ABSTRACT
The events marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism provide an excellent occasion to reflect on the book’s impact on Middle East gender and women’s studies. In some ways Orientalism and feminist studies have, in Marilyn Strathern’s memorable phrase, an awkward relationship.1 Despite the fact that the book is attuned, perhaps surprising for its time, to issues of gender and sexuality, its main focus lies elsewhere: the way in which the Orient has been represented in Europe through an imaginative geography that divides East and West, confirming Western superiority and enabling, if not actually constituting, European domination of those negatively portrayed regions known as “East.”2 Orientalism was not meant to be a work of feminist scholarship or theory. Yet it has engendered feminist scholarship and debate in Middle East studies as well as far beyond the field.
