Queering Orientalism and Contrapuntal Reading

Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to be models to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times censor in the West. Amer's analysis reveals Western literary representations of gender in the Middle Ages as cross-cultural, hybrid discourses as she reexamines borders-cultural, linguistic, historical, geographic-not as elements of separation and division but as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. Crossing these borders, she salvages key Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices from oblivion to give voice to a group that has long been silenced.

Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the “Turkish Renaissance” manifested itself, to some degree, as an “age of beloveds,” in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the “age of beloveds” was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.

The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society

A History of Ottoman Poetry

Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient In Intimate Outsiders , the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo As invited guests, these Europeans were “intimate outsiders” within the women’s quarters of elite Ottoman households At the same time, elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque

Queering Orientalism and Contrapuntal Reading

Citations

Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

References

Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society

A History of Ottoman Poetry

Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature

Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures