Travelling Sexualities, Circulating Bodies, and Early Modern Anglo-Ottoman Encounters

A. Arvas

Abstract: This dissertation explores intricate networks and connections between early modern English and Ottoman cultures. In particular, it traces connected sexual histories and cultures between the two contexts with a focus on the abduction, conversion, and circulation of boys in cross-cultural encounters during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that the textual, aesthetic template of the beautiful abducted boy - i.e. Ganymede, the Indian boy of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Christian boy in Ottoman poetry - intersects with the historical figure of vulnerable youths, who were captured, converted, and exchanged within the global traffic in bodies. It documents the aesthetic, erotic, and historical deployments of this image to suggest that the circulation of these boys casts them as subjects of servitude and conversion, as well as objects of homoerotic desire in the cultural imaginary.