Abstract
Orientalism, which we can define as how the West recognizes the East, can be determined in many different fields such as literature, music, and architectural painting since ancient times. In orientalist ideology, the negative traits of the other are always emphasized. Because, as Said also emphasizes, the West can only create its own self by alienating and negating the East. The representation styles of marginalized societies; identities and genders are negative in parallel with the Western understanding in the movies that are dominated by the orientalist ideology. The Eastern woman, who is currently the absolute other in terms of gender, is marginalized once again in the examples of Orientalist cinema. This study, based on the movie Tight Dress, aims to observe the hegemonic structure of the willingness to represent women in the patriarchal order of the Eastern Muslim-Turkish representation of women produced within the Western masculine fantasy discourse within the framework of feminist theory and to reveal the orientalist elements in the film through semiotic analysis.
TopThe Relationship Between Orientalism And Cinema
Orientalism is a concept created based on Western intellectuals, artists, and novelists in the East that took shape between the 18th and 19th centuries. The colonialist’s cultural hegemony of the 18th and 19th centuries discursively orientalize the Orient; invented a represented it in a way that essentialized specific traits -backward degenerate, uncivilized and so forth- to show its inferiority, to serve the West’s interest and desire for domination and to create another against whom the West’s identity as superior is presented (Khamas, 2013: 24).
Key Terms in this Chapter
East: The place where the sun rises according to the location.
Orientalism: Orientalism is the term that applied to express east-west relations and interactions from past to present. As Edward Said specify it, orientalism is the prejudiced definition, imagination, and thoughts that the Western world has established about the Eastern world by putting itself in the center.
Cinema: As a branch of fine arts.
Woman: Adult female human.
Semiotic Analysis: Semiotics is a branch of science that examines the relationship between verbal and non-verbal indicators and the systems formed by these indicators.
Tight Dress: A Turkish film made in 2016.
West: The region in the direction where the sun sets according to the location.
Feminism: It is a movement consisting of various ideologies, social movements and mass organizations aimed at eliminating inequalities by recognizing the rights of women and protecting these rights.