The chapter opens by noting the severe gender imbalance in both sources and attention in the Chinese history of homosexuality. The author cites male-centered and phallocentric attitudes toward sex that led to the invisibility of female homosexual relations. The chapter covers 2000 years of history and so is necessarily uneven. The primary focus is on male homoeroticism in the late Imperial era.
Medieval (general)
This tag is used when a more specific date isn’t available covering very roughly the 11-14th centuries.
LHMP entry
As indicated in the chapter title, this section solely concerns relations between men.
Reading pre-modern literature in terms of gender and sexuality requires abandoning, modern sexual categories, even when continuities can be identified. The chapter begins with a review of major historians that shaped the study of medieval (homo)sexuality. It discusses the complicated structure of medieval, thinking around gender and sexuality. Discussion of specifics, primarily focuses on male homoerotic relations with brief nods to female relations.
This article looks at two stories within the 1001 nights that set up scenes of apparent homoeroticism due to gender disguise. In two romances—that of Qamar and Budur, and that of Ali Shar and Zumurrud—the woman disguises herself as a man during a period when the lovers are separated, and then when they are reunited and the disguised woman is in a position of greater social power, she teases her lover (who has not recognized her or even realized she is a woman) by demanding that he submit to her sexually (believing he is submitting to a man).
This paper looks at the structure of legal arguments in medieval Islamic law that covers male and female homosexual acts. The author examines how different schools of law structured their analysis regarding categorization and punishment either through analogy to illicit heterosexual sex or with regard to the social roles of those involved in the sex act. This is not an analysis of how same-sex sexuality is treated in literature or poetry but specifically within the genre of legal argumentation.
Identifying female same-sex love in the middle ages poses challenges in part because it goes against the prevailing stereotype of the era as reactionary and misogynistic. But in some ways, the forms female same-sex love takes in the middle ages poses a challenge to contemporary models in categories of desire.
Introduction: History of Desire, Desire for History
Introduction: Sex before Sexuality
The text opens with a manuscript illustration of the concept of sexual temptation and resistance to that temptation to introduce various themes relating to how sexual objects and desires were understood in “pre-heterosexual” culture.
Chapter 7: The History of Same-Sex Unions in Medieval Europe
The history of actual performance of same-sex unions is harder to trace than the textual history of the liturgies and the visual history of depictions of same-sex couples. Question: to what extent are same-sex union ceremonies a carryover of pagan unions (e.g., Roman fraternal adoption) versus a new (and perhaps specifically Christian?) concept?
Chapter 5: The Development of Nuptial Offices
Before 1000, priestly blessing of a marriage was an optional favor. Its absence (or refusal) didn’t make the marriage invalid. There was no standard form for this blessing. It was only considered an expected part of the ceremony for the clergy (priests could marry until the 11th century). Often the blessing was only for the bride, not for the couple as a unit.
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