This book traces how ideas about sexuality and gender have been constructed and subverted throughout history in Islamic societies. Starting from the premise that the very concepts of 'Near and Middle East' originate from Eurocentric apprehensions of the region, the book avoids imposing Western sexual categories on the different countries under consideration. Instead it highlights the multiple notions of sexuality and gender that have always circulated in the Islamicate world.
Taking a chronological approach, and spanning case studies from the 9th to the 21st centuries, the book includes contributions on philology, literature, anthropology, history, and politics to showcase the plurality of discourses on sexuality and gender and how they interconnect. The first part of the book examines how gender categories were constructed, discussed and challenged from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. This section looks at language, law, medicine and adab to understand topics such as masculinity and femininity in religious and legal medieval texts; effeminate men in medieval literature; and ideas about passive and active sexual roles in the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arabic cultural production to reveal how a less fluid gender binary, constructed in terms of man and woman, came about with the European influence. The third part comprises contributions from the social sciences and builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to understand how people define themselves, from single mothers in Egypt to queer Palestinians living in Israel.
Each chapter questions sexual categories by historicizing the notions of masculinity, femininity and what is in between,
and glimpsing what different sexual norms have meant for people in the Middle East.
