Bibliographic record
Abstract
This two-part article argues that the earliest Arabic manuscripts of the 1001 Nights celebrate sameness, especially physical sameness, in sexual relationships to the extent that a category of erotic embodiment emerges that cannot be understood through a binary construction of sex. The first part of the article proposes a reading of a fifteenth-century manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies on their own terms. Eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. The resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. By contrast, when difference is stressed via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or threatening. The second part of the article presents a diachronic analysis of one story, “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. Manuscripts of the Nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest Arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. This case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".