There isn't an abstract, so here are a couple of paragraphs as quotes:
The romanticization of the medieval within modern and contemporary eras that is interwoven into popular contemporary news stories detailing which “eligible princes” remain now that both the UK princes (Princes William and Harry) have wed. Arguably, these remaining eligible princes – chief among them Dubai’s Sheikh Hamdan and Jordan’s Prince Hussein – are also models for the sheikh-heroes in desert romances (“14 of the Most Eligible Royal Bachelors”; see also Jarmakani, Imperialist Love Story 9). The list of eligible princes emphasizes characteristics – like wealth, social status, and elite schooling – that are also prominent in descriptions of sheikh-heroes in desert romances.
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In relation to sensationalized new stories about “jihadi brides” or the romantic “culture of jihad,” readers’ stunned desire to know what propels women to leave comfortable lives in the West and migrate to war-ravaged areas threatens to obscure recognition of the way that U.S. involvement in the war on terror operates according to its own set of fantasies. Perhaps the most powerful and dangerous of these is the fantasy that extralegal policies – like torture, secretive drone strikes, and unchecked surveillance of U.S. citizens (and beyond) – will keep us safe. In many instances, these extralegal policies have been justified by figuring their victim-subjects as ineligible for protection from international law by labeling them as barbaric, medieval, non-state actors. They have been figured as outside of the law by constructing them as outside of contemporary times. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that these policies make us considerably less secure through unwarranted data collection and by giving violent groups like ISIS compelling ways of convincing would-be followers that the U.S. is unjustly killing civilians in Muslim countries with which the US is not even at war. Flipping the script of that common denigration of romance readers, I would suggest that the real dupes are those of us who buy in to the fantasy that militarized security will make us safer. We would do well to think more about the quotidian romance narratives that animate the imperialist policies described above. We might find that the romanticized and orientalized sheikhs “way buried” in our psyches are neither allies nor enemies: they are the story that imperialism tells about itself.
There isn't an abstract, so here are a couple of paragraphs as quotes:
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