The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax: Progressive Orientalism and the Arab Spring

Andrew Orr

Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2023

The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax

Progressive Orientalism and the Arab Spring

Andrew Orr

Volume 1 in the series Transnational Queer Histories

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111057231

Overview
Contents

About this book

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

Author / Editor information

Andrew Orr, Kansas State University, Manhattan KS, USA.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
Introduction: Orientalism and the Western Imagination Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter I Crafting a Digital Heroine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
Chapter II Amina and the Media Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Chapter III The Scandal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Chapter IV Academics, Ideology, and Identity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Audience: Historians of the Middle East, Arab Spring scholars, critical IR scholars, digital studies scholars
Pages
- Front matter: 11
- Main content: 161
Keywords: Hoax; Progressive; Arab Spring; Orientalism

eBook

Published: April 3, 2023
ISBN: 9783111057231

Hardcover

Published: April 3, 2023
ISBN: 9783111056579