5.

‘VEILED FANTASIES: CULTURAL AND

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN THE DISCOURSE
OF ORIENTALISM’

Meyda Yegenoglu

If one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically . . . con­

siderable importance must be given to sexual phenomena.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White M asks
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 o f Psycho-Analysis

U nveiling 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 inaccessibil­
ity 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.’1 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

From: Meyda Yegenoglu (1998), ‘Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse
of Orientalism, pp. 39-67, in Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading
of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

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Orient. The very depiction of the Orient and its women, ‘like the unveiling of
an enigma, makes visible what is hidden’.2 The veil is one of those tropes
through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient
and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved. The most
blatant example of the fear of the other and the associated fantasy of penetra­
tion is French colonialism’s obsession with the woman’s veil in Algeria. As we
learn from Fanon, ‘the Algerian woman, in the eyes of the observer, is unmis­
takably “ she who hides behind a veil” .’3 Fanon continues: ‘this enabled the
colonial administration to define a precise political doctrine: “If we want to
destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must
first of all conquer the women: we must go and find them behind the veil where
they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight” .’4
I propose to take this ‘precise political doctrine’ seriously, because it provides
us with several possibilities at once: first, a critique of the critiques of the ethico-
political program of European Enlightenment from the point of view of the
double articulation of global-cultural and sexual differences, hence a new way
of dealing with the entanglement of questions of imperialism and gender;
second, a critique of the critiques of colonial discourse from a feminist point of
view, hence the development of a new feminist perspective in the analysis of
colonial discourse. I must warn my reader that I claim no privilege for the veil
as an object of study. The grand narrative of the imperial, sovereign subject is
complex and constantly changing, and the veil is privileged only to the extent
that it enables us to see some of the complexity of this narrative.
The question of why the veiled woman has such a high profile in the French
colonization of Algeria seems obvious at a first glance: in the colonizer’s eye
Algerian resistance is condensed in the veil which is seen as an obstacle to his
visual control. Conquering the Algerian women is thus equal to conquering
Algeria, the land and people themselves. This is surely not a simple military
question in a narrow sense, but it is rooted in a problematic of power, which
not only takes Algeria as a land to be conquered, but which establishes such
conquest in terms of an epistemological superiority.5 One of the axioms of the
European Enlightenment is ‘the disenchantment of the world’ in which ‘knowl­
edge, which is power, knows no obstacles’.6 In his study on modern forms of
discipline, Michel Foucault demonstrated that this problematic of knowledge
as power is tied to a social program and strategy according to which space is
organized in a particular way which makes its individual occupants and their
behavior visible and transparent. With modernity comes a new form of institu­
tional power which is based on visibility and transparency and which refuses
to tolerate areas of darkness. The epitome of this modern form of power,
Bentham’s model prison, the panopticon, embodies the concept of an eye which
can see without being seen.7 For Foucault, the social practice of transparency
completes the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment, for instance Rousseau’s
well-known dream of a perfectly transparent society (we might also say that it
reveals the other side of these ideas).8 Foucault’s view is supported by Jean

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Starobinski’s interesting study on the theme of transparency and obstacle in

Rousseau. Starobinski shows that Rousseau attached a negative value to any­
thing hidden or mysterious and elaborated a whole theory of unveiling the
truth.9 Indeed, in the political doctrine of French colonialism, the veiled woman
is made ‘a case which, at one and the same time, constitutes an object for a
branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power5, and Muslim women
are classified as a group of people ‘who have to be trained or corrected, clas­
sified, normalized, excluded, etc5.10 As Foucault has succinctly argued, these
objects of discourse are not a pure creation of discourse, they are rather objects
(and subjects) identified by discourse as problems to be dealt with, and objects
to be known and controlled (only once they are identified, they enter into a
process of construction in and by discourse). Surely, the veiled woman is
already other-ed in her own culture, gender-ed in and by a particular form of
dressing, but she is other to the Western subject in a way that differs from her
position relative to the dominant male subjects of her culture. I would like to
argue here that the case or tropology of the ‘veil5 is not simply a signifier of a
cultural habit or identity that can be liked or disliked, be good or bad, but ‘in
a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the other5 for a subject, i.e., for
the European subject in our case, it signifies the production of an ‘exteriority5,
a ‘target or threat5, which makes possible for that subject to ‘postulate a place
that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base5.11 This enables him to
produce himself, vis-a-vis an other while simultaneously erasing the very
process of this production.
The veil can be seen as the resisting data or tropology of this modern power
whose program aims to construct the world in terms of a transparency provided
by knowledge as power. However, limiting itself to Europe as the sovereign
subject of history, Foucault's analysis of such power has remained blind to the
role played by these technologies and their epistemological and subjective
import in the European colonization of the world. Gayatri Spivak suggests that
we write against the ‘possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persis­
tent constitution of other as the self's shadow5. I take her words as a warning:

The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely

orchestrated, far-flung and heterogenous project to constitute the colonial
subject as Other. This project is also the symmetrical obliteration of the
trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity. It is well known that
Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme,
in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century.
But what if that particular definition was only a part of the narrative of
history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of
epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a
vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext
of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated
knowledge’ . . ,12

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The subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism is demonstrated in

the fact that, whether he likes it or not, for the European subject, there is always
more to the veil than the veil. A very interesting example is Gaetan Gatian de
Clerambault, the nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who was fascinated
with the foldings of North African dressing and took hundreds of photographs
of veiled people. Clerambault seems to constitute the unique instance of a sub­
jective approach to North African Islamic culture which needs to be explored
further. According to Gilles Deleuze, if Clerambault’s interest in Islamic folds
‘manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory percep­
tions of ether addicts in the folds of clothing’.13 The Islamic veil is considered
by Clerambault and Deleuze as providing a unique form of perception of a
world of ‘figures without objects’.14 I see this as a legitimate area of research
into the Islamic veil/fold, but I am interested here in a dialectics of seeing and
gazing. Although Deleuze considers this a more restricted area of the ‘optical
fold’,15 I argue that its ethico-political implications exceed its epistemological
limits. A general study of the fold and of its varieties remains limited in a dif­
ferent way, if we remember that, writing against the always-already existing
possibility of the constitution of the other as the self’s shadow, Spivak’s ‘two-
handed engine’ would ask for a re-inscription of the Islamic fold/veil as subju­
gated knowledge of the Western imperial palimpsest in Clerambault’s
psychological ‘discoveries’. And Malek Alloula’s well-known The Colonial
Harem undeniably demonstrates the place of sexual difference in the significa­
tion of the Islamic fold/veil. Alloula’s semiological classification and reading of
erotic postcard pictures of half-veiled Algerian women opens up the proble­
matic of cultural difference into a problematic of sexual difference. Although
his approach is a semiological/Barthesian one which does not employ a themat-
ics of fold, I suggest that we take this work as a warning for the Deleuzian over­
looking of sexual (and cultural) difference in the fold/veil.16

