SOURCE: “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism,” in Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 39-67.

In the following excerpt, Yeğenoğlu explores Western writers' attitudes toward the Oriental veiled woman and discusses the link between Western masculinist and colonialist positions as these positions relate to the Oriental other.

If one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically … considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

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 of Psycho-Analysis

Unveiling as Political Doctrine

Erecting a barrier between the body of the Oriental woman and the Western gaze, the opaque, all-encompassing veil seems to...