Travelling Sexualities, Circulating Bodies, and Early Modern Anglo-Ottoman Encounters 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. The project thereby uncovers the tensions and dissonances between the aestheticized eroticism of cultural representations and the coercive and violent history of abductions, conversions, and enslavements of the boys. Traveling Sexualities also highlights the significance of the Ottomans to the project of queering the Renaissance in early modern studies. It uncovers connected histories between seemingly different spaces and cultures with discursive and material crossings, cross-cultural transferences, movements, interactions, and encounters with a focus on the figure of the boy through queer-historicist contrapuntal readings of multiple genres (English plays, poems, travelogues, chronicles, maps, and paintings; Ottoman poems, historical chronicles, prose works, festival accounts, miniatures) from mid-fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Ultimately, the project enriches our understanding of the global Renaissance by disrupting binaries (self/other, Islam/Christian, European/Ottoman), thereby provoking a re-imagination of what the East and the West signify, as the lines between the two worlds are blurred and rendered permeable. Looking afresh at early modern sexualities through a global perspective, it offers additional queer and postcolonial methodologies for a historicist contrapuntal analysis. The transcultural and the queer converge through the figure of the boy as he circulates within the aesthetic, commercial, and erotic economies shaping Anglo-Ottoman interactions, which in turn highlights a Renaissance without fixed cultural borders. This, therefore, brings to our attention a queerer Renaissance that provides us with valuable insights into our contemporary problems regarding sexuality, gender, race, Islamophobia, orientalism, and cultural imperialism.
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