Redirecting desire
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When describing the physical appearances of oriental bodies, colonial ethnographers oscillated between language that conveyed disgust and desire. The former is easier to comprehend from the perspective of a colonizing body that needs to justify its disdain and mistreatment of its colonized. The latter is more riddled with the complications of sexual desire. The "Other-bodies" being described with sensual language were almost always male, and Larochelle argues that this choice was twofold: first, in their principal othering, oriental men were sufficiently removed from the world of their white observers that any sexualization "remained on the level of allegory" and thus became an admissible, or at least less governed, vehicle for expressing homosexual desire (Larochelle 141). Second, redirecting the object of the colonial male gaze from the sexualized female "Other-body" was intended to minimize the risk of miscegenation or hybridization. Both motivations came from the overarching imperative to preserve a racially pure, heteropatriarchal reality.