T he rhetoric of the veil: O rientalist travel writing in the nineteenth

CENTURY
In a sentence which predicts Alloula’s work, ‘in the Arab world’ writes Fanon,
‘the veil worn by women is at once noticed by the to u rist. . . [it] generally suf­
fices to characterize Arab society’.17 Can this immediate attention be consid­
ered as an instance of the celebrated Lacanian ‘triumph of the gaze over the
eye’ ?18 If I am wary of Foucault’s complicity with the very form of power he
analyzes because he overlooks its working outside Europe, or of Deleuzian
analysis of the fold, I am also wary of a kind of psychoanalysis which is blind
to the historical inscription of its conceptual apparatus. The question posed by
Francois Wahl to Jacques Lacan in his seminar on the gaze is instructive in this
sense. Against Lacan’s insistence that all eye is evil eye, Wahl brings up the
example of the ‘prophylactic eye’ (an eye that protects one from disease) in the
Mediterranean cultures. Lacan’s answer is that the prophylactic eye is allo­
pathic, i.e., it cures the disease by exciting a dissimilar affection, and that the

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prophylactic objects are clearly symbols of the phallus. In the same place, he
refers to the North African-Islamic ‘baraka’ and, despite a few places where he
admits that he hesitated, concludes that the eye is always maleficent rather than
beneficent.19 I take the hesitation rather than the conclusion as my guide, but I
am interested in a deconstruction of the sovereign subject rather than an eth­
nography of Islamic culture. In other words, I am more interested here in dem­
onstrating the historical determination of the Lacanian gaze, of ‘the form of a
strange contingency, symbolic of what we (they) find on the horizon, as the
thrust of our (their) experience, namely the lack that constitutes castration
anxiety5.20 Within such an approach, I consider the European’s immediate
object of attention in the horizon of Muslim culture as his construct: the veiled
woman is not simply an obstacle in the field of visibility and control, but her
veiled presence also seems to provide the Western subject with a condition
which is the inverse of Bentham’s omnipotent gaze. The loss of control does not
imply a mere loss of sight, but a complete reversal of positions: her body com­
pletely invisible to the European observer except for her eyes, the veiled woman
can see without being seen. The apparently calm rationalist discipline of the
European subject goes awry in the fantasies of penetration as well as in the
tropological excess of the veil. This is why the precise political doctrine is not
simply a military matter, but, as I will demonstrate below, the strategic desire
which defines it is structured through fantasy. Drawing upon his experience as
a psychiatrist, Fanon emphasizes the violent play of this reversal:
Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is
always preceded by a rending of the v e il. . . Whenever, in dreams having
an erotic content, a European meets an Algerian woman, the specific fea­
tures of his relations with the colonized society manifest themselves . . .
With an Algerian woman, there is no progressive conquest, no mutual
revelation. Straight off, with the maximum of violence there is possession,
rape, near-murder . . . This brutality and this sadism are in fact empha­
sized by the frightened attitude of the Algerian woman. In the dream, the
woman-victim screams, struggles like a doe, and as she weakens and
faints, is penetrated, martyrized, ripped apart.21
The veil is then part of or an element of a highly charged fantasmatic scene.
Nevertheless, the fantasy of penetration is only one aspect of a more complex
ideological-subjective formation which oscillates between fascination and
anger and frustration. In the nineteenth-century European travellers’ obsession
with the veil, the ‘precise political doctrine’ dissolves into a textual inscription
which is witness to an underlying enunciative (and subjective) formation tra­
versing different fields of writing. These texts clearly display the veil’s specific
polysemy. As is well known, in Lacan’s approach the gaze is not seen, but is
imagined by the subject in the field of the other.22 Orientalist writing is the
European imagination at work in the field of the other. The veil attracts the eye,
and forces one to think, to speculate about what is behind it. It is often repre­

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sented as some kind of a mask, hiding the woman. W ith the help of this opaque
veil, the Oriental woman is considered as not yielding herself to the Western
gaze and therefore imagined as hiding something behind the veil. It is through
the inscription of the veil as a mask that the Oriental woman is turned into an
enigma. Such a discursive construction incites the presumption that the real
nature of these women is concealed, their truth is disguised and they appear in
a false, deceptive manner. They are therefore other than what they appear to
be. Edmondo de Amicis’ statements reveal this figure of deception: ‘it is impos­
sible to say what they contrive to do with those two veils . . . making them serve
at once to display, to conceal, to promise, to propose a problem, or to betray
some little marvel unexpectedly’23 (emphasis added).
The figure of the masquerade is frequently employed. Theophile Gautier, in
his description of the women of Istanbul, expresses both his denunciation of
the veil and his identification of the true nature of the city through this same
figure: ‘an immense female population - anonymous and unknown - circulates
through this mysterious city, which is thus transformed into a sort of vast mas­
querade - with the peculiarity, that the dominoes are never permitted to
unmask.’24 Edmondo de Amicis describes the women on the streets of Istanbul
in a similar manner:

The first impression is most curious. The stranger wonders whether all
those white veiled figures in bright colored wrappers are masquerades, or
nuns, or mad women; and as not one is ever seen accompanied by a man,
they seem to belong to no one, and to be all girls and widows, or members
of some great association of the ‘ill-married’ . . . One is constrained to
stop and meditate upon these strange figures and stranger customs.25

The veil gives rise to a meditation: if they wear a mask, or masquerade or

conceal themselves, then there must be a behind-the-mask, a knowledge that is
kept secret from us. The mystery that is assumed to be concealed by the veil is
unconcealed by giving a figural representation to this mask and to the act of
masquerading as an enigmatic figure. However, what is thus concealed, i.e., the
‘masquerade’, the ‘veil’, is the act o f concealment itself. The veiled existence is
the very truth of Oriental women; they seem to exist always in this deceptive
manner.
This metaphysical speculation or mediation, this desire to reveal and unveil
is at the same time the scene o f seduction. The metaphysical will to know gains
a sexual overtone. Troubled with this mask, the Western subject is threatened
and seduced at the same time:

These then, you think, these are really those ‘conquerors of the heart’,
those ‘founts of pleasure’, those ‘little rose leaves’, those ‘early ripening
grapes’, those ‘dews of the morning’, ‘auroras’, ‘vivifiers’, and ‘full
moons’. These are the hanums and the mysterious odalisques that we
dreamed of when we were twenty years old . . . It is a costume at once

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austere and sweet, that has something virginal and holy about it; under
which none but gentle thoughts and innocent fancies should have birth.26
Since he is devoid of any true perspective on the Oriental woman, Amicis can
never be sure. The Oriental woman/Orient is so deceptive and theatrical. With
her, everything is an enigma. Amicis continues: ‘that jealous veil that, accord­
ing to the Koran, was to be “ a sign of her virtue and a guard against the talk
of the world” is now only a semblance.’27
This fear of being deceived by the masquerading Oriental woman is also what
characterizes Loti’s representation of the Oriental woman in Disenchanted. In
this novel, two Turkish women and a French writer, Marc Helys, write a letter
to Loti, simply because they want some divergence from their monotonous life
and would like to teach him a lesson by making him an object of ridicule. The
women approach Loti under their veils, thus remaining completely incognito.28
Uncomfortable with their invisible presence, Loti asks them to remove their
veils, but they refuse to do so. During their conversations, when the women
speak a few Turkish words with each other, Loti immediately warns them that
he knows the language sufficiently well and would be aware if any ‘uncivil
remark’ was being uttered about him.
This short scene sums up the whole theme of the novel: it is about how Loti
is seduced but at the same time mocked by these veiled women. As they them­
selves express through their attitude, it is precisely with their veils that Oriental
women can seduce, mock, and threaten him. The veil places them at a distance
Loti cannot reach. In warning them that he knows Turkish, that he can under­
stand them, he in fact expresses his own anxiety. This anxiety is caused by his
lack of a true, fixed perspective; he cannot position himself vis-a-vis them. He
reminds them of his knowledge of their language precisely because this knowl­
edge does not seem sufficient to him to gain control over their veiled presence,
for they masquerade and their dress is deceptive. It is this incapacity to fix and
control that is unsettling and terrifying and yet so seducing.
A variety of reasons are offered by the European subject to explain this obses­
sion with the Oriental veil: ‘civilizing’, ‘modernizing’, and thereby ‘liberating’
the ‘backward’ Orient and its women, making them speaking subjects. These
are the manifest terms of the political doctrine. But then what do we make of
the above texts obsessed with the veil? Joan Copjec suggests that no rational
explanation can account for the West’s preoccupation with lifting the veil, for
this is a preoccupation sustained by fantasy and hence belongs to the realm of
desire. According to Copjec:
What was capital in this fantasy was the surplus pleasure, the useless
jouissance which the voluminous cloth was supposed to veil and the
colonial subject, thus hidden, was supposed to enjoy. Every effort to
strip away the veil was clearly an aggression against the bloated pres­
ence of this pleasure that would not release itself into the universal
pool.29

