Crossing Borders is a study of cross-cultural representations of gender and female same-sex sexual practices in the medieval French and Arabic traditions from 1000 to 1500. My goals in writing this book are fourfold: to bring together two literatures and cultural traditions that are too often discussed in isolation from each other: medieval Arabic and French literatures; to shed light on a significant medieval Arabic erotic tradition that is today completely neglected or censored; to uncover the determining role that the medieval Arabic tradition on eroticism played in French literary writings on gender and sexuality; and to affirm the centrality of a cross-cultural approach both to medieval studies and to theoretical discussions of gender and sexualities. The main conceptual paradigm underlying this project is the notion of “borders” (cultural, linguistic, historical, and geographic), not as elements of separation and division, but rather as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration.
Crossing Borders complements the recent line of productive studies on gender and homoerotic relations in non-Western and at times non-Christian literatures that have begun to enrich scholarly investigations of medieval Western European writings. Ruth Vanita’s publications on same-sex love in India, Daniel Boyarin’s queer rereading of rabbinic culture, Tova Rosen’s scholarship on gender in medieval Hebrew literature, and Kathryn Ringrose’s work on eunuchs as a third sex in Byzantium, among others, are already complicating our views of medieval Western gender and sexualities.1 They have demonstrated the extent to which gender trouble was already a non-Western phenomenon before it became a Western one. At the same time, these critical works have unveiled an important body of medieval primary texts that have broadened our understanding of medieval homosexuality; they have provided a much needed historical and comparative vantage point from which to view a broader range of alternative sexual practices.
Building upon these groundbreaking studies, Crossing Borders investigates the heretofore unrecognized role that Arabic eroticism has played in the construction of alternative sexualities in Old French literary texts. My research reveals that it was often through the detour of Arabic textuality, through the recourse to thematic motifs and the evocation of Middle Eastern sociocultural traditions, that French narrators named and depicted what remained unspeakable throughout the European Middle Ages. The key Arabic role in French writings is not to be interpreted as the influence of one tradition over the other. For, as we will see, Arabic erotic material is rarely found mimetically reproduced in the French tradition. Rather than exact repetitions from one literary text to the other (“influence”), we find instead various instances of hybridization, cross-fertilization, and at times censorship (“resonances”). Throughout the following chapters, as I identify expressions of lesbian desire in medieval French writings, I focus on their hybridity and on the cross-cultural dialogue they entertain with some of the most prominent Arabic literary productions on same-sex desire. We will see that the strategies of gender representation deployed in the medieval Arabic erotic tradition (Ibn Nasr’s tenth-century Encyclopedia of Pleasure, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices Used by the Literati and Allusions in Eloquent Speech, and al-Tifashi’s thirteenth-century The Delight of Hearts in particular), as well as in a multitude of Arabic tales (from the One Thousand and One Nights especially) offered some medieval French writers a linguistic and thematic corpus to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times even to censor. By confronting medieval French texts with their Arabic intertexts, I propose to recover meanings that have been lost, obscured, or distorted (perhaps censored) in the process of crossing the borders between French and Arabic. Such a double reading (queer and cross-cultural) will usefully call into question long-cherished paradigms of heterosexuality and Westernness which, until recently, were still thought to characterize the Middle Ages.
As I cross the borders between medieval Arabic and French literatures, I focus on the dialogic exchanges between the two cultures, on moments of interaction and collaboration but also of contestation and subversion in each society’s articulation of gender difference and sexual practices. Each of the French texts under investigation will be interpreted both horizontally and vertically2–horizontally because each word, every sentence and scene in Old French writings holds a specific meaning to its Western audience, and vertically because these same elements hint also at a literary corpus, a cultural tradition that precedes or is contemporary to the moment of French textual production. Old French literature on female homoeroticism may thus be considered an intersection of textual surfaces, a dialogue between different contexts; it is plural by definition, as it absorbs, blends, and transforms Western generic conventions with an Arabic intertext. The medieval French discourse on alternative female sexuality may usefully be thought about as a process of “écriture-lecture” (writing-reading),3 in which each statement is meaningful only in relation and in opposition to another discourse. It is precisely this intertextuality, the dialogue that French writings engage between Western generic and rhetorical conventions on the one hand and Arabic literary texts and contexts on the other that we will seek to unveil throughout the following chapters.
We will redefine the very notion of “intertextuality” in the process. This poststructuralist notion–introduced by Julia Kristeva, based on her reading of Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s poetics, medieval farces, and carnival–rejected the view of structuralist semiotic theorists (since Saussure) who viewed texts as discrete structures with their own internal logical codes. Rather than investigating sources and influences and instead of interpreting intertextuality solely in linguistic terms, Bakhtin and Kristeva argued for the importance of also taking into consideration the three-pronged dialogues between author and audience, author and characters, and author-audience and historical context. The expansion of the notion of intertextuality invites henceforth a consideration not only of the linguistic and textual context (the intertextual), but also the sociohistorical and cultural codes inscribed within each text (the intercultural).
Crossing Borders builds upon this reevaluation of the intertextual and shows its operation in specific medieval texts. As it calls into question the boundaries between the medieval Arab Islamicate and the Christian European worlds, it also questions the very notion of textual boundaries. The following chapters will demonstrate that medieval French writings on female homoeroticism are permeable and challenge conventional dichotomies of inside and outside, text and context. Rather than follow a historical chronological order, therefore, the chapters are organized in a manner that shows that intertextuality means both interlinguistic, intertextual echoes (Chapters 2 and 3), as well as intercultural ones (Chapters 4 and 5). They are thus ordered in such a fashion as to follow literary and cultural intermixing from its most explicit to its most implicit manifestations. While I consider at first the most explicit resonances between the French literary representations of lesbianism and the medieval Arabic erotic tradition (linguistic borrowings in Etienne de Fougères, Chapter 2), I proceed in Chapter 3 to examine some less explicit echoes between both traditions, such as the thematic parallels between three versions of the Yde and Olive stories and the tale of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour from the One Thousand and One Nights. I end with even less explicit resonances when I focus on the role that Arab material culture and key sociocultural traditions are rewritten in the Escoufle (Chapters 4 and 5). Informed by the critical perspectives of gender, queer, and postcolonial studies, Crossing Borders proposes to explore the textual, sexual, and cultural interconnections between medieval France and the Arab Islamicate world.