The Construction of the Non-Western, Masculinized Other in Western Media: a comparative visual analysis from the 1900s, 1940s and 2000s.

Abstract

In recent discussions about Western identity, a fear of Muslim men has predominated the debate. It is said that they are a threat to Western women, and thus to the Western identity. This research delves deeper into this discourse by focusing on the question: “how has the non-Western masculine Other been constructed through Western media in the past century?” This is done by a crosssectional visual analysis of popularized visual imagery from the 1920s, the 1940s and the 2000s. The analysis focuses on the intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. This research demonstrates that the current discussion on fear of Muslim men is not an isolated case, but can rather be seen in continuous timeline of the “West vs the Rest”, in which masculinity and femininity are used within the same frameworks to establish who can be defined as the Self and who is defined as the Other. By doing so, this research challenges a contemporary Western structure of Self- and Otherhood, emphasizing that while every form of marginalization, oppression and suffering is unique, the system which creates it is one and the same: a system which defines the creation of the self by means of controlling the Other.