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Simultaneously attracting and repelling the subject, the veil occupies the
place of the objet petit a, the object causing desire in Lacanian psycho analysis.
Lacan writes that ‘the object a in the field of the visible is the gaze5.30 However,
such an object does not exist objectively, in itself, but is constructed retroac­
tively by the subject. Although any object might potentially be an object of
desire, what transforms an object into objet petit a is, in Slavoj Zizek5s words,
‘an interested look, a look supported, permeated and distorted by desire5.31
Such a look is possible within fantasy. Fantasy is basically a scenario filling out
the fundamental lack in the subject caused by a splitting in the language. In
Heath's words, ‘no object can satisfy desire - what is wanting is always
wanting, division is the condition of subjectivity5.32 The concept of fantasy is
crucial in Lacan's account of sexual relationship: Jacqueline Rose shows that it
is at the level of fantasy that man achieves his identity and wholeness: ‘the idea
of a complete and assured sexual identity belongs in the realm of fantasy5, and
‘the man places the woman at the basis of his fantasy, or constitutes fantasy
through woman by transposing objet a onto the image of woman who then acts
as its guarantee. ‘The absolute Otherness of the woman, therefore, serves to
secure for the man his own self-knowledge and truth.533 We have seen above
how the veiled Oriental woman is given precisely such a status in Orientalist
discourse'. In Orientalist writing, discourses o f cultural and sexual difference
are powerfully mapped onto each other. What is crucial in this process is that
the very act of representing the veil is never represented; the desire that repre­
sents the veil can not be represented. The subject can not represent (see) himself
representing (seeing) himself.34 The metaphorical excess of the veil is thus an
effacement of the process o f production of the subject. Placing desire on the side
of the being rather than on that of the thing, Jacques Lacan writes: ‘This lack
is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflec­
tion on a veil.535

W oman as veil: N ietzsche and D errida , or limits of the deconstruction

of metaphysics

We have then a very precise relationship established between the veil, masque­
rading, truth and woman. These themes are familiar in post-structuralist,
psychoanalytic and feminist theories. By a detour through these theories, I am
going to argue that, since the veil is a figure essential in the construction of fem­
ininity in a patriarchal order, the European's strange obsession with the veiled
woman also has implications for a more general analysis of patriarchy.
The representation of ‘womanliness as masquerade5 finds one of its most
powerful expressions in Nietzsche's work, where he associates femininity with
the tropes of truth and veil.36 For him, woman, like the truth, is enigmatic and
has a deceptive appearance. She adorns herself and by adorning herself she
seduces and fascinates man: ‘woman, conscious of man’s feelings concerning
herself, walking beautifully, dancing, expressing delicate thoughts: in the same
way, she practices modesty, reserve, distance - realizing instinctively that in this

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way the idealizing capacity of man will grow.’37 She has no truth nor she does
or can want enlightenment about herself;38 Her truth is her adornment and her
style is appearance and disguise. She is nothing but a pure spectacle.39 Here is
Nietzsche’s description of the feminine:
Unless a woman seeks a new adornment for herself that way - 1 do think
adorning herself is part of the Eternal-Feminine ? - surely she wants to
inspire fear of herself - perhaps she seeks mastery. But she does not want
truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning nothing has been
more alien, repugnant and hostile to woman than truth - her great art is
the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.40
Faced with this destabilizing, fearful and enigmatic figure, we find a per­
plexed man who tries to grasp the essential femininity that lies behind her mask.
Nietzsche’s ‘nothing but pure spectacle’ is only apparently opposite to the veil
as a dark figure or as an obstacle to vision. The underlying question is the same
as de Amicis’ or Loti’s: how can he attain the knowledge of this enigma, how
can he reveal what lies behind her veiled appearance (i.e., the lie as her great
art) ? These are the questions de Amicis, Gautier and Loti ask in their search for
the truth of the Oriental woman as an appearance of femininity. In their rhe­
torical and epistemological move which I describe as the double articulation of
cultural and sexual difference, culture and gender are other-ed through each
other. These European men bring their insight and knowledge, their intuition
and contemplation to the task of uncovering her hidden truth, yet they are not
successful. Their solution is to posit the truth of a particular culture from within
a certain patriarchal metaphorics: deception and dissimulation are essential
characteristics of Oriental cultures. According to Nietzsche, however, woman’s
deceptive style does not mean that she conceals an essence behind her appear­
ance and adornment. She is deceptive because she has no essence to conceal. It
is her masquerading style which makes one think that she hides an essential
truth.
Nietzsche’s aim in establishing an association between the tropes of woman,
truth, and veil is to develop a critique of the philosophy of truth, which is the
problematic commanding European Orientalist writing. An analysis of the veil
occupies an important role in his attack on metaphysical discourse and the
various set of oppositions established within it. The parallelism he establishes
between the movement of truth and the deceptive feminine gesture enables
Nietzsche to criticize, but at the same time to reinscribe the tropological system
of metaphysics. The veil functions to make ‘truth profound, to ensure that there
is a depth that lurks behind the surface of things’.41 It is precisely by attacking
this figuring of the veil that Nietzsche is able to take a critical distance from the
metaphysics of truth and the essentialism immanent in such discourses as Loti’s
or de Amicis’. He refutes the idea that there is an essence or ‘real’ behind the
veil and increases the value attached to appearance over truth or real: ‘we no
longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have

