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Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (The Middle Ages Series) by Amer, Sahar is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (The Middle Ages Series) about?

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

Who reads Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (The Middle Ages Series)?

Author

Amer, Sahar

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Published

2008

Language

EN

ISBN

9780812201086

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Criticism, Literary Fiction, Romance

Rating

4.4 / 5 (5 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13