Julieta: Your title, The Erotic Margin, links sexuality with spatiality. Antoine-Ignace Melling's depiction of the harem is, except for the two women kissing, an asexual space. In your view, what led Melling to portrait the harem in such a way?

IRVIN C. SCHICK: I can think of two main reasons. One is that his close association with the imperial household (especially the sultan's sister) impelled him to be cautious. The two women kissing was already fairly bold and I think he just chose to leave it at that. And secondly, his goal was different in this book. His approach was meant to be "objective," almost clinical. Orientalist productions spanned a spectrum from the most "scientific" to the most sensationalist. This book's claim was to scientific objectivity.

Julieta: Your research often highlights the Western tendency to depict the Islamic world as a place of confined, hidden, or purely passive female sexuality (as in the harem). Did you find any counter-narratives or evidence of agency among women within these spatial limits during the late eighteenth century? 

 IRVIN C. SCHICK: Most certainly. I have just finished translating an important Ottoman erotic manuscript in the David Collection (Copenhagen) and hopefully it will be published next Spring. In it, women are depicted as sexually voracious tricksters. This aspect was introduced into orientalism in part through Galland's translation of the 1001 Nights.

As I mentioned in The Erotic Margin, orientalist discourse was extremely inconsistent, and its success is that it was able to pass all these contradictory statements simultaneously as fact. Women are both sexually passive and sexually voracious. Can these statements both be true? According to orientalism, they are.

Julieta: Antoine-Ignace Melling served as an architect for the Ottoman court, which granted him an unprecedented "insider's eye," as praised by Orhan Pamuk. Given that Melling's Bosphorus depictions are transnational and transcultural, do you believe that his drawings elude the central sexual and spatial critique of your Erotic Margin?   

IRVIN C. SCHICK: No, I don't think so. If you look carefully at Melling's drawings, you see that they are extremely orderly, quite perfect. You do not see the mess and disorder that you would expect in a major metropolis, which Istanbul certainly was at the time. His vision of Istanbul is almost antiseptic. He has made the city perfect, and in so doing, he has constructed a certain space that had little to do with reality. So while his vision of the city is different from the vision of many others, it is no more accurate.