Even when Sahar Amer is largely recycling topics that the Project has covered from her before, there's always enough new material to provide intriguing glimpses of what's out there in the field of medieval Arabic same-sex literature. One of these years, if I continue the fiction series on the podcast, I dream of getting an own-voices story drawing on this material. (Or lots of them! But I don't want to dream too high.) The topic of women's same-sex relations in the Islamicate world has too often been treated through an Orientalizing or male-gaze lens when depicted in fiction. And as scholars like Amer note, the contemporary association within Islamic societies of homosexuality with "Western corruption" can be a bar to the exploration of these themes from within those societies. But there's such a wealth of tradition here. And it provides such a delightful contrast to the treatment of women's same-sex relations in the texts of Christian Europe in the same era.
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