Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures

by Sahar Amer

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."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Feminism, Medieval, Queer Studies

264 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Heather Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of studies of texts featuring women’s relationships and especially erotic or romantic relationships in medieval literature, with the added angle that the author is tracing connections and contrasts between Arabic and French texts. There’s a growing body of literature in this general field and I tend to collect them. One of these days I mean to put together an on-line “sourcebook” of themes and motifs taken from both history and literature that could be useful or inspirational to modern authors writing fiction about lesbians in historic settings (or historic-inspired fantasy settings).

[The Unsafe Lorekeeper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This well-researched and well-written book explores attitudes toward sexuality in the medieval Arab world and compare these with the moralizing and censorship that occurred once Arab literature began to be translated into European languages. Particularly interesting is the assertion that, in the medieval Arab world, there was not a special word for bisexuality because it was considered the default behavior.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this interesting, but like a lot of comparative litcrit, not always the most persuasive. Also I’m just in a ‘can literary scholars please stop treating court culture like the default’ phase right now.