Although there is no doubt that the vocabulary extracted thus far is not exhaustive, some clear patterns have emerged. In particular, it indicates that one can speak of three genders and two sexualities. First, rather than a male/female dichotomy, sources clearly view men, women and boys as three distinct genders. Indeed, boys are not deemed ‘feminine’, nor are they mere substitutes for women; while they do share certain characteristics with them, such as the absence of facial hair, boys are clearly considered a separate gender. Furthermore, since they grow up to be men, gender is fluid and, in a sense, every adult man is ‘transgender’, having once been a boy.
Second, sources suggest that there are two distinct sexualities. But rather than a hetero/homosexual dichotomy, the two sexualities are defined by penetrating and being penetrated. For a man who penetrates, whom he penetrates was considered to be of little consequence and primarily a matter of personal taste. It is indeed significant that the words used for an ‘active’ man’s sexual orientation were quite devoid of value judgment: for example, matlab (demands, wishes, desires), meşreb (temperament, character, disposition), mezheb (manner, mode of conduct, sect), tarîk (path, way, method, manner), and tercîh (choice, preference). Being objects of penetration, boys and women were considered not quite as noble as men. As sexual partners, however, neither women nor boys were held to be more estimable than the other. In short, instead of a well-defined sexual identity, literature suggests that, in Ottoman society, a man’s choice of sexual partner was viewed purely as a matter of taste, not unlike a person today might prefer wine over beer or vice versa.
El-Rouayheb has shown that the assessment of many Western Orientalists concerning the ostensible prominence and acceptance of homosexuality in the Middle East and North Africa has been anachronistic, suffering from the presentist presumption of the universal and transhistorical validity of a unitary notion of homosexuality. He has argued that pre- and early modern Arabic sources suggest the existence of a more nuanced, role- and age-differentiated view of same-sex relations. As Frédéric Lagrange, a scholar of Arabic literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, has put it in Islamicate Sexualities (2008): ‘the contemporary Western reader who has never perhaps questioned his holistic conception of homosexuality finds it “sliced up” into a multitude of role specialisations, since medieval authors usually see no “community of desire” between, for instance, the active and the passive partners of homosexual intercourse.’
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