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Could Edward Said have known at the time he wrote Orientalism that he would not only be revolutionizing the field of Middle East Studies and the disciplines at its core, but also a number of allied and aligned fields, one of which, Women's Studies, had not fully come into being? This presentation is about genealogies of knowledge, in this case Middle East gender studies. It is about counter-hegemonic thought, in this case, the rupture of the genealogy of Orientalist representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim women.

Brandy Lien Worrall does not search for an identity here. She surveys, acknowledges the dust that has gathered on these lives, and gives us sense. Not the sense of heritage or displacement, but the sense of distance to be traversed. Those of us who are immigrants recognize this distance. In this case, the distance stretches itself out between Vietnam and America, Long An and Mifflintown, Outsider and American, Enemy and Family. It is not an identity she gives us, be it a biracial, bicultural, Vietnamese, or rural Pennsylvanian Dutch identity. It is the crossing of that distance, not from one to the other in an order of progress, but back and forth as "history" condenses into other narratives of foreign policy debacles, and justification for more resolute conduct in future wars abroad. We take these last to be real: Desert Storm's, and the Afghanistan campaign's rectification of those foreign policy mistakes vouches for their truth.