Based on the premise that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine sexual worlds through the discourses available, this book explores the Ottoman sexual thought and practices. It deals with the history of the Ottoman Empire, the history of sexuality and gender, and the Islamic Middle East.

"Producing Desire is a major, highly original, and often surprising presentation of sexual attitudes and practices in the Ottoman Middle East. The author uses a wide variety of contemporary sources to shed new light and draw original conclusions regarding changing attitudes toward sexuality in the Ottoman Empire before and after western influences. These influences are shown to have inhibited forms of male sexual expression that had occurred more freely in an earlier period. I recommend it enthusiastically for students, faculty, and the general public."--Nikki R. Keddie, author of Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

"Using the concept of multiple scripts, Dror Ze'evi brings together into a powerfully analytical focus several sexual discourses to give us a historically grounded and nuanced story about Ottoman sexual thought and practices. No other work brings these 'scripts' together the way Ze'evi has attempted and successfully accomplished."--Afsaneh Najmabadi, author of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

"As a broad treatment of questions of sexuality over four centuries, Producing Desire not only takes up a topic that no one else has treated systematically, but also aims ambitiously to talk about change over time, and in particular to describe the ambiguous and uneasy outlook of the nineteenth century, when various discourses about sex were challenged."--Leslie Peirce, author of Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab