In following up on references to gender transgression in medieval Arabic literature, I’ve been struck by the way certain motifs align differently from what we see in the literature of Christian cultures. In European romances, “Amazonian” characters who dress and act as men are often a context for accidental homoeroticism. Cross-dressing in general also provides this opportunity. But as we saw in Rowson’s article on categories of cross-dressed entertainers in medieval Baghdad, the social signals and assumptions around gender-crossing were different in the Islamicate world, in part because of the greater normalization (if not actual approval) of male homosexuality. I chose Kruk’s article to cover to illustrate some of these differences even though it touches on female homoeroticism only very tangentially.
There is a long history in western culture of projecting female homosexuality onto the Other, and especially onto an Orientalist fantasy of harems and odalisques. Lesbian historical fiction is not immune to this projection. That makes it all the more important to familiarize ourselves with how issues of homoeroticism and gender performance were understood within the cultures we may consider as fictional settings. The "woman warrior" motif was popular in medieval Arabic epics, but she represented different things from the woman warrior of European chivalric romance, and the gender dynamics of these stories are very different. Historical fiction that wants to use motifs like these as a jumping off place either needs to engage with those differences or risk being nothing more than yet another Orientalist fantasy.
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