Orientalism and Representation of Muslim Women as “Sexual Objects”

Edward Said’s book Orientalism paved the way for a new discourse on the Colonial and Western interpretations of the Orient and the Middle East. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries especially, Europeans visiting the “East” recorded their travels in literary texts, autobiographical writing, paintings and photography. Said suggests that within these works, the creators transposed their own ideas and pre-conceptions of the East, thus creating and mythologizing a view that belonged not to reality, but to a colonial concept representing domination. Many of these Orientalist works project an image of the East as different, the “Other”, and objectify and scrutinize all its elements.