The Homoerotics of Orientalism

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. Examining European accounts of sites like Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, and unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable work models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today.