Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other.
—Homi Bhabha
IF CROSSING BORDERS has demonstrated that love between women is more prevalent in medieval French writings than hitherto believed, it is because we have situated Old French literature in the multicultural context of medieval Europe and read it through the lens of the cross-cultural contacts between France and Islamicate civilizations and cultures in the Middle Ages. Old French literary discourses on lesbianism have emerged as prime examples of East-West hybridity, cross-fertilization, as well as cultural and literary exchanges. As polyphonic, dynamic constructions, and despite a heterosexual veneer, they do not privilege one form of sexuality at the expense of another or develop one single (Western) social and cultural practice. Rather, literary texts discussed in Crossing Borders may be fruitfully considered a “crossing of textual surfaces, a dialogue between several writings.”1 They juxtapose and interweave multiple discursive voices: Western and non-Western; French and Arabic; straight and gay; normative and alternative. Within this polyphony, the French medieval literary lesbian emerges as truly cross-cultural; she is constituted as “other” not only sexually but especially linguistically, literarily, socially, and culturally. She is at once French and Arabic; her voice is one and plurivocal; her depiction is heterosexual and homosexual (while not being reducible to bisexuality); her relations are (homo)sexual and homosocial.
The insertion of Arabic linguistic, thematic, and sociocultural traditions in Old French literature is important to consider because it invites us to reevaluate the nature of the threat posed by same-sex desire between women in the medieval West. In light of the preceding chapters, and especially our discussion of Aelis’s cross-cultural embroidery business in the Escoufle, European clerical condemnations of same-sex love and desire between women do not appear to be solely due to the disapproval of erotic liaisons between women as manifestations of the “sin against nature” (peccatum contra naturam), to their perceived threat to the natural division of gender, or even to their disregard of religious (heterosexual) teachings. Rather, the denunciation of lesbianism by medieval Western theologians could at least be partly attributed to the social consequences that were feared to derive from the involvement of two women. In other words, if lesbianism was decried, it was perhaps because it was assumed to be a byproduct of the economic role that lesbian-like single women increasingly played in the developing urban economy of medieval Europe. It may be the power and independence that single women stood to gain from their emotional and business associations with other women that seemed menacing to conventional social and economic structures, especially when they competed with male spheres of activities, male earning potential, and hence male authority.2
Equally important, the insertion of Arabic interlinguistic, intertextual, and intercultural elements in Old French texts also represents the imaginary ominous irruption of (Eastern) unbridled public sexual encounters within the developing urban milieus of medieval France. It is the potential development of Western harem-like structures and alternative social geographies that were especially feared because they threatened Western social, public, and familial morality. Finally, it is possibly the alluring material pleasures and cultural sophistication of the East that clerics sought firmly to control when they decried same-sex love, friendships, or even women’s business work. If lesbianism was considered a threat in the European Middle Ages, it is primarily because it took on the colors of the East.
This book has also pointed to the complex ways in which Arabic tales may have circulated in medieval France, inviting us to revise our notions of cultural and literary transmission. My discussion of the role played by the Arabic Story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour in the various Yde and Olive renditions, as well as in the Escoufle, strongly suggests that Arabic tales did not circulate (and likely did not even exist) in what we tend to think of today as “complete” and “full-fledged” versions. Arabic tales, firmly entrenched in oral tradition, were known primarily through their retelling in performance. Such stories, and framed ones especially, could thus only have been known and transmitted in smaller units or even in episodes. Hence, crossing the borders between Arabic and French does not mean that French authors translated or copied verbatim an available Arabic tale. Rather, it means that they culled some of its elements and wove them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities and expectations and to conform to some of their period’s generic and literary conventions. Jean Renart interlaced his Escoufle with only some scenes from the Arabic tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, while the authors of the various Yde and Olive narratives (verse epic, miracle play, prose rendition) evidently focused on other parts of the same story from the Arabian Nights. Such fluid adaptation may suggest that different parts of the Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour tale circulated in different forms in different parts of medieval France; or it may imply that each narrator was simply interested in a particular section of the same available tale. This process of selection, cross-fertilization, and transformation is central to the entire concept of cross-cultural literary transmission and production. For medieval French writers, Arabic texts (along with other cultural and literary traditions, including Latin, Celtic) were not models to copy blindly, but rather were examples to imitate, to subvert, and at times even to silence. If the exact line of transmission of Arabic tales to the West remains difficult if not impossible to trace, it is nevertheless fruitful to consider the very real and enriching possibility that medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid,3 cross-cultural project.
