Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/22/2025
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

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Website:
https://mec.sas.upenn.edu/events/2025/09/22/body-doubles-gender-sexuality-and-premodern-1001-nights
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Middle East Center

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This talk will explore what we can learn about gender and sexuality in the 1001 Nights if we focus on the pre-1700 manuscript tradition. One of the key arguments to come out of this research is that gender difference is de-emphasized in erotic episodes. This can be seen both in written descriptions of embodied beauty and in the images included in a few of the manuscripts under study. Recognizing this “erotics of sameness” makes a number of fresh readings of the Nights possible, including those that center homoeroticism and gender transformation.

Zayde Antrim is Charles A. Dana Research Professor of History and International Studies and Acting Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Trinity College (Hartford, CT). She is the author of Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mapping the Middle East (Reaktion Books, 2018), as well as co-editor of Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta: