ABSTRACT
The research on which this book is based was sparked off by a hunch that if I could find proof of women's involvement in Orientalist culture I would be able to challenge masculinist assumptions about women and imperialism. Indeed, the excavation of a woman Orientalist artist like Browne in itself appeared initially to offer a new paradigm for the study of Orientalism. The mere existence of a woman's representation of the harem's forbidden spaces undercut the characteristic homogeneity, intentionally and omnipotence that Said had ascribed to the Orientalist gaze. Her view of the Orient as respectable and domestic could not but challenge some of Orientalism's key sexualized myths. But, as the research went on, I kept unearthing clues to other female versions of the Orient and the harem. Scraps of information, faded catalogue illustrations, elusive references in reviews, all pointed to a previously unimaginable number and range of images by women. All of a sudden, the apparently neat counter-discourse that I had set up around Browne began to fragment and fray at the edges. Yes, there were indeed substantial numbers of women artists enngaged in Orientalist representation, but they did not all follow the same route as the eminently respectable Henriette Browne. At the very moment that I proved my hypothesis of women's involvement in visual Orientalism, the stability of its constituent categories began to crumble. The alternative female Orientalism indicated by the likes of Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, with her semi-nude monumental odalisques, undercut the determining imprint of gender that appeared to operate so smoothly in the case of Browne. The female Orientalist gaze became a far more fluid and contested entity than I had previously suspected.
