Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence & the Culture of Homoerotic Desire

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“Both Burton and Lawrence,” writes Feras Alkabani, “mastered sophisticated forms of Oriental masquerade, complete with Arab personas through which they ventriloquized their most intimate thoughts and desires and articulated their lived homoerotic experiences.”

In this session, we will be in discussion with Feras Alkabani about his book Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire: Orientalist Depictions of Arab Sexuality. In the book, Alkabani explores how British Orientalists like Burton and Lawrence constructed the “Orient” as a space onto which they could project forbidden desires, alternative identities, and fantasies of erotic freedom. As Alkabani notes, Burton and Lawrence’s “masquerade enabled them to transcend their British-imperial subjecthood, even if temporarily, and take on Muslim-Oriental skin – a separate alter ego acting almost independently of the English author.”

But these fantasies did not emerge in a vacuum. The conversation will also turn toward the intellectual world of the Nahda — the Arab renaissance of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — and the ways Arab scholars, writers, and reformers understood European scholarship, manners, social norms, gender relations, and concepts of sexuality and propriety, often in ways that radically differed from Orientalist fantasies.

Together, we will explore Orientalism not simply as a Western fantasy about the Arab world, but as a site of encounter, misunderstanding, appropriation, resistance, and intellectual exchange. We will explore how cross-cultural encounters shaped understandings of homosexuality, and the ways this continues to be felt since the Arab Spring.