Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
The Beetle (bk 1), Orientalism, Transgender Lives - Coggle Diagram
The Beetle (bk 1), Orientalism, Transgender Lives
-
"in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said, 11)
what is Orientalism? a form of discrimination--it is a Western discourse to create a binary (West/East; Occident/Orient) that allows for mechanisms of CONTROL and domination; creating a stereotype which gets picked up as a normalcy
Book 1: Richard Holt's narration: currently unhoused and in need of work; London metropole is bad and economically unsound; jeopardizing workers
Hes like a person on the outer margins of society being judged, but then the person he finds in the home he breaks into his puts judgement on him because they are “foreign” and that scares him which is wild lol
"Keep still" "There was a quality in the voice I could not describe" (chp 3) "But I had no doubt it was a foreigner; it was the most disagreeable voice" (52). The irony of Holt breaking and entering but this person is the foreigner??? The accent is the horror? It's two words. The fear is rooted in fear of racialized other
questions of ownership: "if the house were empty...a moral and a legal right to shelter" (48); dude, just because you perceived it to be empty, it's not yours?
pg 46: feet dragging, body in labor;
Holt's masculinity: "I wanted to play the better man. [...] Instead I played the cur" (49); Cur as a "rascal" or scoundrel. Cowardly. Man = courage
"For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his"--reaffirms that man means able to 1) control oneself and 2) dominate others.
"fingers prodded me then and there [...]" (57 chp 4); the novel imagines white men's bodies as under attack
the larger politics of framing non-white bodies as sexually perilous, predatory, and invasive has current implications
-
Opening of chapter 5 with the new examination of the Beetle's body and face--"so essentially feminine"; "Beak like nose"--hi, historically used to mark race (anti-semitism, racial ethnography, etc); but it also "feminizes" to show the racial history of gender/the gendered history of race ; "yellow as safron"--racialization; the idea of youth and roundness/softness as feminizing
-
the focus on lips and language is a rhetorical tool to dismiss foreignness and accents and way to recenter Englishness and Anglophone proficiency
-