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lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to
wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand
and “ know everything” .’42
Metaphysical discourse is able to secure the various sets of oppositions it con­
structs between appearance and reality, surface and depth, precisely through
the figuring of the veil as that opaque curtain which conceals, covers, hides or
disguises an essential nature. Nietzsche, by distancing himself from the idea of
a ‘real’ residing beneath appearance and by valorizing the appearance over this
‘real’, attempts to undermine the oppositional structure that characterizes
metaphysical discourse. However, as Doane rightly points out, while taking up
a critical distance from the metaphysics of truth, Nietzsche reinforces the asso­
ciation between woman and dissimulation or deception, for ‘the pronoun she
plays a major role in delineating the operation of this mode of deception’.43
Despite his attempt to devalorize the association of truth with what is behind
the veil, Nietzsche’s work still retains the categories of deception and feminin­
ity as deception. Although, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, there are no negative con­
notations attached to deception and appearance (on the contrary he values
them), Doane argues that these categories nevertheless ‘place the woman as the
privileged exemplar of instability’.44 In other words, despite his attempt to
dissociate the value attached to truth, Nietzsche still remains locked within
the binary logic which construes truth and appearance as opposites. What
Nietzsche fails to address is posed by Irigaray, as her criticism targets the very
opposition between real and appearance itself and the interest that resides
underneath such an opposition: ‘what that we should question has been forgot­
ten, not about a truer truth, a realer real, but about the profit that underlies the
truth/fantasy pairV45
The profit that underlies the truth/fantasy pair is what I have described as the
European’s fictional unity and command of experience, i.e., the production of
their subjectivity, which de Amicis, Gautier and Loti had managed by a textual
proliferation of discourses through the tropology of the veil.
Joan Riviere’s important work ‘Womanliness as M asquarade’ also brings out
an implicit criticism of the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics by providing us
with a powerful discussion of how the figures of woman or femininity and
veil/mask are closely associated in a masculine order.46 Unlike Nietzsche’s
approach, Riviere’s exposes man as the one who formulates the question: for
Riviere, the term ‘masquerade’ refers to the male's representation of woman on
the one hand and how this representation constitutes her identity on the other.
These two aspects are closely related, for the question of representation is at the
same time a question of constitution.
The concept of ‘womanliness as masquerade’ refers to a male’s representa­
tion, to masculine construction: ‘The masquerade is a representation of femi­
ninity, but then femininity is representation, the representation of woman.’47
This trouble with masquerade is man’s trouble: ‘the conception of womanliness
as a mask, behind which man suspects some hidden danger, throws a little light

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on the enigma.’48 It is man’s assumption of femininity which turns it into an

enigma. As Stephen Heath observes: ‘M an’s suspicion is the old question, Was
will das Weib?, D as ewig Weibliche (What does woman want? Eternal femi­
nine) all the others, always the same . . . the masquerade is the woman’s thing,
hers, but it is also exactly for the man, a male representation.’49 The question
‘What does she want?’ is paradigmatic here: de Amicis articulates this question
when he ‘wonders whether all those white veiled figures in bright colored wrap­
pers are masquerades, or nuns, or mad women’ or when he cries, in fervor,
before the cold mute masks: ‘come, more like other men for once! tell us who
you are.’50 We learn from Riviere’s psychoanalytic-feminist criticism that the
question of what woman wants is the man’s question. According to her, it is
precisely this characterization of femininity that incites contradictory desires;
the desire to know and uncover her truth on the one hand, and the desire to
distance her and thus avoid the threat her unpredictability and inaccessibility
pose, on the other. Consequently, the man is seduced and mocked and threat­
ened all at the same time. Such a contradictory and ambivalent desire, caused
by the continual displacement o f his perspective on or lack o f knowledge o f the
woman, lends itself to an over-representation (the excess of the veil) and to an
endless investigation of the feminine in an effort to evade such a lack and con­
stitute his subjectivity. As such, the instability he experiences is dissipated by
projecting it onto the feminine and characterizing her as the sex which is unpre­
dictable and deceptive. At this point we also need to remember Freud’s endless
attempts to evade his inability to know and conquer the ‘darkness’ that hovers
around the feminine sexuality - at the same time a darkness he himself con­
strues through his own representation. For example, he is as confident to study
and know men’s sexuality as he is totally puzzled by the other sex: ‘That of
women - partly owing to the stunning effect of civilized conditions and partly
owing to their conventional secretiveness and insincerity - is still veiled in an
impenetrable obscurity’ (emphasis added).51 As Doane suggests, ‘the horror or
threat of that precariousness (of both sexuality and the visible) is attenuated by
attributing it to the woman, over and against the purported stability and iden­
tity of the male. The veil is the mark of that precariousness.’52
Derrida is another critic of Nietzsche and the last figure in our detour through
post-structuralist theory. Although affirming Nietzsche’s attack on the meta­
physics of truth through the metaphor of woman as the name of untruth,
Derrida nevertheless gives it another twist in his Spurs. His concern is, like
Nietzsche, to undo the metaphysical discourse that sets truth and untruth as
opposites. While Nietzsche compares woman’s deceptive veiled gesture to the
movement of untruth, Derrida compares the feminine gesture to writing or
style. The concept writing is one of the central instruments in Derrida’s decon­
struction of metaphysical binaries. Refuting the idea that woman has an
essence, Derrida argues that ‘there is no such thing as the truth of woman, but
it is because of the abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is
“ truth” . Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth.’53 The metaphors

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Nietzsche uses for femininity such as instability and dissimulation are also
deployed by Derrida. In his case, she appears as the figure for undecidability
(associated with but repressed by metaphysics), but as a figure nevertheless:
It is impossible to dissociate the questions of art, style and truth from the
question of woman. Nevertheless, the question ‘what is woman?’ is itself
suspended by the simple formulation of their common problematic. One
can no longer seek her, no more than one could search for woman’s fem­
ininity or female sexuality. And she is certainly not to be found in any of
the familiar modes of concepts or knowledge. Yet it is impossible to resist
looking for her.54
Derrida represents a step further than Nietzsche in deconstructing the meta­
physics of truth. But his deconstruction of metaphysics by way of associating
woman with undecidability and unpredictability implies turning woman into a
ground or instrument of deconstruction. However radical this aim is, she
becomes a vehicle of deconstruction rather than a subject of it. In Spivak’s
words, ‘as the radically other she does not really exist, yet her name remains
one of the important names for displacement, the special mark of deconstruc­
tion’.55 As Spivak rightly suggests, to avoid this ‘double displacement of
woman’, what is needed is the deconstruction of the ‘opposition between dis­
placement and logocentricism itself’. Spivak further argues that the task of
deconstructing the sovereign subject cannot be accomplished if we limit our
investigation to the question of what woman is, for this is only another way of
asking the question ‘what does woman want?’ With this question, woman is
still posed as the object of investigation. Rather, the feminist gesture requires
asking the question that will allow the woman the subject status and the posi­
tioning of a questioning subject: what is man? what does he want? It will then
be possible to ‘bring back the absolutely convincing deconstructive critiques of
the sovereign subject’.56
I take Spivak’s suggestion that a deconstruction of the opposition between
displacement and logocentrism is necessary in order to pose the question of the
itinerary of man’s desire in an attempt to deconstruct the imperial European
subjectivity.57 The question of what man wants, of ‘the itinerary of his desire’,
does not only make women subjects of inquiry but it also opens the inquiry to
a global socio-economic and cultural inscription, for which nineteenth-century
Orientalist writing is but one remarkable instance. We are now in a better posi­
tion to ask what ‘interest’ is involved here and what is ‘the profit that underlies
the truth/fantasy pair’.

