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Structure of the Book 9 9 dressing and their relationship to homosexual intimacy. Chapter 11 , 'Tempting Pederasty', investigates the complex world of pederasty, its distinction from male homosexuality, its relative excellence compared to heterosexuality, and the involvement of women in pederastic tendencies. It considers pederasty in relation to the economic activity of trade , and the admiration of male beauty in conjunction with Sufi mysticism, wine drinking, and obscene poetry, particularly the influential role of Abu Nuwas. Chapter 12 , 'Hedonistic Narrative', presents the unequivocally explicit sexual accounts involving homoerotic games, sexual verbal games, and stories of sexual intercourse, fun, and pleasure.
Structure of the Book 9 9 dressing and their relationship to homosexual intimacy. Chapter 11 , 'Tempting Pederasty', investigates the complex world of pederasty, its distinction from male homosexuality, its relative excellence compared to heterosexuality, and the involvement of women in pederastic tendencies. It considers pederasty in relation to the economic activity of trade , and the admiration of male beauty in conjunction with Sufi mysticism, wine drinking, and obscene poetry, particularly the influential role of Abu Nuwas. Chapter 12 , 'Hedonistic Narrative', presents the unequivocally explicit sexual accounts involving homoerotic games, sexual verbal games, and stories of sexual intercourse, fun, and pleasure.
Th is article employs sources produced by people who worked at the Abbasid court in order to expose a tension in early Islamic society between two systems of sacrility. An emerging monotheism was promoted by pious elders (mashāyikh) and ascetics (nussāk), which gave power and authority to one absolute deity, Allāh. Th e court, and most members of society, favored an older system, henotheism, which championed the sacrility of leadership archetypes, the king, sultan, saint, and master-teacher, while tolerating the emerging new sacredness of the One. Th e latter system enjoyed familiarity since ancient times in the Near East and vested nearly all leadership roles in society with a measure of sacred power and authority, hence adding to the stability of Abbasid hierarchy. Here, I examine three major practices at the court for generating sacrility, including praise hymns (madīḥ) in honor of great men, palace space-usage and architecture, as well as bacchic culture, which all privileged the caliph and his subordinates. Th e implications of symbol usage extend far beyond the court since underlings appropriated it in seeking rank and status by emulating their superiors.
The history of sexuality is now such a respectable academic discipline, or at least such an established one, that its practitioners no longer feel much pressure to defend the enterprise -to rescue it from suspicions of being a palpable absurdity. Once upon a time, the very phrase "the history of sexuality" sounded like a contradiction in terms: how, after all, could sexuality have a history? Nowadays, by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history that we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history sexuality has. If such questions do come up, they get dealt with cursorily, in the course of the methodological throat clearing that historians ritually perform in the opening paragraphs of scholarly articles. Recently, this exercise has tended to include a more or less obligatory reference to the trouble once caused to historians, long long ago in a country far far away, by theorists who had argued that sexuality was socially constructed -an intriguing idea in its time and place, or so we are reassuringly told, but one that was taken to outlandish extremes and that no one much credits any longer. 1 With the disruptive potential of these metahistorical questions safely relegated to the past, the historian of sexuality can get down, or get back, to the business at hand.But this new consensus, and the sense of theoretical closure that accompanies it, is premature. I believe that it is more useful than ever to ask how sexuality can have a history. The point of such a question, to be sure, is no longer to register the questioner's skepticism and incredulity (as if to say, "How on earth could such a thing be possible?") but to inquire more closely into the modalities of historical being that sexuality possesses: to ask how exactly-in what terms, by virtue of what temporality, in which of its dimensions or aspects-sexuality does have a history.That question, of course, has already been answered in a number of ways, each of them manifesting a different strategy for articulating the relation between GLQ 6:1
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