Abdulhamit Arvas

This book project examines the history of sexuality in the West as both a history of transnational contact and a problem of translation. By tracing translations of Arabic and Ottoman medical, legal, and cultural texts into European languages from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, it shows that European understandings of embodiment were profoundly shaped by these exchanges. Focusing on early modern literature alongside medical treatises, travel narratives, and ethnographies, the study demonstrates how translation transformed pluralities into naturalized binaries of sex and gender. In reframing the history of sexuality within a global context, it elucidates how categories often taken as natural, stable, and European in origin were in fact constituted through centuries of global circulation and negotiation, and thus, offers a comparative model for historicizing embodiment, sexuality, and difference.