Recent debates on homoeroticism in contemporary Arabic literature and culture revolved around Joseph Massad’s premise of the inapplicability of the Western Gay International movement to an Arabic cultural context. Massad attributes the increase of homosexual literary representations to a misplaced, postcolonial desire on the part of the “colonized” Arab; mirroring what is in essence the desires of a “hegemonic” West. While one could argue the plausibility of this critical approach in a homosexual context, little is said about its appropriateness to female homoerotic literature that seems to fall outside the masculine West and the feminine East binary oppositions. In this paper, I argue that the recent critical homoerotic debates have focused on homosexuality as a representative model for gay subjecthood in the Arab world, and have thus failed to prove their applicability in establishing the parameters of a lesbian Arab identity. After surveying the Arabic literature produced in the last three decades and comparing it with its medieval counterpart, I argue that despite the increase of lesbian character depiction in recent literary texts; these representations offer little to advance societal views of female homoerotic desire which remains forever locked within traditional, heterocentric dialectic. Often writers evoke the topic of female homoeroticism through the portrayal of occasional, superficial scenes, without any attempt to delve into the essence of sexual identity differentiation. These passing allusions are often riddled with heterosexual moralistic righteousness, which claims that female homoeroticism exists only as a prelude to, or as a temporary replacement of, normative heterosexuality. Ilh?m Man?our’s recent novel She, You, and I (2000), however, is a pioneer in attempting to place the issue of lesbian sexuality at the forefront of Arab cultural awareness. Man?our’s lesbian heroine, Sih?m, grounds her sexual identity in feminine body politics rather than heterosexual or feminist politics. My research proves that one of the myriad impediments to a true literary representation of Arab female homoeroticism is the adherence to a politicized passive/active “femme/butch” formula that is clearly anchored in heterosexual and feminist politics rather than in lesbian body politics. For this reason, Man?our’s accomplishment lies in her assertion that her heroine’s choice of an alternative sexual identity is not motivated by political feminist discourse, but rather by her own body discourse. Her novel carves out alternative linguistic and cultural spaces, outside of the Western/Eastern dyad, for the expression of lesbian desire and the emergence of a recognized, outspoken Arab lesbian identity.