T he constitution of the E uropean subject as sovereign

Two modes of differentiation, the sexual and the cultural, are thus not simply
two distinct, singular moments in the representation of difference, but rather, as
Homi Bhabha phrases it: ‘within the apparatus of colonial power, the discourses
of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional over-determ in ation .The

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structural affinity between the two with respect to the display of difference
establishes a chain of equivalence in which woman is the Orient, the Orient is
woman; woman like the Orient, the Orient like the woman, exists veiled; she is
nothing but the name of untruth and deception. If the Oriental is feminine and
if the feminine is Oriental, we can claim that the nature of femininity and the
nature of the Orient are figured as one and the same thing in these representa­
tions. This equivalence positions the Orientalist/Western colonial subject as
masculine: the other culture is always like the other sex.59 This is why the
Western subject, whether male or female, is always fascinated by the veil or
harem, the truth of culture in the space of woman, in the body of woman. But
then what does he see when the mask is lifted? Is it ever lifted? How can the
subject of knowledge know and be certain about what lies behind the mask?
Nietzsche refutes the view there is an essence behind the veil. Riviere reinscribes
the question as man’s, but then reads it also as constitution of femininity (which
is representation of woman).60 Irigaray also resists differentiating between the
veil and what exists underneath it, by writing that ‘beneath the veil subsists only
veil’.61 But for her - and especially we might say, if representation is constitu­
tion - there is an interest in the question and a profit in the discourse which it
produces.
What do we make of these Orientalist and masculine representations which
presuppose and pose a place and a cultural/sexual secret behind the Oriental
feminine veil? We have seen that European writers first posit the Oriental veil
as an object of investigation and presuppose that there is something behind it,
but then this very presupposition is both denied and accepted by the conclusion
that the very nature or being of the Orient is veiled. On the surface, this is a
process in which the veil is incorporated as an object of discursive and textual
play. These two processes however, political and cultural, as separate they are,
are not simply chronologically ordered. While the political project has been a
precise strategy of unveiling, i.e., an implementation of the European principle
of government based on an ideal of transparency and visibility, the textual and
conceptual dimension, the inscription of the veil in the European text is witness
to a constitution of subjectivity, an imaginary unity and command of experi­
ence in the encounter with the other. A careful reading of this constitution might
enable us to see that the profit that underlies the truth/fantasy pair is not a
simple plus on the side of European subjectivity. Since such profit, such surplus
of subjectivity is in the excess of the tropology of the veil, it is subjected to a
mechanism which remains beyond its control. What the Orientalist texts man­
ifest in their paradoxical attempt to other the veil is that the reference is always
veiled and remains other to what it signifies. This is the point where ‘real’ pol­
itics (the world of conflict) and textual ‘sublation’ (belles lettres) are necessar­
ily conflated with each other. What appears through this conflation might be
called an ethos. The ethos in question, that of the sovereign subject of Europe,
is described by M arx in his critical reading of Hegel. Gayatri Spivak observes
that, according to M arx, ‘Hegel’s picture of the subject appropriating the

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object5 was really charged by 4a deep hostility5. In M arx5s own words, 'the
appropriation . . . must proceed from indifferent alienness to real hostile
engagement5.62
If Europe's outside is made an integral part of its identity and power in dis­
courses such as Orientalism, this is, paradoxically, only by the creation of such
outside in terms of an absolute and essential difference. If the veiled woman/
culture remains always different or infinitely dissimulating in Orientalist logic,
this is not because of the complexity of her/their being-in-the-world, in which one
might find continuities as well as discontinuities with one's own culture/subjec­
tivity, but because they are always and absolutely different. They should remain
different, because I should remain the same: they are not/should not be a pos­
sibility within my own world, which will thus be different. This is the ‘deep hos­
tility5 which is pointed out by Spivak and M arx, in resonance with essentialism
conceived as a philosophy of the ‘proper5. That is to say, such hostility does not
refer to a mere prejudice or uncultivated aggressive behavior which can be cor­
rected or repaired by simply taking a more peaceful, good-natured, tolerant or
sympathetic attitude. Deep hostility is not merely a subjective or personal char­
acteristic, changing from one person or group to another, and thus adaptable or
normalizable. While personal or even group characteristics might well be affected
by education, to think that such an education will thus erase the subject position
is rather disingenuous. It is not a question of liking or disliking the Orientals,
their women, and their culture. The hostility expressed here is the force of nega­
tion which constitutes the subject as sovereign, that stern force which drives the
machine of his self-production in the dialectical, restricted economy of the pro­
duction of the self as same. It is therefore a necessary moment in his encounter
with the culturally/sexually different.

M imicry and the question of the veil

I have argued above that if the concept-figure of veil provides the Orientalist
with an imaginary control of his colonial displacement, its textual inscription
nevertheless remains beyond his control. I have thus located an incessant
movement of desire at the center of orientalist discourse. This is part of an
attempt to transform and reformulate the very means by which we identify
the nature of colonial oppression and hence rethink the problematic dichoto­
mies between self and other, structure and agency, domination and resis­
tance.63 To rethink Orientalism's discursive field through the psychoanalytic
concept of desire enables us to conceive colonial domination as being based
on an ambivalent and conflictual economy. To give an account of otherness
through the concept of desire implies a formulation of the process of colonial
identification not as an affirmation of a pregiven identity, but as a process in
which both the ‘Western subject5 and the ‘Oriental other5 are mutually impli­
cated in each other and thus neither exists as a fully constituted entity. As
Bhabha suggests, ‘the desire for the Other is doubled by the desire in language,
which splits the difference between Self and Other so that both positions are

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partial; neither is sufficient unto itself’.64 My purpose, in pointing to the com­

plexity and contradiction of desire in the representations of cultural and
sexual difference, is twofold: to understand the process of exclusion and dif­
ferentiation through which the Western self is constituted and achieves the
appearance of an autonomous identity precisely by veiling its dependency and
indebtedness from its excluded and marginalized other; second, to capture the
unavoidable trace of the other in the subject and the consequent resistance it
exerts upon him.
The notion of ambivalence and the contradictory economy as developed by
Bhabha enables us to understand the excesses or slippages within colonial dis­
course.65 Such excesses or slippages imply the impossibility of formulating the
relationship between the Western subject and its colonial other in dualistic
terms which implies setting up oppression and agency as two different poles of
a binary opposition. My reiteration of the concept of desire should thus be con­
ceived of as an effort to displace the notion of colonial discourse as an affirma­
tion of a pregiven Western identity. The crux of my argument is that not only
the very identity o f the Western subject is constituted in the movement o f desire,
but also the potential resistance to this constitution is also inscribed in this very
process. Fanon’s observation is pertinent for understanding this dynamic:
‘when it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the
experience of desire . . . As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered.’66
Before I proceed to the discussion of the ways in which the veil might acquire
a subversive quality, I would like to recapitulate what I have been suggesting
regarding the moment of colonial resistance. To inquire into the ‘mechanism’
of the Western subject’s constitution through the psychoanalytic concept of
desire is not to suggest that its identity is fully determined.67 On the contrary,
it should be seen as an attempt to explain the constituted character of the
subject and thereby to argue that both the closure of the subject’s identity and
the resistance of the other is never final, but always partial and relative. As
Judith Butler warns us, it is erroneous to assume the subject in advance so as
to protect its agency, because to argue the constituted character of the subject
is not to suggest that it is determined. In other words, the power that consti­
tutes the subject does not cease to exist ‘after’ constituting its subject, for the
subject ‘is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and
again’.68 Therefore, if we are not in search of an a priori guarantee for the
agency of the subject, then we cannot afford not to scrutinize the process of the
constitution of the subject. The inquiry into the agency of the subject can be
made only when it is not presumed and such an inquiry is contingent upon
understanding its constituted character.
How does the desiring subject’s ceaseless pursuit of its absent object and the
disruption of the stability of this desire refigure itself in the context of colonial
discourse? If we claim that the subject can never achieve a full closure in con­
stituting his identity, what role does the unique text-ile of the veil, a text-ile
which ‘conceals’ and ‘hides’ the other from the colonial gaze, play in this

