Entry #5

In our discussion the past week, my group and I discussed the topic of gender and sexuality through colonial contest after reading Anne McClintock’s first chapter of “The Lay of the Land”. I was intrigued and even disturbed by many aspects of the text, just as most of my group members seemed to be. To set the tone, the reading started off by stating how Christopher Columbus during his search for India had “erred in thinking the earth was round. Rather, he said, it was shaped like a women’s breast,…” (p. 21). The text continues on explaining that “Columbus’ breast fantasy, like Haggard’s map of Sheba’s Breasts, draws on a long tradition of male travel as an erotics of ravishment”, highlighting colonist men’s feminizing of land among other things they seek power over using gender superiority (p. 22).

Europeans for centuries had eroticized the orient such as Africa, the Americas and Asia seeing themselves as superiors over other parts of the world. Being that other cultures were seen as “the other” was deeply rooted, and even associated with overly sexualized tales of the “far-off lands”, I think this only further enabled their objectification of the orient. I personally related this part of the text to the orient exotic portrayal of Arabs, as shown in Disney’s Aladdin for instance. But after watching Netflix’s show “Emily in Paris” I found that some of the French who watched it had criticized stereotypes within the show of them being fetishizing the French (source). This makes me question if the exotification of cultures is more spread out nowadays, as opposed to only being on the orient.

A point brought up in our discussion which I found interesting regarded how men were seen as “masters and possessors of nature”, noting how ironic that mother nature turns earth to a feminine entity that somehow ends up being claimed back to the man. Moreover the feminization of lands, European explorers’s sexualization applied onto unknown lands which they called virgin territories. The objectification of exotic women seemed endless and therefore obsessive. This obsessive nature can be seen in examples such as “female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact” and how sailors “bound female figures. to their ships’ prows and baptized their ships – as exemplary threshold objects – with female names” (p. 24).

And to conclude, through European travels which essencily was colonialism, European men alienated other cultures through tales they told and created perceived stereotypes. The other aspect to the reading was the male dominance over females, projecting a gender superiority complex. A possible analogy could be that Europeans regarded themselves as superior, they projected their own sexual fantasies onto women in other cultures describing them as sexualy deviant to fit into the fantasy they’ve created. What I believe further proves my conclusion was there being a tale of a woman who went as far as to “summarily slain” a young Spaniard “in full view of his fellow countrymen after he got attention by a group of women (p. 28). Tales such as the one previously mentioned however contradicts the European man’s fantasy of “women’s invitation to conquest” and thus it seemed to be disregarded (p. 28).