From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, sexual torture has played a notorious role in the recent history of American interventions into the Arab world. These abhorrent techniques have been officially justified as an effective tool for interrogating Arabs, who are perceived as repressed and especially susceptible to sexual coercion - the result of centuries of racist assumptions about Arab sexuality. In Desiring Arabs, Joseph A. Massad uncovers the roots of these attitudes and analyzes the impact of Western ideas - both about sexuality and about Arabs - on the last two hundred years of Arab intellectual production.