Producing Desire
eBook - PDF

Producing Desire

Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900

  1. 242 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Producing Desire

Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900

About this book

This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source material—medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues—in a nuanced, wide-ranging, and powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual worlds through the set of discourses available to them. Dror Ze'evi finds that while some of these discourses were restrictive and others more permissive, all treated sex in its many manifestations as a natural human pursuit. And, he further argues that all these discourses were transformed and finally silenced in the last century, leaving very little to inform Middle Eastern societies in sexual matters. With its innovative approach toward the history of sexuality in the Middle East, Producing Desire sheds new light on the history of the Ottoman Empire, on the history of sexuality and gender, and on the Islamic Middle East today.

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Yes, you can access Producing Desire by Dror Ze’evi,Dror Ze'evi in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Middle Eastern History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. List of Tables
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Note on the Transliteration of Arabic and Turkish
  6. Introduction: Sex as Script
  7. 1. The Body Sexual: Medicine and Physiognomy
  8. 2. Regulating Desire: Shari ªa and Kanun
  9. 3. Morality Wars: Orthodoxy, Sufism, and Beardless Youths
  10. 4. Dream Interpretation and the Unconscious
  11. 5. Boys in the Hood: Shadow Theater as a SexualCounter-Script
  12. 6. The View from Without: Sexuality in Travel Accounts
  13. Conclusion: Modernity and Sexual Discourse
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index