Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day

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. Cover Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Note on Text 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 Chapter 1 Locating Discourses on the Gender Binary (and Beyond) in Pre-modern Islamicate Societies Serena Tolino Chapter 2 Illusions of Androgyny: Cross-dressing Women (Ghulāmiyyāt) in Abbasid Society Johannes Thomann Chapter 3 Contesting Masculinity in Pre-modern Arab Societies: Intoxication, Desire and Antinomian Mysticism Danilo Marino Chapter 4 Three Genders, Two Sexualities: The Evidence of Ottoman Erotic Terminology İrvin Cemil Schick Part II Subverting the Sexual Norm in Modern ARAB Cultural Productions Chapter 5 Eros and Etiquette: Reflections on the Ban of a Central Theme in Nineteenth-Century Arab Writings Nadia Al-Bagdadi Chapter 6 Women’s Literature as Counter-Narrative in Baʿthist Iraq? Achim Rohde Chapter 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 Chapter 8 Living Archives of the Egyptian Human Rights Movement: The Political Biography of Aida Seif al-Dawla Chapter 9 Sex Work in Tangier and the Emergence of New Youthful Subjectivities Mériam Cheikh Chapter 10 The Straight Story: Challenging Heteronormativity in Beirut Chapter 11 Palestinian Queers and the Debate on Sexual Identity and Religious Normativity Nijmi Edres Index