{"id":109,"date":"2025-10-12T23:24:30","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=109"},"modified":"2025-10-12T23:24:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:24:30","slug":"fanon-a-more-feminine-form-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/fanon-a-more-feminine-form-of-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Fanon + A More Feminine Form of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

After reading Prof. Fawzia\u2019s article about R.F. Kuang\u2019s novel <\/span>Babel<\/span><\/i>, I started reading <\/span>The Wretched of the Earth<\/span><\/i>, Franz Fanon\u2019s key decolonial text. I haven\u2019t made it through the entire book yet, but one key idea from Jean-Paul Sartre\u2019s preface is that men are made when they \u201c[thrust] out the settler through force of arms\u201d and decolonize themselves (Fanon 18).\u00a0 The decolonized, realized man forms himself by throwing back at the colonizer who \u201cno longer clearly remembers that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun\u201d his own violence (Fanon 14). \u201cThe rebel\u2019s weapon is the proof of his humanity,\u201d and his violence is a direct response to colonial violence imposed on him (Fanon 19).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Colonization, then, makes non-humans out of both the aggressor and the colonized. I found myself curious about how Fanon\u2019s theory fit into Bell\u2019s experience and action, especially because her work was mostly nonviolent\u2014at least, not overtly so, and especially not from Wallach\u2019s perspective, who provided most of our biographical information on Bell. It may be because England was more insidious in its influence in Iraq in comparison to its unfettered brutality in India, for example; or it might be a function of Bell\u2019s gender, since she was permitted less access to decisions that involved combat than contemporaries like Lawrence or Wilson.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mostly, though, I was interested in the first part of what Fanon wrote (as it was recounted by Sartre); that colonialism unmakes both the colonizer and the colonized. This theory provides a possible explanation for Bell and even Eberhardt\u2019s ability to \u201cunsex\u201d themselves in the East and take on more male social roles, as with Bell\u2019s negotiations among sheikhs and independent travel, and Eberhardt\u2019s independence and sexual exploits. Fanon\u2019s \u201cunmaking\u201d of colonizing men could be reframed as a movement so far to the masculine end of an imagined masculine-feminine spectrum, such that men become more like pure instruments of violence. Could it be possible that women colonizers are \u201cunmade\u201d differently from the male, in that they are pushed into traditional masculinity instead of total brutality? I was reminded in this train of thought of someone\u2019s comment from class about how colonizers conquered land in an eerily similar way to how men \u201cconquer\u201d female bodies, as well as the references in Wallach\u2019s biography to Bell\u2019s desire to \u201cpenetrate\u201d Arabia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bell\u2019s colonialist activities in Iraq could then be conceptualized as a more feminine, but still violent, mode of conquering, something based more in exploitative social, cultural, and economic relations than in direct violence. This might contextualize the quote from <\/span>A Woman in Arabia<\/span><\/i>, too: \u201cIf the American and British invaders of 2003, after ousting Saddam Hussein, had read and taken to heart what Gertrude had to say on establishing peace in Iraq, there might have been far fewer of the bombings and burnings that have continued to this day\u201d (A Woman of Arabia 17). The author would likely advocate for a more neocolonialist, soft-power approach to relations with the East\u2014in the context of Bell, a more \u2018feminine\u2019 form of power, enabled by a combination of Orientalism, racism, and the sense of freedom colonialists derived from cultural and spatial distance from the colonial motherland. This strain would be perpetuated not by men \u201cunmade\u201d into pure weaponry, but by women made into effective agents of imperial power.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After reading Prof. Fawzia\u2019s article about R.F. Kuang\u2019s novel Babel, I started reading The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon\u2019s key decolonial text. I haven\u2019t made it through the entire book yet, but one key idea from Jean-Paul Sartre\u2019s preface is that men are made when they \u201c[thrust] out the settler through force of arms\u201d … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fanon + A More Feminine Form of Power”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6926,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6926"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}