Andrew Orr: The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax explores the vulnerability of educated and politically engaged Westerners to Progressive Orientalism, a form of Orientalism embedded within otherwise egalitarian and anti-imperialist Western thought. Early in the Arab Spring, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog appeared. Its author claimed to be Amina Arraf, a Syrian American lesbian Muslim woman living in Damascus. After the blog s went viral in April 2011, Western journalists electronically interviewed Amina, magnifying the blog s claim that the Syrian uprising was an ethnically and religiously pluralist movement anchored in an expansive sense of social solidarity. However, after a post announced that the secret police had kidnapped Amina, journalists and activists belatedly realized that Amina did not exist and Thomas Tom MacMaster, a forty-year-old straight white American man and peace activist living and studying medieval history in Scotland was the blog s true author. MacMaster s hoax succeeded by melding his and his audience s shared political and cultural beliefs into a falsified version of the Syrian Revolution that validated their views of themselves as anti-racist and anti-imperialist progressives by erasing real Syrians.
Watch our book talk with the author Andrew Orr here: https://youtu. be / MnaaxlO6Vuw