shows clearly the concept of orientalism as it avails evidence that the slave women had no consent to give, nor any worthless resistance, yet were criminally liable for any wrongdoing just like in the case of Celia. In legal cases involving slaves that came up in the courts, the courts only ascribed will and subject hood to the slaves not to enforce their rights, but to hold them to account for crimes and thereby punish them. We argue that this orientalism has continued to influence and impact the perception of people towards gender and sexuality even to this day, albeit in a lesser manner. In modern day, most of the societies the world over are patriarchal in nature and view female gender as sexual objects. Further, instances of racism continue where Blacks and Asians are viewed as inferior species by the Westerners, a notion that has indeed been bought by some Blacks and Asians themselves.
We then examine the work of Michel Foucault titled,” The History of Sexuality: Introduction” as translated by Robert Hurley. Contrary to some belief, Foucault’s focus in this article is not sexuality per se but rather how sexuality has become an object of knowledge. It is true that over the years, human beings have come to identify with their sexuality. Foucault seeks to know the reason why people have come to view their sexuality as interlinked with their sexuality. The great interest in the study of sex is the main theme in this article by the French philosopher. In this quest, the author follows a genealogical method with respect to sexuality. He makes no assumption that sexuality as a concept has any fixed meaning. On the contrary, the author follows a trail that leads to the position that our understanding of sexuality has had various meanings, used in differing ways and for varying reasons or purposes. There is nothing which is fixed that can be described as sexuality of human beings but rather sexuality has been used as a tool for distributing certain kinds of power.
For instance, Foucault views the increase in discourses on sexuality as a way of social control. The concept of sexuality among human beings has been interlinked with education, good government family structure and demography. The author views sexuality as nothing more than a social construct. He argues that there is nothing about the sexual organs, coitus, instincts and impulses related to sex that by themselves relate to other aspects of the consciousness and social being of human beings. Conversely, he argues that human beings have created connections that they now think of as objectively real and autonomous of people. Foucault argues that by the 19th century when capitalism had allowed for the development of a dominant bourgeoisie class, there was no repression of discourse on sex but rather a proliferation in this discourse. In the introductory part of the article, Foucault begins with a discussion of the notion of repressive hypothesis which entails a widespread belief among Westerners in the late 20th century that the open discussion of sex was repressed during the former centuries. As already mentioned in this paper, Foucault disagrees with this belief and wonders why the Westerners believed in such a hypothesis. He notes that the portrayal of the past centuries as having repressed sexuality avails a basis for the notion that in rejecting the moral systems of the past, future sexuality will be unfettered. In the second part of the article, the author explores this hypothesis in considerable detail. He particularly notes that since the 17th century, there arose an explosion of discussion on sex through the use of an authorized vocabulary which stipulated when, where and with whom such talk could be made. He further argues that the desire to talk about sex mostly in the West emanates from the Counter-Reformation in the Roman Catholic Church which called its followers to confess both their sinful desires as well as actions. It is important to note that this practice of confession within the Roman Catholic Church which has over 2 billion strong faithful continues to this day. In further evidence, Foucault argues that upon the turn of the 18th century, there emerged a political-economic excitement to hold discussions on sex. This was characterized by the evolution of self appointed experts who spoke rationally and with moral authority on matters relating to sex. During this time, governments of the day became alive to the fact that they were no longer managing subjects but a population which called for concern with issues such as marriage, birth and death rates. This in turn had an effect and a change in the discourse on sexuality which attracted more interest. In the next section which talks about the Perverse Implantation, the author argues that contrary to the pre-18th century period, where discussions on sex were exclusively about married couples, the succeeding years subsumed the sexuality of children, the insane and the homosexuals. This emergence of perverts, Foucault observes, and their labeling by the society, generated a sense of pleasure and power among them as well as those who studied on sexuality. He also makes the case that the bourgeoisie class was also involved in this perversion though it regulated the vice on the areas where it could take place.
In the text, ”Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book”, Hortense Spillers, an African American herself, explores the issue of orientalism and how it has impacted the perception of gender among people. She distinguishes between motherhood which is viewed as the role of women and mothering which is seen as the labor that black women had to undergo yet being excluded from the domain of motherhood. In short, the white women were said to be practicing motherhood which was not the case for the black women whose only role was taken to be mothering which involved laboring for the child. We argue that this intervention by Spillers in the form of this article was crucial as it came at a period when the black motherhood was seen as serving a subservient role for a patriarchal black population. In the beginning part of her essay, Spillers makes her reflections on the naming of women where she offers her thoughts on the kind of naming which featured the black women being named in a disrespectful and a disdainful manner. She makes reference to the 1965 Moynihan Report which named black women as a representative of a dysfunctional black family that is out of tune with the conventional patriarchal American family. The Report inscribed ethnicity as a scene of negation through the construction of a binary opposition between white and black family structures.
In the second section of the essay, Spillers offers another way of viewing the history of slave trade which should not be seen merely as brutality and dehumanizing moments, but as representing high levels of meaning construction that are critical to the way in which Americans made sense of the subsisting system. It is the case that Africans actually found themselves in a suspension neither being African any longer nor being American. As such, they were outside of the normative ideas of whiteness that were being viewed as dominant constructions of identity. In the third section, the author delves into the historical lack that is present in the family structure of the Blacks owing to the fact that their family is formed within slavery. In conclusion, Spillers makes an assessment of her argument throughout the text and upon reflection argues that it is likely that the ways in which gender has been configured for black men and women through slavery could represent a critical and powerful intervention. She avers that this would be so if an account of the ruptures of the legitimacy of white, normative gender constructions as radical ways of understanding what it takes and means to be either a man or a woman in lieu of criticizing the supposed illegitimacy of the black family structures for want of something distinctly American. Spillers deals with symbolic integrity of male and female as two positions that lose their distinction and validity through dispossession or captivity. She argues that ethnicity de-genders people by ensnaring them within an endless mode of thought and casting them in terms of their ethnicity irrespective of their gender differences.
In conclusion, we aver that for a black subject to achieve any success in a culture that is full of whites, he must adapt a patriarchy. This position emasculates black females from participating in any power structure. In a classic evidence of orientalism impacting the perception of gender in the society, the blacks are able to form a concept of themselves with the white as the subject. We argue that such is one of the various obtaining effects of having been taken from Africa, which we may simply state as the theft of the body. At the present in most societies, a patriarchal system is the norm where the female is regarded as second in the hierarchy.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Hammonds, Everlyne M. "Towards a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: A Problem of Silence." Alexander, Jacqui M and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Feminist Genealogies,Colonial Legacies,Democratic Futures. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. 170-182.
Hartman, Saidiya V. "Seduction and the Ruses of Power." Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem. Between Man and Woman Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. London: Duke University Press, 2007. 110-141.
Manalansan IV, Martin F. "Migrancy, Modernity,Mobility Quotidian Struggles and Queer Diasporic Intimacy." Luibheid, Eithne and Lionel Cantu Jnr. Queer Migrations Sexuality, U.S citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 146-160.
Spillers, Hortense J. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An Americna Grammar Book." Hortense, Spillers J. Black, White and in Color Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 203-229.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. London: Duke University Press, 2006.
