Produktinformation

• Amazon-Verkaufsrang: #123092 in Bücher
• Veröffentlicht am: 2008-09-15
• Abmessungen: .1 Pfund
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• 453 Seiten

From Booklist
With this scholarly, intellectual history, Columbia professor Massad critiques how Arabs have narrated their sexual desires in scholarship and literature and attempts to explain recent changes in such narratives as a response to, and to some degree an internalization of, pervasive and pejorative Western views of Arab sexual desire. Collecting a number of modern Arab scholars' thoughts on sexuality, Massad initially analyzes how these scholars have described nonnormative or "deviant" sexual behavior in an effort to teach their contemporaries about the often fluid sexual mores of earlier civilizations. He then notes that, starting in the late twentieth century, racist representations of Arab sexual desire and chauvinistic Western notions of human (and gay) rights began to permeate the discourse and transform cultural notions of deviance in the Arab world. Finding that recent Arabic novels reflect a "sexual taxonomy" that ultimately represses nonnormative sexual behavior by anchoring it to binary notions of hetero and homo, Massad urges resistance to narrow Western notions of sexual identity and encourages fresh consideration of the relationship between sexual activity and sexual identity in Arab culture. Driscoll, Brendan

Pressestimmen
"A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic.... I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work." - Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report "In Desiring Arabs, Edward Said's disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor's thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing.... Massad brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present." - Financial Times"

Kurzbeschreibung
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in "Desiring Arabs" Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this end, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization.A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad's chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.