WOMEN & ACCESSORIES (2:08)

I am Amira Jarmakani. I'm a professor of women's, Gender and Sexuality studies currently at the San Diego State University.

My name is Sarah Sense. I'm a visual artist. I'm Chita Matcha and Choctaw.

Amira: So, a lot of what happened with French Orientalist painting was kind of like just adding adornments or adding accessories, or and basically adding a kind of ethnicity through those additions, in order to draw on these stereotypical ideas, that other women were more exotic, and therefore more sexually available, and therefore was permissible to paint them in this way and this very like available kind of way. And it's just becomes so clear like how the kinds of accessories around are then meant to stand in for an entire cultural tradition, and people who have literally been disappeared.

Sarah: …This Russell painting that we're looking at and talking about right now like taking his wife, who, I'm assuming from European descent and dressing her up as a Native woman that's lounging… like It's so loaded with history.

It's not really taking one person on any sort of like journey through actual real Native traditions and culture and regalia right? Where does Russell gather up all this information? Well, obviously it's just from this, like social construct that he's that he's in right? So when we borrow all of this information without like considering the implications of what happened to Native women on this land, and then just throw the sex onto it like the violence of that, the danger of that is that it is referencing historical trauma on women in North America.

THE HAREM (2:04)

Amira: Orientalism is basically it's like a system of knowledge that comes about to have power over an entire region. So a whole group of scholars are assembled to create knowledge about a region with, but the knowledge that is created is oftentimes not rooted in the actual cultures and traditions of the places that are being colonized. and it also is creating misinformation about the region, like, for instance, that the harem is a place of sexual abandon, for instance.

Amira: It’s often understood in English, and the way that it's been translated as particularly like exactly just like a space for sexual abandon or lasciviousness. It's a space where the man in power, the Sultan, or whomever, has access to like an unlimited supply of women, and there and it's all about sex in this context. Whereas if you understand the word in its own context, harem, now I’m talking about in Arabic it would be harim, it comes from the same root of the word aihtiram which means respect. And it is basically just like, references the area of the house where women would gather, where they would be able to communicate with one another, and that is usually supposed to be inviolable to them. Like men, cannot enter unless they’re intimate family, or unless you know they're announced, and women can get ready, or something like that. So it also just references another kind of way of imagining women who are seen as exotic from a particular Western perspective…

Sarah: It's about that position of power like who like in in these two paintings that we're looking at right now like the beauty, you know the beauty layered and layered and layered and layered on with both of them right like the jewelry, the fabric, the hide, the women, the portraiture, the actual painting. The application of the paint like everything. It's just, there's so much beauty that it could be looked at and loved for that for all of the beauty. But all that beauty can also be used as a tool to make it okay, to make something that's truly violent okay, to make trauma and inflicting trauma and violence on a woman okay. And that's the problem.