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process? How can we seek out the residues, the remains or traces of the veiled
other which exceed the phallocentric and Orientalist representations? Where
can we locate the moments of recalcitrance? What, if any, role do the unique
characteristics of the veil play in this?
We have seen above that the colonial subject’s desire to control and dominate
the foreign land is not independent from his scopic desire, from his desire to
penetrate, through his surveillant eye, what is behind the veil. The invisibility
the veil secures for the colonial other is simultaneously the point at which desire
is articulated and the ground upon which the scopic drive o f the subject is dis­
placed, for there is always the threat of the return of the look of the other. In
Fanon’s words, ‘it was the colonialist’s frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman, it
was his gamble on winning the battle of the veil’.69 In this battle ‘the occupier
was bent on unveiling Algeria’,70 because ‘there is in it the will to bring this
woman within his reach, to make her a possible object of possession’.71 But
what explains the obsession with lifting the veil is something that is always-
already inscribed in this unique sartorial matter. The veil is seen as a border
which distinguishes inside from outside, as a screen or cover, and women are
associated with the inside, home and territory in the native Algerian culture.72
Of course at the same time the veil demarcates a boundary and delimits the
colonial power. As Malek Alloula’s analysis of the French colonial picture post­
cards demonstrates, the veil that covers the Algerian woman indicates a refusal
to the French soldier. The photographer, whose scopic desire is discouraged,
experiences disappointment and rejection.73 Similarly for Fanon, since the veil
allows women to see without being seen, it disallows reciprocity, and implies
that the woman is not yielding herself, making herself available for vision.74
It is this disappointment and frustration which disturbs the voyeuristic look
of the subject. Unlike looking at a photograph or a screen, by looking at a veiled
other, the subject cannot have the security of ‘I look at it, but it does not look
at me looking at it’,75 because there is always the threat of the return of the look
of the other. This implies that the pleasure of seeing is not entirely on the side
of the subject, but he himself is subject to a look and hence is not inscribed, to
borrow from Metz again, as an ‘invisible’ subject.76 The structure of voyeuris­
tic pleasure which is based upon the ‘invisibility of the subject’ and the ‘visibil­
ity of the object’ is being reversed here into its opposite. Instead of being looked
at, the object now looks at.77
The subject cannot ignore that he is being looked at as he tries to unveil the
other in order to satisfy his voyeuristic pleasure and thus fails to fantasize
himself as a full subject.78 The look that filters through the tiny orifice of the
veil is the statement of the absent and invisible other and this statement can be
translated, to borrow a formulation from Bhabha, into: ‘as even now you
look/but never see me’.79 In other words, the invisible other speaks from its
absent location. The countergaze of the other should be located in this absent-
presence, in this space of the in-between. It is the veil which enables the Oriental
other to look without being seen. This not only disturbs the desire of the
M eyd a Y eg en o g lu

Western/colonial subject to fix cultural and sexual difference, but also enables
the colonial other to turn itself into a surveillant gaze. It is in this space of
absent-presence that there emerges the challenge of the ‘invisible’, ‘hidden5
other. To recapitulate, it is through the veil that the colonial Western desire to
see emerges and is erased simultaneously, and this is what enables the veiled
other to destabilize the identificatory process of the subject. It is this moment
of seeing or these eyes that filter through the veil which frustrate the voyeuris­
tic desire of the colonialist and displaces his surveillant eye.
If it is through this uncanny look, which her absence/invisibility provides to
her, that the other constitutes its ‘I5and thereby unsettles the colonial gaze, then
one might ask what the difference is between my account of the other's resis­
tance through its enigmatic absence and the representation of the veil in
Orientalist discourse? Are these two discursive systems not based on the recog­
nition of the other as absent, invisible, hidden, and do not both register this
absence as enigmatic?
In his discussion of the Algerian liberation struggle, Fanon claims that during
the anti-colonial resistance movement, the veil ‘has been manipulated, trans­
formed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle5.80 What trans­
formed the veil from being an element of tradition into an element of strategy of
subversion? Fanon at times claims that the veil was used by women as a protec­
tive mask in order to carry bombs and weapons for the revolutionary movement
- ‘every veiled woman, every Algerian woman, became suspect5.81 But this is not
a sufficient explanation because many women during the revolutionary process
reveiled themselves in order to affirm ‘that it was not true that woman liberated
herself at the invitation of France and of General de Gaulle5.82 Apparently what
used to be an ‘oppressive5 item which confined women to the private domain of
the home now enabled them to assert their subjectivity and agency.83 The affir­
mation of the veil in the anti-colonial struggle was a direct response to the colo­
nial desire to unveil, reveal, and control the colonized country. It is not surprising
after all that women's agency emerged out of the texture of their own culture. Or,
given the immense significance of the veil for both sides, should we not say that
the anti-colonial resistance emerged under the banner of a metaphor - veil - that
belongs to, that is woman? However, this culture was no longer the same. In
taking up the veil as a constituent symbolic element of their subjectivity, the
Algerian women did not simply continue their traditional roles, because the veil
had now become the embodiment o f their will to act, their agency. It was thus
reinscribed and re-charged in the colonial situation and acquired a symbolic sig­
nificance that directly affected the struggle. I talk about the consequences of this
situation for the relationship between nationalism and women in ‘decolonized’
societies - the question of the manipulation or control of women by ‘post-colo­
nial’ nation-states - in chapter 5 of Colonial Fantasies, the publication in which
this article originally appeared. Now I should like to explain how the veil turned
out to be a subversive element. In order to do this, I want to use the concept of
mimicry as explained by Luce Irigaray.

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In her critique of phallocentrism, Irigaray insists that a mere reversal of this

system cannot constitute a subversive politics, for it remains locked within the
same economy that it aims to shatter. What could displace and hence shake the
ground of the phallocentric representations is a purposeful but distorted imita­
tion of the characteristics attributed to the feminine:
There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one ‘path’, the one historically
assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine
role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordina­
tion into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart i t . . . To play with
mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploita­
tion by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It
means to resubmit herself - inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘percep­
tible’, of ‘matter’ - to ‘ideas’, in particular to ideas about herself, that are
elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect
of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up
of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means ‘to
unveil’ the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they
are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere.84
Following Irigaray’s formulation, I suggest that by claiming and playfully
repeating the very attributes of concealment and dissimulation, the Algerian
women managed to stay elsewhere, indeed to create an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘outside’
that displaced the French colonial power. But how does one distinguish between
a subversive repetition and a loyal one? For Irigaray, parodic repetition differs
from mere loyal repetition, for it consists of simultaneous recognition and denial
of the dominant codes of femininity. However, repetition of the dominant norms
in and of itself may not be enough to displace them, for there is a risk involved
in it. The trap here is becoming complicit by receding back into the old defini­
tions that one seeks to combat. Hence mimicry does not automatically produce
a subversive outcome; it can achieve such an effect to the extent that it is, as
Braidotti notes, ‘being sustained by a critical consciousness’.85 That is, it can be
subversive on the condition that the naturalized gender codes are critically
reflected upon. The re-articulation, reworking and re-signification of the discur­
sive characteristics of phallocentrism can open the possibility of an in-between
ambivalent zone where the agency of the female subject can be construed. In our
case, the colonization of land and culture in Algeria was strategically entangled
on the body of women - such is the articulation of the historical and fantasy.
This created a unique situation for native women and produced a historically
specific kind of critical consciousness. Always-already articulated as the most
inner core of culture, of the very nativity and territoriality of culture, Algerian
women had become able to embody their difference vis-a-vis the hostile foreign
power. It is in this very particular kind of historical conjuncture that the veil
shifted from a traditional to a subversive role. This is no doubt a historically spe­
cific situation or conjuncture of our modern times, that is repeated in so many

