Mapping Boys on the Horizon Available to Purchase

Chapter 2 merges the poetic and the cartographic gaze on boys by zooming in on cross-cultural encounter zones to show how boys’ bodies signified the spaces from which they were abducted. It brings into conversation the spatial representations of boys by Ottoman poets such as Aşık Çelebi and Mehmed II with representations of Ganymede-like boys on the margins of Western European maps. This chapter proposes that early modern representations of territory conceptualized cross-cultural spaces as embodied by the beautiful boy, who evokes a terrestrial competition between men that is loaded with cross-religious desire. In doing so, it also calls into question the traditional trope of the land-as-female in colonial discourse. Further questioning what cultural work the boy’s body does and how his beauty functions in spatial imaginings, this chapter unveils the boy’s potential to engender religious conversion, pushing against the simplistic dichotomies of subject/object and active/passive.