Abdulhamit Arvas assigns these texts in a course on racialized genders that visits multiple locations and periods in search of connected histories of sexuality, gender, and race. For instance, when Iago cries out, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!” he is using an interracial, bestial fantasy to incite racism in the Venetian world of Othello as well as displaying the racial and sexual anxieties of his white English audience. Arvas provides this list of readings to demonstrate the intersecting histories of race, gender, and sexuality in their emergence in the early modern period.

By reading across genres which are in dialogue with one another—travel writing, medical treatises, and drama—students can attend to how knowledge about bodies and desires was produced, circulated, and contested. These texts offer distinct but overlapping representational strategies:  

• Travel narratives imagine and exoticize gender and sexuality abroad, often encoding fantasies of racial and sexual difference.

• Medical writings classify and pathologize bodily variation, producing “monstrous” anatomies that shaped early modern ideas of sex, race, and embodiment.

• Drama, meanwhile, stages these discourses, dramatizing gender variance, racialized eroticism, and imperial desire for metropolitan audiences.

These readings contextualize early modern drama within broader archives of cross-cultural encounter, imperial cartography, and scientific inquiry. Drama both reflects and critiques the medical and ethnographic logics of its time. Gender and sexuality were constructed as mobile, unstable categories within the overlapping regimes of empire, science, and art. This reading list aims to trace genealogies of the contemporary intersections of sexuality, gender, and race—revealing continuities, ruptures, and crossings between past and present.

Travel writing

Early modern travel writing imagined foreign bodies through fantasies of racial, sexual, and gendered difference, often depicting sodomy, monstrosity, and gender variance to contrast European norms. These texts function as sexual ethnographies that link imperial knowledge production to the regulation of desire.

• Leo Africanus. A Geographical Historie of Africa. Translated by John Pory. 1600.
  Excerpt: Section 4.1 on women witches of Fez.

• Linschoten, Jan Huygen van. Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. His Discours of Voyages into Ye Easte & West Indies, Deuided into Foure Bookes. London: Printed by [John Windet for] Iohn Wolfe, printer to the Honorable Cittie of London, 1598.
  Excerpt: Section 17. on women’s bodies in Asia.

• Lithgow, William. The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures & Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affrica. Project Gutenberg, 1632.

• Mandeville, John. Mandeville’s Travels.  
  Excerpt: section XXII ‘Of folk of dyuerse schap’: on diverse “kinds” or monstrous races in various islands including giants, dwarves, two-sexed.

• Montaigne, Michel de. The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581 : V.3. Vol. 3. England: J. Murray, 1903.  
  Excerpt: Section, 1580-81: Observation on same-sex marriages and gender troubling figures in France and Italy.

• Nicolay, Nicholas de. Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages Made into Turkey London 1585.
  Excerpt: Section 4.2 on Turkish bathhouses and improper Turkish women.

• Sandys, George. A Relation of a Journey Begun an Dom 1610, London, 1615.
  Excerpt: Section on lesbianism in Turkey; whiteness of women.

Medical treatises

Medical treatises pathologized bodily variation and pleasure, defining norms through figures like hermaphrodites, sodomites, and monstrous births. These texts reveal how scientific discourse reinforced gender and sexual binaries by moralizing physical difference.

• Avicenna, and O. Cameron Gruner. A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna. Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms, 1966.
  Excerpt: Chapters 42, 43, 44 on sodomy, hermaphrodites, women’s pleasure.

• Crooke, Helkiah. Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, 1618.
  Excerpt : "Of Monsters and Hermaphrodites."

• Paré, Ambroise. Of Monsters and Prodigies. London: T. Cotes and R. Young, 1634.
  Excerpt: Chapters 1, 4, 5, 12 on monstrosity, sodomy, hermaphrodites.

Drama

Early modern drama staged the embodied consequences of imperial and medical discourses, bringing to life anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality through figures like eunuchs, Moors, and cross-dressers. Plays transformed abstract knowledge into affective spectacle, while questioning and reproducing social norms simultaneously.

• Arvas, Abdulhamit. “Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019).
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• Bosman, Anston. “‘Best Play with Mardian’: Eunuch and Blackamoor as Imperial Culturegram.” Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 123–57.
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• Burton, Jonathan, Kate Fisher, and Sarah Toulalan. “Western Encounters with Sex and Bodies in Non-European Cultures, 1500–1750.” In The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1st ed., 495–510. Routledge, 2016.
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• Daborne, Robert. A Christian Turn'd Turk. In Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turn'd Turk, and The Renegado, edited by Daniel J. Vitkus, 75–140. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
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• Masten, Jeffrey, and Valerie Traub. “Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
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• Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 1 (2006): 11–21.
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• Rowson, Everett K. “The Effeminates of Early Medina.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93.
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• Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra.
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• Shakespeare, William. Othello.
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• Smith, Ian, and Jyotsna G. Singh. “The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns.” In A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 190–204. Oxford, UK: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009.
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• Traub, Valerie. “Sexuality.” In A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance, edited by Ania Loomba. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.