Select annotated bibliography entry
Arvas, Abdulhamit. Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025.
Focusing on England and the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 17th centuries, this book examines literary and visual representations of abducted boys across these imperial contexts. It argues that the figure of the abducted beautiful boy, as an eroticized object, links homoerotic desire with racial formation and imperial power structures. Arvas reveals how the circulation and captivity inherent in this global trafficking structures sexual and racial discourses.
