Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism

Abstract

This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.

America's Next Literary Foil: Deconstructing the Orientalized Body of the Other in Miranda Kenneally's Coming Up for Air.

“…3 As a crucial rite of passage or a 'trip' to adulthood, Maggie's first time is made to fit with the orientalist motif of sexuality associated with liberty, epitomized by Roxy's libidinousness. The fact speaks to the orientalist motif of libidinousness readily associated to gay and queer encounters (Boone 1995); in this novel such encounters are something to try but eventually become censorable. Further, Maggie is excused in her normative sexuality because she did not know about the boy's fetishes and, crucially, she did not intend to come upon them in the first place.…”

Naming our sexualities

“…Though Foucault downplayed the sexual revolution of the 1960s as being a continuation of the nineteenth-century intensification of a discourse of sexuality rather than a rupture with earlier forms of repression, it is this post-1960s shift that has so dramatically altered the position of the Muslim as other to the West. The exotic Orient, though still the site of furtive pleasures for sex tourists (Boone 1995), has become the "Muslim world. " During the colonial period, the Orient lagged behind the West because of its dissolute nature and libertine sexuality.…”

L'imaginaire géographique du tourisme sexuel

“…L'imaginaire qui est ici à l'oeuvre ne concerne ni les femmes ni les paysages des pays cibles : il a pour objet les rapports de pouvoir dans lesquels se fera la rencontre. (Boone, 1995). Tanger a pu ainsi constituer pour ceux-ci un « sanctuaire » (Boone, 1995 : 100 ;Waitt and Markwell, 2006 : 51), et le Mexique (Cantú, 2002 : 148), la République Dominicaine (Padilla, 2007 : 83), la Thaïlande (Dredge, 2010 : 170 ;Roux, 2009 : 33) ou le Luang Prabang (Laos) (Berliner, 2011) seraient aujourd'hui des « paradis gay », où les corps indigènes sont libres et donc plus disponibles.…”