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.
Edited by:
Professor Aymon Kreil,
Dr Lucia Sorbera,
Professor Serena Tolino
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 549g
ISBN: 9781838604080
ISBN 10: 1838604081
Series: Gender and Islam
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 24 December 2020
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
Aymon Kreil is Assistant Professor for the Anthropology of the Middle East at Ghent University, Belgium. He worked before at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Lucia Sorbera isChair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. Serena Tolino is Associate Professor in Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Reviews for Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day
This far-reaching collection offers a surprising array of sources, from early Ottoman erotic poetry to 1970s gay Egyptian cinema, and it informs us about a wide range of Muslim lives from crossdressing slaves in Abbasid Baghdad to female sex workers in modern Tangier. Yet it also does much more. The authors assembled here challenge us to rethink the categories by which we understand sex and desire, whether it is to test the comparability of modern notions of gender binaries against premodern texts or to chart the silencing of erotic discussions in nineteenth-century Arab writings. They resist easy answers to ideas about subversion in women’s novels in Baathist Iraq or reconciling Islam and queerness among modern Palestinians. Along the way, they craft indelible images: love of hashish and boys in Sufi communities, student feminists in 1970s Egypt, and closeted gay men in modern Lebanon. A rewarding read for novices and experts in the field alike. * Mathew Kuefler, Professor of History, San Diego State University, USA * A wonderfully rich and varied interdisciplinary collection, including both historical and contemporary perspectives, that provides us with a “glimpse of desire” by highlighting the plurality of meaning and practices linked to gender and sexuality in the Middle East. -- Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of Anthropology & Middle East Studies, Brown University, USA
