Isabelle Bagon

HNRS 378
2/4/24

1.“Orientalism” refers to the societies and cultures of Asia, the Middle East, and North
Africa being studied and represented through the eyes of the Western World. According
to Said, three qualifications would have Europeans engage in Orientalism such as
creating regular ideas about the East, studying their society as a whole, and then
theorizing about them. The East is depicted as mysterious and inferior, but only
because Europeans engaged in Orientalism as a way of asserting their cultural and
intellectual superiority. The East was “submitted to being–made Oriental”1, such as the
model of the Oriental women who never spoke or represented herself. Instead, the
foreign man who possessed the woman spoke for her and dominated everything. The
West's interests were served, reinforcing the power they had over the East with the
“idea of European identity as a superior in comparison with all non-European people
and cultures”2. Yes, he is right, the historical dynamic between the West and the East
has led to our current stereotypical assumptions about countries other than European
ones such as China, Japan, and India to name a few.

2. To McClintock, the female body represents the unknown world being untouched by
the males who are dreaming of “discovering” the continents of Africa, the Americas, and
Asia. The Europeans fantasized about the sexuality of unknown lands with “travelers
found an eager and lascivious audience for their spicy tales”3. The countries became
the subject of pornography about Europe’s forbidden sexual desires. Colonized women
were depicted as exotic and hypersexualized, reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Knowledge about the unknown world was combined with gendered violence and was
validated by the European Empire. The world was “feminized and spatially spread for
male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial
power”4. As the reader, we examine the ways colonialism and gender project
domination and control. McClintock’s work seems to be correct because today there are
fetishizations about Filipino women and how some men perceive us as feminine, exotic
creatures who will offer their service no matter the circumstance.

3. The concept of time relates to colonial imagination with the use of panoptical time,
which served as a model of surveillance and control. Panoptical time was the
structured and regulated perception of time that mediated “nature and culture as a
natural image of evolutionary human progress”5. The European narrative was the main
part of the tree with the other countries ranked and subdued on the branches.
1
Said, Orientalism,72
2
Said, Orientalism,73
3
McClintock, Imperial Letter, 22
4
McClintock, Imperial Letter, 23
5
McClintock, Imperial Letter, 37
Anachronistic space refers to the distortion of historical timelines so that imperialistic
domination was justified. This depicted the imperial force “journeying backward in time
to an anachronistic moment of prehistory”6. Women, the colonized, and the industrial
working class were excluded from the historical timeline. Anachronistic space “became
central to the discourse of racial science and the urban surveillance of women and the
working class”7. For example, Africa was depicted as a fetish land full of cannibals, and
witch doctors. The selective understanding of history allowed colonial powers to position
themselves as enlightened, allowing their domination over “uncivilized societies”.
Controlling the perception of time and historical events reinforced the power dynamic
between colonizers and the colonized.

4. The idea of domesticity is a huge part of colonial control and imposed the regulation
of specific gender roles within colonized societies. This allowed the colonizers to
position themselves as culturally and morally superior. For example, women were
depicted as “childlike, irrational, regressive and atavistic, existing in a permanently
anterior time”8. Racial deviance was to surveillance the working class who were
classified as “racial deviants, throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory”9.
Controlling women’s sexuality was a means to control the health of the male imperial
body. A metaphor emerged such as “sexual purity”, to control racial, economic, and
political power. The degenerate class was under surveillance and was assumed to be
distributing money, sex, and property transgressively. The empire could only be held up
if these domestic and sexual disciplines were put in place. Commodity is closely related
to domesticity because it involves producing and consuming goods from the colonies.
The process is intertwined with racism and gender dynamics. For example, when the
Anglo-Boer War started in Africa, the advertisement for soap advocated for cleanliness
and “brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances”10. Using the
colonization of foreign peoples, it became a central aspect of imperial economies. The
soap was one of the goods produced through colonial exploitation and the ideas of the
colonizers were widely spread.

6
McClintock, Imperial Letter, 40
7
McClintock, Imperial Letter, 41
8
McClintock, Imperial Letter,42
9
McClintock, Imperial Letter,43
10
McClintock, Imperial Letter,32