The Orientalization of Boy Love: A Conclusion Available to Purchase

The conclusion moves from the early modern period to the nineteenth century in a dialogue with contemporary queer explorations of the boy in our (post)modern global context. While in the early modern period, the boy is prominent in Ottoman and English cultural representations, the orientalizing modernity of the nineteenth century rendered perverse the expression of boy-love in both cultures. Hence, we witness the fading of beautiful boys and boy-lovers in both contexts. Instead, within the context of a pederastic modernity, boy love started to be attributed to the so-called orient by the Western colonial ideology; the brown boy is now an object to be saved by the white master from the oriental pederast. Predating this, the abducted boy of the early modern period offers a history wherein boys are made amorous and glamorous components of the violent grammar of empire.