Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures

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What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book explores sex and desire in Muslim cultures through chapters spanning the 9th to 21st centuries. It examines how sexual norms and their underpinning categories arise from diverse subjectivities, illustrating the ongoing negotiation of norms, their boundaries, and subversion. The cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures emerge from specific social and historical contexts. The first part investigates the construction, discussion, and challenge of sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part focuses on literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a space for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each contribution reveals how understandings of sexualities and the subjectivities they create are rooted in the interdependent relationships between gender and political power. By identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book transcends the norm versus transgression dichotomy, offering insights into the significance of various sexual norms across different historical periods in the Middle East.