The Homoerotics of Orientalism by Joseph A. Boone

Author:Joseph A. Boone [Boone, Joseph A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Middle Eastern, -, Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual & Transgender eBooks, Schools; Periods & Styles, History & Criticism, Literature & Fiction, Arts & Photography, Gay & Lesbian, Gay & Gender Studies, Criticism & Theory, History, European, Art, Middle East, Social History, Regional & Cultural, Literary Criticism, Art History
ISBN: 9780231521826
Google: N3QRAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00I2G2OVM
Goodreads: 23035779
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2014-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

THE CLOSET, COLONIALISM, AND SEXUAL PREDATION IN MAUGHAM’S “CAIRO”

The contradictions of colonialism that subtly infiltrate Gide’s encounters with Egyptian homoeroticism are explored in self-conscious detail in Robin Maugham’s exquisite but deeply disturbing short story “Testament: Cairo, 1898” (composed 1974), in which the repressive morality that inhibits sexual relationships among British men is set against the apparent ease with which a British soldier finds love with an Egyptian lad. At the same time, the attributions of polymorphous perversity—from the horrors of child prostitution to erotic sadism—that the narrative projects onto Egypt reveal themselves to be aspects of the colonializing machinery itself. The story is narrated by an unnamed British soldier who, sent to the military hospital in Cairo after showing signs of tuberculosis while on a campaign against Dervish rebels up-country, finds himself increasingly attracted to Ted, the sixteen-year-old soldier occupying the sickbed next to his. Under the lure of British propaganda, Ted has joined the army to escape the oppressive religious environment of his family (the same motivation is given to Tommy, the British soldier in Chahine’s Alexandria … Why?, as we will see). The narrator’s relentless gaze lingers on Ted’s “delicate” features and “skin as soft as a girl’s,” filling the narrator with a “pain of longing” and an “impatience to find out the truth” of the youth’s sexuality.6At sick-leave camp, the narrator begins hatching “plans” (16) to seduce Ted that are initially thwarted by the presence of an unwelcome third in the form of another soldier, George, who literally inserts himself between their two beds and brags of his crude heterosexual exploits in what appears a closeted attempt to turn Ted on and win him from the narrator.

The upshot of these machinations, in which homosocial camaraderie masks a range of unacknowledged homoerotic desires, is the threesome’s visit to a prostitutes’ den in Cairo’s medina, in which the spectacle of naked, barely pubescent girls (echoing a similarly sensationalist scene in the Quartet as Justine searches Alexandria’s child-brothels for her missing daughter) is heightened by the suggestion of sadistic violence, intimated in the doorkeeper’s “silver-handled whip … [dangling] like a snake” (17) that he uses to “discipline” the girls. These stereotypically Orientalizing touches, however, tell the reader more about the British soldiers’ covert and projected desires than about Egyptians: it is George, whose vitriolic misogyny masks his repressed homosexual desires, who sadistically enjoys using brutal sex to make the extremely “tiny” girl he has chosen scream in fear and “pain” (20), and it is both George and the narrator who harbor pedophilic desires for male youths like the “infant” Ted. For the narrator, who forces himself to go through the act of coitus with the prostitute he chooses lest his own “secret” (18) be revealed, the payoff of this sordid episode is voyeuristic: the chance to spy on Ted in the adjoining cubicle and witness the boy’s impotence—“I longed to know what was going on” (20; emphasis added), he says to justify his act of surveillance. What he sees gives

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