Crossing Borders

Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

Sahar Amer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780812240870
  9780812240870
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812201086
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety.In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to be models to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times censor in the West.Amer's analysis reveals Western literary representations of gender in the Middle Ages as cross-cultural, hybrid discourses as she reexamines borders—cultural, linguistic, historical, geographic—not as elements of separation and division but as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. Crossing these borders, she salvages key Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices from oblivion to give voice to a group that has long been silenced.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Chapter One Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Same-Sex Love Between Women
• Chapter Two Crossing Linguistic Borders: Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des Manières and Arabic Erotic Treatises
• Chapter Three Crossing Sartorial Lines: Female Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive and The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Boudour from the One Thousand and One Nights
• Chapter Four Crossing the Lines of Friendship: Jean Renart’s Escoufle, Saracen Silk, and Intercultural Encounters
• Chapter Five Crossing Social and Cultural Borders: Jean Renart’s Escoufle and the Traditions of Zarf, Jawaris, and Qaynas in the Islamicate World
• Conclusion Beyond Orientalist Presuppositions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments