Yesterday the world discovered that Amina Arraf and her blog, “A Gay Girl in Damascus” were a hoax. In a post written by the blog’s sole author, Tom MacMaster, Amina’s followers and supporters were told that the entire blog, her abduction, everything was fiction. In his revelatory post, MacMaster writes, “This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.” This particular line struck a chord in me because Tom MacMaster, in his literary experiment gone wildly out-of-control, inadvertently accomplished something positive and that is illustrating the depth of liberal Orientalism’s influence on Western society.
When I first learned that the case of Amina Arraf was a hoax, I felt sick to my stomach. I was angry and disgusted that I not only let myself be drawn into the hoax but also because of MacMaster’s dismissal of his own guilt by accusing Westerners of being agents of liberal Orientalism. As I calmed down, I began to ask myself: why am I so angry? Is it because Amina’s case was a fraud? Because this takes attention away from the gross human rights violations of the Syrian regime? Indeed, those are all things that upset me, but what made me mad was that I was drawn in and I was a participant in liberal Orientalism. By posting the graphic of Amina, by joining Facebook support groups of Amina, by writing about her, I was drawn into the hoax and also became an agent of liberal Orientalism. Despite being fed a steady diet of Said for most of my intellectual career, I still could not escape the label of Orientalist or avoid participating in perpetuating a fetishization of the East by the West. That’s embarrassing and humiliating, but it’s also sobering. I mentioned some of these points on Jezebel, about my discomfort and that MacMaster makes a valid point:
Intellectually and emotionally this is really jarring. The unprofessional side of me wants to point the finger and say, “Wow, you have some balls, pal!” but I know that my own personal and professional uneasiness and anger with this whole situation does prove his point about “liberal Orientalism.” As someone who also promoted this story, it’s a hard pill to swallow that despite being intellectually raised on a steady died of Said, the knee-jerk reaction is still there to run out and save Eastern women from Eastern men and despotic rule! Tom MacMaster simply pointed this out when he revealed/admitted that his blog and its author, Amina, “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” is a hoax.
Drawing attention to the idea of a “liberal Orientalism” as being the cause? motivation? of his blog certainly doesn’t absolve him of what he did or his own participation in “liberal Orientalism” and I really think that by attempting to share and/or invert the guilt (right here, I feel guilty) he makes me even angrier (again, the truth hurts).
People jumped on this cause because Amina Arraf was a novelty and the Western impulse is to SAVE, however destructive and quixotic that endeavor may be. In her lesbian identity, together with her Arab/Syrian identity, she became “trendy” because of her sexuality, because of her Arab identity, because she was deviant. Is that not why Orientalism exists? An utter fascination with the “deviancy” of the Arab World? Islam: Deviant. Polygamy: Deviant. Homosexuality: Deviant. When I pointed this out, that even the so-called “Jezzies” were participants in liberal Orientalism, I was essentially told that I was “wrong.” Commenters absolved themselves of responsibility by deleting “Arab,” which was critical to Amina Arraf’s identity and cause, and saying that it was not wrong to support the release of a woman who was demonstrating her right to free speech and was subsequently imprisoned by the regime. No one was willing to take responsibility or hold themselves accountable for what MacMaster very simply states in that there is an intense “pervasiveness of liberal Orientalism.” All of the commenters believe, as enlightened, indepedendent feminist women that they are not guilty of being Orientalists themselves, but in fact they are Orientalists. Simply removing an adjective does not absolve you from guilt or from the label.
This whole situation demonstrates that when someone points out, even in as in the case of Tom MacMaster, in an effort to assuage and absolve some of his guilt, that there is a pervasive liberal Orientalism in the West, that we learned nothing from Said, and we continue to believe that we are more evolved and as women we must save other women. It is horrifying, as an academic, to be caught-up in this hoax and to realise that I was also a participant after years and years of learning to push back against Orientalism, to identify and subvert it, it seems that even the most self-conscious academic, activist, woman can be led astray by a clever ruse. MacMaster successfully, if inadvertently, demonstrated that we are certainly not in a post-racial, post-Orientalist world. If anything, we are able to justify, rationalize, and re-package our Orientalism. Sadly, when confronted with the truth, it is much easier to deny, deny, deny and accuse each other rather than it is to accept the fact that we all had a hand in perpetuating Orientalism in this instance. People who say that their support of “Amina” was not relevant to her Syrian/Arab identity or that it meant anything at all, is a lie. Being candid with oneself and admitting that we “were had” will lead to much better discussions and self-consciousness when trying to understand deeper issues in the Middle East and the Arab World and how we, as a Western public form our approach.
Initially very angry with Tom MacMaster for his fraud, I am now grateful that his blog and the ruse helped me to re-evaluate my approach and my self-consciousness in working in gender and sexuality in Middle Eastern and Muslim-majority countries/communities. If anything, the results of the blog asks us to be more self-aware of our own Orientalism(s). It forced me to check myself and to own my own Orientalist tendencies, which although I think are inevitable given my privilege, being conscious of them and acknowledging them is important if we are ever to fully unpack and dissemble Orientalist structures and ways of knowing and viewing the “Other” in the “East.”
“Despite being fed a steady diet of Said for most of my intellectual career, I still could not escape the label of Orientalist or avoid participating in perpetuating a fetishization of the East by the West.”
It is not just East, but a particular strain of it; female, Muslim, Sunni, and, definitely, Arab.
Almost like Riverbend, another likely hoaxer, who claimed to be of mixed Shia-Sunni origin.
Amina’s homosexuality just adds another layer to the well-established character of an Eastern revolutionary the West would like to see.
I thought the story with the security forces leaving her home because her dad had some kind of cinematic spiel that also outed her as gay was super weird and highly implausible. But I had also jumped onto the bandwagon along with other LGBTQ bloggers based in the US when I saw the alerts up. The hoax was kind of a privilegefest and may have made things even more difficult for marginalized bloggers who aren’t hoaxes.
In a US context, there’s a history of white writers putting out false autobiographies about being from non-white backgrounds.