Week 2 Reflections

There was something about the "Women's Prisons" piece that I find truly unsettling. The way Alloula presented that warping of a real issue (i.e. women's repression) by Western society for commercial purposes felt disturbing. In addition to that, and as usual, where there are monetary gains to be made there is some sort of sexual undercurrent. When the author pointed out the implicit sexual fetishism involved with photos, I began to question whether I could ever look at a postcard the same way again. There were just so many levels of violation happening at once. I think the person who was most violated is, to quote the author, "the other Algerian woman, absent in the photo." It is her life and her story that are being commercialized and, in turn, sexualized. They are not even real images of her but imitations. They are scenes created to suggest realism rather than being real. The author pointed out there is an implicit suggestion of violence in these images. In almost all of the photos the women are in states of half dress and in a several of them the photographs are taken from a perspective inside the cage. It is if by being on the other side of those bars, the photographer and the viewer are being allowed to "penetrate the harem," that they have gained access with or without the permission of their subjects.

I was really fascinated by Stoler's connection between the language of race and sexuality. It wasn't something I had ever really considered before but the more I read about it, the more valid a theory it seemed. I think Stoler's exploration of the ties between racism and sexuality also relate back to the "Women's Prisons" piece. The postcards and the images discussed and displayed in Alloula's article are inherently connected to racism. Those postcards are playing into the sexual fetishes and assumptions of the West. The foreign culture and the real life oppression of the Algerian women is used to make them a sexual fantasy. The photographer creates false reality in order to fulfill Western fantasy. I think that this connects back to Stoler's reference to the language of race in connection to sexuality. The language used to describe sex and sexuality in 19th century Europe was influenced by the age of imperial expansion. Words like savage, primitive, barbaric were all used to describe a person's "libidinal energies." Given the context of the time period, the immediate association with those words would be related to the colonizers vs. the colonized. This languages suggest that the inferior peoples, which were those of a different race, were connected to sex in a base, unrefined, animalistic way. What separated "us" (the white bourgeois colonialists) from them (the indigenous people they colonized) was their perceived relationship to sexuality. It wasn't that the West repressed their sexuality, they simply were able to control it. They associated their ability to control this primal portion of themselves with their white superiority. The Western fetishism with the images of the simultaneously sexually repressed yet sexually deviant Middle Eastern woman were used to emphasize the civilized nature of Western society. But this notion of superiority was in fact racial in origins. By touting this superior sexual control, the West was able to justify their conquering of foreign lands, while covering up the racial origins of their domination