This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.
How might current theories of the queer archive, its ephemeral, idiosyncratic, and fetishized contents, and its affective relation to the past and present, need amending to accommodate non-Western contexts and their differing histories and cultural scripts of sexuality? This article addresses such questions by examining the İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, the never-completed, lifetime labor of love of the mid-twentieth-century Turkish historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu. The entries and illustrations in the eleven extant volumes turn out to be a veritable treasure trove of queer history, queer longing, and queer affect—one that nonetheless managed to pass itself off as acceptable reading material for any number of middle-class Turkish families. Facing the systematic erasure of Istanbul's centuries-old tradition of male homoerotic culture from the official and state record, Koçu makes his encyclopedic enterprise the covert home for a queer archive that, in refusing to disappear, becomes a queer politics.
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