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UAL Research Online

Friendship, Sociability, and Masculinity in the Ottoman Empire: An Essay Confronting the Ghosts of Historicism

Delice, Serkan (2010) Friendship, Sociability, and Masculinity in the Ottoman Empire: An Essay Confronting the Ghosts of Historicism. New Perspectives on Turkey (42). pp. 103-125. ISSN 1305-3299

Type of Research: Article
Creators: Delice, Serkan
Description:

Peer reviewed journal article

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, heteronormalizing agenda of historicism.

Official Website: http://www.newperspectivesonturkey.net/
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: LGBT studies, queer theory, Ottoman Empire, Ottoman history, history of sexuality, Michel Foucault, cultural studies, masculinity, friendship, gender, sexuality, hetero-normativity, historicism, subjectivity
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > London College of Fashion
Date: 2010
Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2014 11:23
Last Modified: 08 Oct 2015 08:45
Item ID: 6729
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/6729

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