Full Description
What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere - emerge from very specific social and historical contexts.
The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliterations and Translations
Introduction. The Many Names of Desire: On the Study of Sexual Practices, Norms and Binaries in the Middle East, Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera and Serena Tolino
Part I. Who's Who: Beyond the Gender Binary
1. Locating Discourses on the Gender Binary (and Beyond) in Pre-modern Islamicate Societies, Serena Tolino
2. Illusions of Androgyny: Crossdressing Women (Ghulamiyyat) in Abbasid Society, Johannes Thomann
3. Contesting Masculinity in Pre-Modern Arab Societies. Intoxication, Desire and Antinomian Mysticism, Danilo Marino
4. Three Genders, Two Sexualities: the Evidence of Ottoman Erotic Terminology, Irvin Cemil Schick
Part II. Subverting the Sexual Norm in Modern Arab Cultural Productions
5. Eros and Etiquette - Reflections on the Ban of a Central Theme in Nineteenth Century Arab Writings, Nadia Al-Bagdadi
6. Women's Literature as Counter-Narrative in Ba'thist Iraq?, Achim Rohde
7. Framing the Closet: Gay Men in Egyptian Cinema in the 1970s, Koen M. Van Eynde
Part III: Sexuality, Power and Resilience in the Middle East and North Africa Today
8. Living Archives of the Egyptian Human Rights Movement: the Political Biography of Aida Seif al-Dawla, Lucia Sorbera
9. Sex Work in Tangier and the Emergence of New Youthful Subjectivities, Mériam Cheikh
10. The Straight Story - Challenging Heteronormativity in Beirut, Erica Li Lundqvist
11. Palestinian Queers and the Debate on Sexual Identity and Religious Normativity, Nijmi Edres
Note on Contributors
Indexes
Endorsements
