Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism [Paperback]

Colonial Fantasies is a powerfully argued and engaging dissection of colonial psychology, critiques of Orientalism that isolate gender and culture, and the Western feminist adoption of the rescue paradigm. One of Yegenoglu's incisive arguments is that desire is the nexus in the process of colonial discourse that constitutes the Western subject as well as the possible resistance or interruption of this process. As desire frames the relation between the subject and its other, Yegenoglu argues that the veil interrupts the relation. As a barrier from which the other can see but avoid being seen, the veil is the site at which the colonialist desire is made manifest, but simultaneously displaced (62). Her argumentation is lucid and compelling: for the colonial gaze, the veil is both the tantalizing object of desire (in the fantasy of unveiling) as well as the bête-noire, because it precludes the climax of the voyeuristic project. The veil therefore frustrates the identity-forming process of the subject-object positioning in colonialist discourse; the subject cannot quite see the object, and its subjectivity thus remains in question. Interestingly, this overtly phallocentric logic of identity forming through scopic penetration has been inherited by Western feminism. As the veil has come to signify the backwardness of Islam and its inherent oppression of women, the visibility of the veil itself comes to embody difference. In this dynamic, the identity of the liberated Western woman is constructed vis-à-vis the oppressed Muslim woman (102). Since the status of Western women is contingent on the continued representation of Muslim women as oppressed, Yegenoglu reveals that the Western feminist establishment has a vested interest in the exceedingly patriarchal ideology of colonialism. Yegenoglu then exposes the fallacy of assuming the unveiled woman to be normative; such universal constructions serve particular political ends in outmoded Enlightenment ideology. She argues that unveiling and veiling are both cultural practices particular to certain cultures and historical moments (115). This facilitates the deconstruction of the binary by unfixing the poles. In sum, Yegenoglu's critical analysis of the colonial fantasy has produced a thorough tome sure to provoke further discussion among post-colonial theorists.