Friendship, sociability, and masculinity in the Ottoman Empire: An essay confronting the ghosts of historicism

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores the historical transformation of masculinity and male intimacy in the Ottoman Empire, with a special emphasis on ethnic, class and gender subtexts of same-sex relationships. Focusing on two significant historical narratives—one written by the historian Mustafâ Âlî in the late sixteenth century, the other by the nineteenth-century historian Cevdet Paşa—I will discuss the ways in which both historians produced narratives of transition and decadence and deployed a problematic historicism that does identify same-sex intimacy. Coming to terms with the inadequacies of both essentialist/identity-based and constructivist approaches for understanding historically specific gender and sexual identifications, I will argue for a new set of concepts that will allow us to appreciate the continuing instrumental significance of same-sex intimacy in a wider discussion of friendship, masculinity and conduct. I will also interrogate the extent to which we might read historical narratives, in spite of their historicist, silencing effects, from a new perspective on subjectivity—a perspective that accounts for the potential of historical subjects to weave webs of identification and sociability, as well as to create relational modes that escape the regulatory, hetero-normalizing agenda of historicism.