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Difference Unveiled: Bulgarian National Imperatives and the Re-dressing of Muslim Women, 1878-1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Mary Neuburger
Mary Neuburger*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, USA
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Extract

Recent scholarship has poignantly argued that the founding of modern “Western” nation-states is to a large degree a product of their drawn out colonial encounters with “the East.” It is convincingly argued that “the West” constructed its own self-assured, national and supra-national identities in the process of “discovering” and “inventing” the exotic yet inferior “East.” Furthermore, a diverse body of scholarship has delineated the central role of discourses on gender and sexuality in the development of Western societies and, in particular, nation-states. If the image of “pious mother” became key to Western national self-images, it was the counter-image of the women of the harem—veiled, oppressed, and mysterious—that typified representations of Eastern barbarism. Furthermore, Western economic and political penetration of its colonies was to a large degree justified by the “gendering” of the “irrational Orient” versus the “rational Occident.” The “liberation” of Islamic women from their “oppression” as typified by the veil became central to Western “civilizing” missions, which had far-reaching echoes on the frontiers of European society.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 169 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe 

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References

Notes

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