Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T04:52:26.424Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Friendship, sociability, and masculinity in the Ottoman Empire: An essay confronting the ghosts of historicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Serkan Delice
Serkan Delice*
Affiliation:
University of the Arts London, United Kingdom, delices_tr@yahoo.co.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper explores the historical transformation of masculinity and male intimacy in the Ottoman Empire, with a special emphasis on ethnic, class and gender subtexts of same-sex relationships. Focusing on two significant historical narratives—one written by the historian Mustafâ Âlî in the late sixteenth century, the other by the nineteenth-century historian Cevdet Paşa—I will discuss the ways in which both historians produced narratives of transition and decadence and deployed a problematic historicism that does identify same-sex intimacy. Coming to terms with the inadequacies of both essentialist/identity-based and constructivist approaches for understanding historically specific gender and sexual identifications, I will argue for a new set of concepts that will allow us to appreciate the continuing instrumental significance of same-sex intimacy in a wider discussion of friendship, masculinity and conduct. I will also interrogate the extent to which we might read historical narratives, in spite of their historicist, silencing effects, from a new perspective on subjectivity—a perspective that accounts for the potential of historical subjects to weave webs of identification and sociability, as well as to create relational modes that escape the regulatory, hetero-normalizing agenda of historicism.

Keywords

masculinityfriendshipgendersexualityOttoman historyFoucaulthetero-normativityhistoricismsubjectivity
Type
Dossier on Gender, Ethnicity, and the Nation-State
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 42 , Spring 2010 , pp. 103 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akgündüz, Ahmet. İslam Hukukunda Kölelik-Cariyelik Müessesesi ve Osmanlı'da Harem, İstanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1995.Google Scholar
Andrews, Walter G., and Kalpaklı, Mehmet. The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Ben-Naeh, Yaron. “Moshko the Jew and His Gay Friends: Same-Sex Sexual Relations in Ottoman Jewish Society.” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 1-2 (2005): 79–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures.” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 11–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Erol, Ali. “Türkiye'de Eşcinsellik.” Savaş Karşıtları (2005), http://www.savaskarsitlari.org/arsiv.asp?ArsivTi pID=1&ArsivAnaID=27952.Google Scholar
Fleischer, Cornell H.Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âlî, 7546-1600. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleischer, Cornell H. “Gelibolulu Mustafâ ‘Âlî Efendi, 1541-1600: A Study in Ottoman Historical Consciousness.” Dissertation, Princeton University, 1982.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “De l'amitié comme mode de vie.” Gai Pied, no. 25 (1981): 38–39.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Edited by Rabinow, Paul. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, edited by Rabinow, Paul, 135–40. London: Penguin Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Freccero, Carla. Queer/ Early / Modern, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Cayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Gökyay, Orhan Şaikt ed. Görgü ve Toplum Kuralları Üzerinde Ziyâfet Sofraları: (Mevâ'ıdü'n Nefâis Fî-Kavâ'ıâı'l-Mecâlis). İstanbul: Tercüman Gazetesi, 1978.Google Scholar
Halperin, David. “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality.” Representations, no. 63 (1998): 93–120.Google Scholar
Hocaoğlu, Murat. Eşcinsel Erkekler, Yirmi Be$ Tanıklık, İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2002.Google Scholar
Holden, Philip. “Rethinking Colonial Discourse Analysis and Queer Studies.” In Imperial Desire, edited by Holden, P. and Ruppel, R. J., 295–321. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Kuru, Selim Sırrı. “Sex in the Text: Deli Birader's Dâfi'ü'l-Gumûm ve Râfi’ü'l-Humûm and the Ottoman Literary Canon.” Middle Eastern Literatures 10, no. 2 (2007): 157–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meram, Ali Kemal. Padişah Analart ve 600 Yıl Bizi Yöneten Devşirmeler. İstanbul: Toplumsal Dönüşüm Yayınları, 1997.Google Scholar
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of HistoricalAnalysis?” Journal of Women's History 18, no. 1 (2006): 11–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paşa, Ahmed Cevdet. Ma'rûzât. Edited by Halaçoğlu, Yusuf. İstanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1980.Google Scholar
Peirce, Leslie. “Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order: The Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society.” In Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, edited by Zìlfì, Madeline C., 169–96. Leiden: Brill, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Percy, William A. IIIPederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Rowson, Everett K. “The Traffic in Boys: Slavery and Homoerotic Liaisons in Elite Abbasid Society.” Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no. 2 (2008): 193–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Jan. The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History, and Orientalism (1500-1923). Vol. 1, Poetry, Historiography, Biography and Autobiography. İstanbul: Isis Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Silay, Kemal. Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court: Medieval Inheritance and the Need for Change. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University, 1994.Google Scholar
Soydan, Serdar. “Bursa'da Yürümek ya da Yürü/t/ül/me/mek: EBTT Derneklerinin 6 Ağustos 2006 Bursa Yürüyüşü.” Feminisite, http://www.feminisite.net/news.php?act=details&nid=207#bursada%20yurumek.Google Scholar
Şeker, Mehmet, ed. Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Âlî ve Mevâ'ıdü'n-Nefâis Fî-Kavâ'ıdi'l-Mecâlis. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1997.Google Scholar
Tekin, Şinasi, and Tekin, Gönül Alpay, eds. The Ottoman Gentleman of the Sixteenth Century. Mustafa ‘Âlî’s Mevâ'idü'n-Nefâis Fî-Kavâ'ıdi'l-Mecâlis: “Tables of Delicacies Concerning the Rules of Social Gatherings”. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2003.Google Scholar
Traub, Valerie. “The Past Is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies.” In İslamicate Sexualities, Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Babayan, K. and Najmabadi, A., 1–40. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2008.Google Scholar
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman, 1981.Google Scholar
Ze'evi, Dror. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse In the Ottoman Middle-East, 1500-1900. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.Google Scholar