Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 Dror Ze'evi Producing Desire considers the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied sources - medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues - in a nuanced analysis of Ottoman sexual thought and practices form the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of this book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual worlds through the set of discourses available to them. Dror Ze'evi finds that while some of these discourses were restrictive and others more permissive, all treated sex as a natural human pursuit. And he further argues that all these discourses were transformed and finally silenced in the last century, leaving very little to inform Middle Eastern societies in sexual matters. Dror Ze'evi, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University, is author of An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s.