In the midst of the First World War, Abdurrahman Robenson, an Ottoman soldier stationed in Erzurum, sent a letter to his friend Ali Sami, the president and founder of the Galatasaray Physical Training Club, in Istanbul. In the letter, Abdurrahman juxtaposed descriptions of his experiences in the army, friendship with Sami, and his unwavering loyalty to the Galatasaray club. Abdurrahman writes, “I always carry the [Galatasaray] club medals with me on my chest. I will take them with me into war. If I die, I will be buried with them. Long live Galatasaray (yaşasın Galatasaray).” Abdurrahman’s letter offers insights into the evolving mores of male honor, the homosocial bonds connecting members of sports clubs and the centrality of club affiliation to the identity of many Ottoman male subjects. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ottoman Muslim, Christian, and Jewish citizens and foreign residents of Istanbul established a plethora of sports clubs around the imperial capital. From Beyoğlu to Tatavla to Vefa, young men signed up to become members of their neighborhood sports clubs. These voluntary associations, which were ethnically and religiously homogenous and almost exclusively homosocial private organizations, attracted Istanbulites from an expanding middle class who wanted to train their bodies, exercise, compete, socialize, have fun, and establish friendships with likeminded young men. Drawing from a diverse array of sources, such as photograph albums, letters, sport club records, government reports, newspapers, memoirs, and illustrated magazines, as well as oral histories, this paper examines the intimate bonds that members of these clubs cultivated. In order to explore the connections between male affection, homosocial bonds, and communal identity in late Ottoman Istanbul, the paper will examine the ways in which young men, such as Abdurrahman, competed on the pitch, hung out at the club, poised for photographs, explored the city and its surrounding environs, took public transportation, exercised, and swam in the sea. The argument advanced is based on multi-lingual archival research, and is part of a broader project on the creation of a shared sports culture among Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Greeks in the late Ottoman Empire.

The way the educated middle class in Iraq of the 1920s, often referred to as Effendiyya, engaged new discourses about gender has received little attention in scholarly literature. The voice of Iraq's first generation of "new" women is especially absent. My paper will focus on Paulina Hassun, editor of "Layla", the first Iraqi women's magazine. Born in 1895 to an Iraqi father from Mosul, and a Palestinian mother, Paulina Hassun returned to Iraq in the beginning of the 1920s. Her aim was to establish the first women's organization and the first women's magazine in Iraq. Accounts of the hardships she encountered create the impression that Iraq was not yet ready for her feminist ideas and the model of womanhood she projected. Based on her writings, the period press, and archival materials my paper will offer an in-depth view of her experience and challenge this understating.

“Cruising Baghdad” examines masculinity and sexuality in interwar Iraq through forms of homosocial and homoerotic notions of friendship and relationships. Moving from the homosocial to the explicitly homoerotic, this paper engages with both sanctioned and normative friendships and relationships as well as more illicit, nonnormative, and unsanctioned practices and desires. It turns to literature as an important repository of critical and alternative voices as well as alternative visions of sexuality, masculinity, state, and society. More specifically, it examines and discusses these questions through the fictional and autobiographical writings of Iraqi communist, teacher, and prose writer Dhu al-Nun Ayyub. Ayyub was born in Mosul and graduated from the Higher Teachers Training College in Baghdad, which had been established in 1923 and which where to educate many prominent Iraqi intellectuals. He died in 1988 in Vienna. Ayyub is considered to be one of the pioneers of Iraqi fiction and is recognized for the satirical and often sociopolitical flavor of his works, but the literary quality if his works is often described as less mature and less developed than the works of the 1950s generation. The homosocial, homoerotic, and sexual themes in Ayyub’s writings have received little attention. Only one critical work in Arabic exists on Ayyub’s eight volume confessional autobiography. This paper focuses primarily on the short stories published in the collection Sadiqi (My Friend, 1938) and argues that the sexualized description and celebration of the male body in Ayyub’s short stories represent instances of homosocial and homosexual desire. Ayyub’s short stories also highlight the ways in which the disciplinary and militarist discourses of the state in interwar Iraq were challenged from a number of different positions and by a number of different actors. In other words, this paper suggests, without reducing sexual desire to resistance, that Ayyub’s short stories raise important questions about how Iraqi men responded to, complicated, and subverted the nationalist and militaristic body image propagated by the state as well as normative sexuality. Finally, this paper hopes to open up a window onto our understanding of masculinity, male culture and friendship as well as relation(ships) in an almost exclusively homosoical public sphere in which friendship, leisure, and social relations were gendered and constructed along same-sex lines. In tandem, “Cruising Baghdad” attempts to visualize the relationship between, friendship, sexuality, space, and leisure in the modern city of Baghdad.