In Boys Abducted, Abdulhamit Arvas explores the history of abducted boys in English and Ottoman literary and visual culture to examine the relationships between homoeroticism, race, and empire in the early modern period. The popular literary trope of the abducted beautiful boy—often eroticized as an exotic object of desire—intersects with the historical phenomenon of vulnerable youths who were captured and exchanged within the global traffic in bodies. Arvas offers a queer-historicist analysis of a wide array of Ottoman and English texts and genres ranging from poetry, drama, and travelogue to chronicles, maps, and visual arts. He shows how the boy in these representations crosses boundaries between nations and empires, embodying the tensions and dissonances between the aestheticized eroticism of literary and cultural representations and the violent history of abductions, conversions, and enslavements. In so doing, Arvas presents complex parallels and connections between the two societies, highlighting the circulation of sexual and racial discourses in imperial imaginings to uncover discursive formations and formulations of sexuality, race, and empire.
A Note on Transcription and Translations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Boys Encountered
1. Traveling Boys in the Mediterranean 45
2. Mapping Boys on the Horizon 81
3. (In)visible Boys in English Abductions 109
Part II. Boys Transformed
4. Refashioning Boys 141
5. Regendering Boys 169
Part III. Boys in Modernity, East and West
6. Staging Boys, 1690–1990 199
7. The Orientalization of Boy Love: A Conclusion 221
Notes 233
Bibliography 277
Index 309