Reverse Orientalism: The Westerner as the Eroticized Other in Persian Arts since the 17th Century

My paper will focus on less known and untouched art historical material that exists in old private houses of Persia, mostly located in Isfahan, Iran. Wall paintings of these houses show idealistic images of European females as non-native but desirable Others from the seventeenth century onward. European woman or zan-i- farangi, which can be translated as “Frankish Woman” or “European woman”, was a pictorial theme in the late Safavid period (1501–1736), this means the exoticization of the European female in Persia occurred long before widespread Western colonial endeavors around the globe. In line with the authoritative critique of Edward Said against what he saw as the flaws of Orientalism, many scholars have argued about the inaccuracy of the cultural representation of the Oriental world in Western scholarship and academia. In the realm of the arts, more specifically in arts that address the human body especially its erotic nature, the sympathizers of Said’s approach have argued that the depiction of Eastern (semi-) nude women in private spaces such as Turkish baths and harems by Western artists have aimed to fetishize and eroticize Eastern women (Other) for the pleasure of the European male voyeur. In my paper, I argue that the same process occurs in the Islamic world, reversing some premises of Orientalism in which the East is unfailingly assumed as a passive object of desirability and submissive recipient of the Western male sexual fantasy.