Veiled fantasies: cultural and sexual difference in the discourse of Orientalism

Abstract

If one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically … considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis Unveiling as political doctrine Erecting a barrier between the body of the Oriental woman and the Western gaze, the opaque, all-encompassing veil seems to place her body out of the reach of the Western gaze and desire. Frustrated with the invisibility and inaccessibility of this mysterious, fantasmatic figure, disappointed with the veiled figure's refusal to be gazed at, Western desire subjects this enigmatic, in Copjec's terms, “sartorial matter,” to a relentless investigation. The practice of veiling and the veiled woman thus go beyond their simple reference and become tropes of the European text in Hayden White's sense: “the data resisting the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them.” It is no surprise that there are countless accounts and representations of the veil and veiled women in Western discourses, all made in an effort to reveal the hidden secrets of the Orient. The very depiction of the Orient and its women, “like the unveiling of an enigma, makes visible what is hidden.”