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"This thesis investigates modes of white self-making that construct whiteness in relation to an East Asian other. In certain instances, the absorption of East Asian cultural practices into white transgender women's gendered expressions extends beyond mere cultural appropriation. A problem rests instead in embodiment and self-making. I present the term "appropriative embodiment" to describe processes by which social groups, such as white trans women, make use of a privileged or majoritarian component of their identity, whiteness here, to ameliorate or better navigate oppression that stems from a minoritarian facet of their identity, transness and womanhood here. This thesis works from interviews with three distinct white trans women to explore the structure of appropriative embodiment as a co-construction of both whiteness and East Asian femininity through the white gaze. I question how and to what end white trans women make use of East Asian aesthetics and use these interviews as reference points for recognizing imperial legacies. This thesis views white trans women's appropriative embodiment of East Asian aesthetics as a practice occurring within a white supremacist global structure."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

This thesis examines the iterations of Orientalism and cosmopolitanism as they surface in two of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's greatest German Singspiel, the 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) and the 1791 Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). By examining the interplay between the libretti and the scores for these operas, the way in which Mozart represented his characters along the lines of race, social class, and gender elucidates his worldview as a product of his childhood travelling across the continent of Europe. These analyses are further contextualized by studies of Habsburg-Ottoman relations in the century before the premiere of Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Freemasonry in eighteenth-century Europe, two important political currents to consider among other sociopolitical factors in the commissioning and composition of these two operas. The research concluded that Mozart's Orientalism surfaced most prominently in the characters of Osmin and Monostatos, whose abhorrent behavior strongly juxtaposes the virtuousness of Mozart's European heroes and precludes them from participating in each opera's celebratory cosmopolitan finale. By contrast, the Pasha Selim and high priest Sarastro illustrate Mozart's cosmopolitan worldview with their inclusion in a Western-oriented value system through their magnanimity, goodness, and virtue despite their Oriental origins. The study of these four Orientals and their interactions with the Western characters concludes that Mozart illustrated the importance of goodness and virtue in his cosmopolitan worldview through his Orientalist representations.

Although postcolonial criticism has run its course for thirty years, a fresh look at Edward Said's Orientalism offers insight into how Orientalism functions in the writings of three British dames. Gertrude Bell in The Desert and the Sown, Freya Stark in The Southern Gates of Arabia, and E.S. Drower in The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, however, challenge Said's theory. Their writing raises questions about how gender alters the discourse about the Other, and whether Said essentializes the Occident. Bell, Stark, and Drower serve as case studies in which to analyze the politically and rhetorically complex interactions between the West and the East at the end of the Colonial period. Over time, these women moved from approaching the Other with superior attitudes and a focus on otherness to developing a sympathetic understanding and greater appreciation of the similarities between the West and the East.