ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a preliminary discussion of how male same-sex intimacies were understood and represented by the Ottoman state in the eighteenth century. The concept of the state is not a coherent and static natural object that the historians must focus their gaze on in order to discern a certain practice. Drawing on Paul Veyne’s insightful reconsideration of Michel Foucault as the “completely positivist historian” of practice, relation, and exceptionality, I see the state itself as a mundane “objectivization” or a correlation of a certain determined practice that gives rise to its own corresponding object. This does not mean that the state does not regulate and dominate the lives of its subjects through its coercive institutions and police violence. Instead, it means that the state should not be mystified, as in most cases it is the relational, heterogeneous and exceptional character of elaborate forms of social practice that gives rise to the “objectivization” that is called the state. My real concern, in other words, is with the multiple ways in which Ottoman men experienced their relationships and enacted their masculinities.
