The Western Framing of the Female Captive: A Hermeneutic Study of Captivity in Morocco

The study of the Western consumption of the female captive remains central to the circulation of cultural and social constructions in the mainstream visual and literary texts. Due to the massive upsurge of such constructs, the hermeneutic study of the existing images about captivity in the East has stipulated new perspectives into the production of these substantial messages that determine genuine challenges to the preexisting canonical view of cultural representations. As many scholars have advanced critics about the female images in many narratives, Western cinema has shown significant portraits of the female which draws an orientalist design of a discursive discourse, introducing extreme exoticness of both pleasures and destruction. With the promise to deconstruct the captive portraits of the female identity, this paper discusses the circulation of such images, explaining why they exist, offering some solutions, as well as offering an analysis of their possible impact on the public. Given the damaging misperceptions that exist as a result of their circulation and consumption, this paper fills a much-needed research gap by asking the following research questions. How does the circulation of these images reproduce issues of femininity and captivity? How do visuals reinvent the literary tradition to depict the female captive in the orientalist discourse? By answering these questions, the paper attempts to examine the issue of representation by adopting a cultural studies approach, relying specifically on qualitative content analysis to reveal alternative possibilities of some of the Western perceptions. The rationale behind this approach lies in the fact that cultural studies bash to study all aspects of cultures without canonizing some artifacts at the expense of others.