Writing Histories of Sexuality in the Middle East

Abstract

The study of histories of sexuality in the region that today we term the has only recently become a domain populated by historians, and much inno vative work continues to be accomplished by literary scholars, social scientists, and, recently, art historians. This interdisciplinarity results in part from the fact that our primary sources confound modern disciplinary taxonomies—we encounter chroni cles as literature, poetry as political satire, belles lettres as social commentary, painted images more sexually graphic than the written word—so that silences in one genre or field of study may be vocalized in another. Because literary texts, particularly of the medieval and early modern periods, openly engaged sexual matters, literary and philological studies preceded the more purely historical. The buildup to histories of sexuality was gradual. The opening of the rich Ottoman archives following World War II facilitated social history and so cially oriented political history (Iranian studies lacks a comparable archive). In the 1980s, women's and then gender history was a significant stimulus to exploration of social cultures, slavery, gender and politics, spatial configurations of gender, and so on. Important publications of the early 1990s focused specifically on the history of sexualities in the region, and since then the field has made steady if not spectacular progress. Some preliminary observations may help to advance this forum's goal of facil itating comparative and transnational histories. First, the term Middle East is not a wholly accurate label for the region covered here, and its narrowness masks the rich potential for transnational history-writing that the actual history of the region invites. Only in the nineteenth century, with the loss of territory to European empires and overseas colonial powers, does it become an appropriate label (leaving aside quibbles over the terminology middle and east). Until then, the eastern Med iterranean, the North African coast, the Balkans, the Danube principalities, the Black Sea region, and substantial parts of the Caucasus and Central and South Asia were critical domains incorporated by the empires—Ottoman, Iranian, and colo nial—that dominated from late medieval until modern times. The borderlands of