White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

by Ruby Hamad

She had a higher opinion of Islam and the Orient than her male contemporaries, claiming that Turkish women she met in the bathhouse were so horrified by the sight of her boned corset they described it as a box in the shape of a woman’s body and felt that English men must be far worse husbands than their own for tying their wives up in such a thing. The presentation of unrestrained Oriental sensuality was not benign. Such representations allowed Western men to project whatever erotic fantasies they had of the “exotic Orient” onto those women, serving as a means of simultaneously desiring and systematically devaluing the Oriental woman and her culture. As historian Hazel Simons puts it, “This domination over the native women was part and parcel of European man’s power and control of her native land.” Flaubert’s Egyptian muse was the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, whom he described as “a beautiful creature,” albeit a “fleshy” one with “slit nostrils.” As she snored in a Cairo bed beside him, he “thought of my nights in Paris brothels and I thought of her dance, of her voice as she sang songs that were for me without meaning and even without distinguishable words.” To Flaubert, Kuchuk was a stand-in for all Near Eastern women, most of whom he would never even see, let alone get to know. In comparing her and them to the brothels of Paris he is essentially categorizing all Oriental women as “prostitutes,” and I do want to stress here that I am not disparaging sex work but highlighting ...