Sociosexual roles in ottoman pulp fiction

Abstract

The sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tlfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive-transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tlfli stories were a protorealist form of "pulp fiction". Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tlfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tlfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.