The politics of beauty: colourism and objectification of Ḥabashiyyah in medieval Arabic literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how medieval Arabic literature constructs and eroticises the figure of the Ḥabashiyyah as an aesthetic type, revealing the intersections of race, gender, and aesthetics. Focusing on al-Ṭirāz al-Manqūsh fī Maḥāsin al-Ḥubūsh by Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Bāqī (fl. sixteenth century), it argues that literary praise of Ḥabashiyyāt was shaped by racialised and gendered modes of description that often concealed deeper structures of colourism and objectification. Through close readings of poetic and prose passages, the study shows how women categorised as Ḥabashiyyāt are described through ethnonyms, bodily features, and sensory effects, and positioned as emblems of desirable ‘brownness,’ elevated above both blackness and whiteness through humoral and environmental reasoning. Although these texts appear to celebrate beauty, they frequently render the figure voiceless, desirable, and consumable within a patriarchal aesthetic framework. Rather than treating praise as neutral admiration, the article situates such representations within broader literary imaginaries that associated the Ḥabashiyyah with alterity, desirability, and marginality.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".