NMC357H1

Gender and Sexuality in Premodern Arabic Literature

Students read translations of Arabic literary texts composed by women or dealing with gender and sexuality. Class discussion considers debates in the field about how to analyze these texts in their historical context and in a theoretically grounded manner. Topics addressed include: popular and elite narrative representations of gender and sexuality; pre-Islamic and Abbasid poetry and remarks composed by women, and their transmission in male-authored anthologies; hetero- and homoerotic obscenity and eroticism in Arabic poetry, epistles, and scientific texts; and literary representations of sexual minorities like eunuchs, intersex people, and mukhannathūn (people with apparently male biology who dressed and behaved as women, and had a specific social position at certain times).