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anti-colonial and national resistance struggles, a strange and unique historical

moment or process in which tradition does not simply disappear in loyalty to
the forward march of progress but instead ceases to be traditional and loyal and
becomes the signifier of an active, resistant and transformative subjectivity, a
moment of empowerment and agency. Surely this is not an unproblematical
moment, given the nationalist elite’s patriarchal framework. But blindness to
women’s irreducible power and seeing their difference as simply contained
within nationalist leadership is indeed to reinscribe the power of female agency
into the grand illusion of the forward march of history.
The Algerian women thus turned the Orientalist representation into an affir­
mation and thereby instilled a new definition of the act of concealment by, in
Mary Ann Doane’s words, ‘enacting a defamiliarized version’ of the Orientalist
representations of the veil. What the colonial gaze saw in the Algerian women’s
disturbing mimicry was a displacement of its own representation of the veil.
Hence what was once familiar and recognizable as concealment, mask, masque­
rading, has now become unfamiliar, disturbing and uncanny. Therefore, what
was implied in this manipulative use of the veil was not a strategy of reversal of
the Orientalist discourse, for such a strategy would have implied an effort to
demonstrate that they were hiding nothing behind colonialism’s so-long-held
object of suspicion. Mimicry revealed that there was nothing but the veil behind
the veil. In resuming and reclaiming the veil, Algerian women parodied the
Orientalist discourse which construed the veil as a mask. Their strategic use of
the veil thus doubled the Orientalist representation of cultural and sexual dif­
ference and this doubling brought a new mode of representation of the veil as a
positive, self-affirming political force. The calling into question of Orientalism’s
claim on the naturalness of the veil through a mimetic repetition enabled women
to constitute a space where they engendered their own subjectivity. The subver­
sive quality the veil achieved in this decolonizing gesture was enabled by the very
conditions that construed it. There is an affinity between Algerian’s women’s
struggle and deconstruction which, in Derrida’s words, ‘operate(s) necessarily
from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subver­
sion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally’.86
Naom i Schor, in reading the meaning(s) of the concept of mimicry in Irigaray,
suggests that, in mimicry, difference is signified as a positivity; it refers to the
reclaiming of the characteristics attributed to the feminine. The difference that
is brought about in this joyful reappropriation is not only beyond masquerade
and mimicry, but signifies 6an emergence of the feminine and the feminine can
only emerge from within or beneath . . . femininity within which it lies buried.
The difference within mimesis is the difference within difference’.87 Following
Schor, I would suggest that we see the difference within the Algerian women’s
mimicry as the difference within difference - a difference that came out of their
doubling of the Orientalist/masculinist representations of difference. In other
words, what is revealed in this doubling is the sub-sistence of the ‘quite Other’
behind its mere difference. The difference represented in the subversive mimicry

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of the Algerian women is the unrecuperable or undomesticated difference that

the colonial Subject has ferociously tried to deny. In Irigaray’s words:
Beneath all those/her appearances, beneath all those/her borrowed finery,
that female other still sub-sists. Beyond all those/her forms of life and
death, still she is living. And as she is dis-tant - and in ‘herself’ - she
threatens the stability of all values. In her there is always the possibility
that truth, appearances, will, power, eternal recurrence . . . will collapse.
By mimicking them all more or less adequately, that female other never
holds firm to any of them univocally . . . Truth and appearances, and
reality, power . . . she is - through her inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry
- the living foundation for the whole staging of the world. Wearing dif­
ferent veils according to the historic periods.88
In exploring the articulation of sexual and cultural difference in the discourse
of Orientalism, I have pointed to the inextricable link between the masculinist
and colonialist position the Western subject occupies in relation to its Oriental
others. A Western reader, more specifically a feminist reader, might feel uneasy
about this suggestion, wondering whether the representations of the Orient,
veil and woman might be different if the gender identity of the representing
agency were woman.

N o tes
1. Hayden White, Tropics o f Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 1.
2. Olivier Richon, ‘Representation, the Despot and the Harem: Some Questions
Around an Academic Orientalist Painting by Lecomte-Du-Nouy (1885)’, in Europe
and its Others, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature,
vol. I, ed. E Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), p. 8.
3. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. H aakon Chevalier (New York: Grove
Press, 1965), p. 36.
4. Ibid., pp. 37-38.
5. As Said shows, this is evident in a speech by Lord Balfour in which he spends a lot
of effort in denying such a superiority, while at the same time proposing it. Edward
Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 32.
6. Theodor Adorno and M ax Horkheimer, The Dialectic o f Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1979), p. 3.
7. Michel Foulcault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 200-1; See also the interesting article by
Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Device’, trans. Richard Miller,
October, 41 (Summer 1987).
8. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Essays
1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 152-4.
Foucault talks about this emergent modern formation as an ‘opinion society’. Of
course, we are reminded of de Amicis’ cry to Turks whose silence must be the result
of a secret agreement or of some malady: ‘Come, more like other men, for once! tell
us who you are, what you are thinking of, and what you see in the air before you,
with those glassy eyes!’ Turks seem to be a people without opinions, or worse, a
people who hide their opinions. See Edmondo de Amicis, Constantinople, trans.
Caroline Tilton (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1878), p. 305.

561
M eyd a Y eg en o g lu

9. Jean Starobiski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. A.

Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 65-80.
10. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 191.
11. I am employing Michel de Certeau’s definition of ‘strategy5 here. See his The
Practice o f Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), pp. 35-6. For a similar application of the concept of strat­
egy, and an astute analysis of the employment of the trope of veil in Iraqi war, see
M ahmut M utman, ‘Under Western Eyes5 in Prosthetic Territories: Politics and
Hypertechnology, ed. Gabriel Brahm Jr. and M ark Driscoll (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1995). In an admirable study of the colonization of Egypt,
Timothy Mitchell has shown, for instance, how Foucauldian power/knowledge
technologies were employed by the French and British colonizers in the so-called
model villages, in the military barracks and in the educational apparatus. Mitchell
argues that the aim of these strategies was to suppress, marginalize or transform
the native culture in order to establish a new one which constructs ‘the world as
picture’. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the
Interpretation o f Culture, ed., Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 280-1.
13. Gilels Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 38.
14. Ibid., p. 94.
15. Ibid., p. 33.
16. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
17. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p. 35.
18. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York and London: Norton & Company, 1981), p. 103.
19. Ibid., p. 118-19.
20. Ibid., p. 72-4.
21. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp. 45-46.
22. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis, p. 84.
23. de Amicis, Constantinople, p. 208.
24. Theophile Gautier, Constantinople, trans. Robert H. Gould (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1875), pp. 193-94.
25. de Amicis, Constantinople, p. 206.
26. Ibid., pp. 206-8.
27. Ibid, p. 207.
28. Irene Szyliowich, Pierre Loti and the Oriental Woman (Hong Kong: Macmillan,
1988), p. 97.
29. Joan Copjec, ‘The Sartorial Superego’, October, 50 (Fall 1989), p. 87.
30. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis, p. 105.
31. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Looking Awry’, October, 50 (Fall 1989), p. 34.
32. Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the M asquerade’, in Formations o f Fantasy, ed.
V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p.
52.
33. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Introduction IF, in Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the
Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan,
1987), pp. 35, 47-8.
34. I adapt Lacan’s formulaic statement. See, Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts o f
Psychoanalysis, pp. 80-2.
35. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and
in the Technique o f Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London: Norton and Company, 1991), p. 223.

