Orientalist descriptions of Muslim women are an extension of the Orient as a commodity. Muslim women were described as exhibiting a “revolting immorality,” and exhibiting their unrestrained sexuality in public, much like the depictions of other desirable non-European females. In one description, Muslim dancers perform in “a blaze of Oriental vice,” “heads and breasts now thrown back, now thrown forward to within a hand’s breath of my face, their flesh quivering.”

DEFINE: Illustrates how Orientalist discourse functioned as a tool of commodification, framing Muslim women's portrayal within colonial power structures.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 409