Orientalism and its Challenges: Feminist Critiques of Orientalist Knowledge Production

Orientalism has shaped conventional Euro-American epistemologies and approaches towards non-US/European people. Orientalism, as a set of epistemologies 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 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 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 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. 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. Ultimately, 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 understand and organize subjects to challenge the representation of Arab and Muslim women as passive or exotic some representations that have come to be universalized.