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36. Stephen Heath’s reading of Nietzsche’s representation of femininity as masquerade

is very illuminating. See ‘Joan Riviere and the M asquerade’.
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollongdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 425.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York:
Vintage Books, 1974), p. 163.
39. For a discussion of the figuration of woman in Nietzsche’s texts see Eric Blondel,
‘Nietzsche: Life as M etaphor’, in The New Nietzsche, ed. D. Allison (Cambridge
and London: The M IT Press, 1988).
40. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 163.
41. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Veiling Over Desire’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed R.
Felstein and J. Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 118-19.
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), p. 38.
43. Doane, ‘Veiling Over Desire’, p. 121.
44. Ibid., p. 122.
45. Luce Irigaray, Speculum o f the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), p. 270.
46. Joan Rivere, ‘Womanliness as M asquerade’, in Formations o f Fantasy, ed. V.
Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 43.
I have benefited greatly from Stephen Heath’s reading of Riviere’s article: ‘Joan
Riviere and the M asquerade’ in the same collection.
47. Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the M asquerade’, p. 51.
48. Riviere, ‘Womanliness as M asquerade’, p. 53.
49. Heath, ‘Joane Riviere and the M asquerade’, p. 50.
50. de Amicis, Constantinople, p. 206.
51. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality, trans. Jam es Strachey
(New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 17. I would like to thank Stephen Heath for
bringing this to my attention.
52. Doane, ‘Veiling Over Desire’, p. 107.
53. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Style, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 51.
54. Ibid., p. 71.
55. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman’, in
Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. M ark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), p. 184.
56. Ibid., p. 186.
57. See the quotation from Karl M arx in ibid., p. 191.
58. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, Screen, 24/6 (December 1983), p. 26.
59. The reader will notice that I use the pronoun ‘he’ to refer to the Western/colonial
subject. This is not a mere slippage, but a conscious effort on my part to highlight
the claim, as developed most notably by Irigaray, that the subject is always-already
masculine, and constitutes himself and retains his autonomy at the expense of the
feminine, but disavows this dependence.
60. Riviere, ‘Womanliness as M asquerade’, p. 38.
61. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, trans. Gilliam Gill (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), p. 110.
62. Karl M arx quoted in Spivak: ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,’ p. 191.
My thanks go to Mahmut Mutman for drawing my attention to this important
quote and sharing his ideas with me.
63. There are a number of theoretical approaches one might use to explain the process
of the constitution of the subject, such as Foucault’s. The reason for my emphasis
on the psychoanalytic theory of desire in understanding this constitution is that it
enables us to grasp the process of exclusion and differentiation through which the
Western Subject constitutes itself.
M eyd a Y eg en o g lu

64. Homi Bhabha, ‘Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative,’ in Anatomy o f

Racism, ed. D. T. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990), p. 193.
65. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’,
October, 28 (Spring 1984), p. 126.
66. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 218.
67. This is a persistent and unfortunately not a very substantiated criticism that has
been advanced by the critiques of post-structuralist theory and psychoanalysis. Such
charges of determinism have been brought time and again in the name of defend­
ing the notion of agency. What is overlooked in such criticisms is the assumption of
a rigid alternative between, to borrow a formulation from Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, total autonomy and absolute subordination. See, ‘Post-Marxism
Without Apologies’, in New Reflections on the Revolution o f Our Time, ed. Erneste
Laclau (London and New York: Verso, 1990).
68. Judith Butler, ‘The Imperialist Subject’, Journal o f Urban and Cultural Studies, 2/1
(1991), p. 77.
69. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp. 46-47.
70. Ibid., p. 63.
71. Ibid., p. 44.
72. When French colonial power identified the veil as a problem and constructed it as
an exterior target, it was involved in a reading and writing (or re-writing) of the veil
which is different from that of the native culture. In his influential Outline o f a
Theory o f Practice, Pierre Bourdieu provides an ethnographic study of the native
Muslim patriarchal culture. The historical precondition of such a study is of course
the French colonization of Algeria. Bourdieu’s observation of the binarism which
make the native culture is instructive in this sense. Bourdieu does not mention the
veil, but he observes that the opposition between male and female is associated with
a number of other oppositions between the outside and inside. In the mythical struc­
ture of the native society, woman is associated with the inside, the house and the
land. The veiled woman represents an ‘inside’ that needs to be protected. Pierre
Bourdieu, Outline o f A Theory o f Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 44-5, 90-4, 122-6. The only place where
Bourdieu mentions the veil is a native proverb reserved for the son-in-law, ‘the veil
cast over shame’ (ibid., p. 44). Since woman is associated with evil acts, the lesser
evil can only be produced by the protection of a man, etc. Despite his apparant crit­
icism of ‘legalism’, and his recognition of different interests of men and women,
Bourdieu re-inscribes the same mythical patriarchal structure based on sexual dif­
ference. In Spivak’s words, ‘the figure of the exchanged woman still produces the
cohesive unity of a clan . . .’. See Introduction, Selected Subaltern Studies, ed.
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), p. 30.
73. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, p. 7.
74. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p. 44.
75. For this formulation see Christian Metz, quoted in Paul Willemen, ‘Voyeurism, The
Look and Dwoskin’, Afterimage, 6 (Summer 1976), p. 41.
76. Even Edward Lane, who stands as one of the solemn and least ‘masculine’
Orientalists, almost confesses this desire to see: ‘A man may also occasionally enjoy
opportunities of seeing the face of an Egyptian lady when she really thinks herself
unobserved; sometimes at an open lattice, and sometimes on a house-top’, An
Account o f the Manners and Customs o f the Modern Egyptians (New York: Dover
Publications, 1973), p. 177.
77. Willemen, ‘Voyeurism, The Look and Dwoskin’, p. 48.
78. M ary Ann Doane suggests a similar structure of reversal for understanding the dif­
ficulty the masculine subject experiences when woman appropriates the gaze and
turns herself from being a passive object of look to a subject of active looking, from
spectacle to spectator. See ‘Film and the M asquerade’.

564
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79. Bhabha, ‘Interrogating Identity’, p. 190.

80. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p. 61.
81. Ibid., p. 62.
82. Ibid., p. 62.
83. To identify Muslim women’s gaining her agency and subjectivity by ‘moving’
outside the home and equating her veiling with confinement implies an unques­
tioned acceptance of the assumptions of the liberal Western feminism which advo­
cates the unveiling of Muslim women as a means of ‘liberation’.
84. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is N ot One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), p. 76.
85. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.
7.
86. Jacques Derrida, O f Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 24.
87. Naom i Schor, ‘This Essentialism Which is N ot One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray’,
differences, 1/2 (1989), p. 48.
88. Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 118.

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