Les puschts, les bardaches, les « almées… mâles » : une caricature de la femme orientale ou un autre rêve d’Orient ?
Puschts, bardashes, “male… almehs”: a caricature of the Oriental woman, or another Oriental dream?

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on some representations of male Oriental dancers who dance dressed as women. It tries to answer the question whether those representations form a caricature of the Oriental woman or if it is another, perverse, Oriental dream. The first part of the paper presents the Oriental male dancer and shows how he was perceived in the Middle East and in Europe. The second part discusses the critics of male dancers’ behaviour in the travelogues by Jean Potocki and Vivant Denon. The three following sections analyse three examples of descriptions dating from the 1840-1850 by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. It turns out that, with time, the caricature becomes less obvious and the descriptions are more and more aesthetic. One can no longer only mock and condemn the male dancers, a new perverse dream seems to be born.

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