At the same time, Crossing Borders has demonstrated the necessity of revising our understanding of the concept of intertextuality and its workings. Far from referring exclusively to linguistic and textual resonances, intertextuality points to the complex web of sociocultural codes that medieval French literary writings draw upon. It is precisely by taking into consideration the multiple manifestations of intertextuality, both its tangible aspects (language, rhetorical devices, textual motifs) and its less tangible ones (sociocultural traditions), that we have uncovered the critical role that Arabic literature and culture played in constructions of same-sex love between women in medieval French writings. The wider definition of intertextuality deployed here urges us to question the traditional dichotomy of “inside” and “outside” and to recognize the fact that Arabic literature and culture reside at the very heart of Old French textuality.
Cross-cultural comparative research is not a neutral field of inquiry. Like any discipline, it does not produce objective knowledge; rather it has inherently political implications.4 At the start of the twenty-first century, with the growing crisis facing the humanities, cross-cultural research between the medieval Arab world and medieval Europe is imperative because it calls into question the West’s own view of itself and undermines its contemporary discursive self-presentation as secular, sexually liberated, and firmly positioned in the first world. Moreover, such an approach uncovers Western presuppositions of the sexuality of “third world women,” whom Chandra Mohanty has described as follows: “This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). [This image] is in contrast to the (implicit) self representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their bodies and sexualities, and the ‘freedom’ to make their own decisions.”5
This portrayal of Western feminists’ perception of third-world women should not be assumed to be specific to the contemporary period, for as Mohanty points out, “Arabs and Muslims, it appears, don’t change at all. Their patriarchal family is carried over from the times of the Prophet Muhammed. They exist, as it were, outside history.”6 The reductionism in the contemporary perception of third-world women has unfortunately often simply been projected back in time, with the assumption that the situation of Middle Eastern/Muslim women has always been the same, that they form a coherent group without any individuation, victims of an all-powerful patriarchal, legal, and religious system.
One of the main contributions of cross-cultural research is precisely its ability to destabilize the long-cherished Western assumption that Muslim and Arab women are an always already constituted coherent, stable category of sexually oppressed, sociopolitically subordinated objects, regardless of class, or of marginal and resistant modes of experiences. Another contribution of this research is its recovery of key primary materials on same-sex relations from the Islamicate world, materials that have long been assumed to be nonexistent, and when known, continue to be neglected or censored. Finally, cross-cultural comparative research is significant because it enriches medieval European writings and returns to them the multidimensional, plurivocal, and pluricultural depth that they undoubtedly possess.
Taking into consideration the Arabic literary discourses on alternative sexualities has undeniable ethical considerations, for, after all, the primary Arabic texts that I have examined in Crossing Borders are some of the most important tools of resistance produced by medieval Arabic culture. As they propose a sharply different image of Arab/Muslim women, they reverse conventional and Orientalist presuppositions about Islamicate cultural practices and destabilize popular binary oppositions between Islam and the West. Since power can be understood only in the context of resistance (as Foucault has forcefully taught us), it is analytically and strategically important for us as critics to take into consideration these modes of resistance in the Arab Islamicate tradition. In their capacity to combat Western cultural imperialism, medieval Arabic discourses on sexualities ultimately have the potential to produce a change in the sociopolitical climate of the Islamicate world, as well as in the power politics and relations between the East and the West.
Uncovering the “othered” discourses on sexuality that are part and parcel of the Arab Islamicate cultural tradition is thus useful because it provides a point of departure for the elaboration of oppositional political strategy and new policies. In this sense, research in comparative sexualities studies has very crucial ethical and political implications for the contemporary Middle East. This research also has political implications that extend beyond this geopolitical area, since it forces Western (U.S. and French) self-images of Western sexuality to be more nuanced and context specific. Last, cross-cultural research promises to promote better cross-cultural understanding between two world areas (the West and the East) of increasing global significance, regions that have been entertaining tense relations, based on the former’s proclaimed democracy (which includes the supposed liberation of women and their sexuality) and the latter’s lack thereof (which is coterminous with female subordination and oppression). As it contextualizes East/West relations and their respective literary productions over the centuries, cross-cultural research promises to deconstruct such binary formulations, which increasingly threaten world peace.
Most significant perhaps, cross-cultural research (on sexuality in particular) puts into question the greater project of humanism “as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the ‘East’ and ‘Woman’ as Others.”7 As Foucault, Said, and Mohanty among others have pointed out, Western (man’s) centrality can be maintained only by defining and constructing the “East” and the Islamicate world as peripheral.8 One of the more powerful implications of cross-cultural research lies precisely in its potential to deconstruct the binary logic of humanist ideology and its attending vehicles of anthropomorphism, ethnocentrism, essentialism, and universalism. Herein lies its undeniable relevance both to the Middle Ages and to the contemporary world.