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Andrew Orr
Walter de Gruyter

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

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AuthorAndrew Orr
PublisherWalter de Gruyter
PublishedMar 01 2023
Book FormatHardcover
ISBN-139783111056579
Dimensions-
Weight-
BISAC
CategoriesHistory > Middle East - General
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

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 exists 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.

Author Bio

Andrew Orr is a specialist in modern military history. He received his B.A. from Claremont Mckenna College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. His work focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries and explores the boundaries of civilian and military identity. His first book, Women and the French Army 1914-1904, studied women’s roles in the French military and civil-military relations in France during the era of the world wars.

Dr. Orr has published on intelligence operations in the Middle East, imperialism, civil-military relations, and the history of French Communist Party. His current projects include a book on French involvement in the Turkish War of Independence and a cultural history of the military in American life since 1973.

He teaches classes in European history, American military history, and African history. Dr. Orr accepts history graduate students in European history, European and American military history, and security studies.

Source: Kansas State University

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