Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity

In Boys Abducted, Abdulhamit Arvas explores the history of abducted boys in English and Ottoman literary and visual culture to examine the relationships between homoeroticism, race, and empire in the early modern period. The popular literary trope of the abducted beautiful boy—often eroticized as an exotic object of desire—intersects with the historical phenomenon of vulnerable youths who were captured and exchanged within the global traffic in bodies. Arvas offers a queer—historicist analy...