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Indeterminate Bodies, Desire and Sexing Oneself in Muslim Legal Discourses
Abstract
The body, especially female, slave, or queer, was as much the territory of regulation and conflict in premodern Muslim discourses as disputes over property or wealth. This paper invites us to approach the body as a site of impassioned, often political and always complex, legal and moral contestation. Indeed, premodern ethico-legal Muslim discourses pertaining to the body often revolved around ways to differentiate, control, and govern it. This paper employs the body as a site through which to assess historical legal and ethical debates over sexing and governing bodies, especially indeterminate bodies (khunthā mushkil). It scrutinizes debates over how to sex indeterminate bodies that defy the male/female binary. Moreover, it offers examples of jurists granting full agency to the unsexable khunthā to sex oneself based on sexual desires and inclinations. Gender differentiation was a major component of Muslim scholars’ legal system. Since Jurists’ legal determinations resulted in tangible socio-legal and spiritual consequences, they were invested in sexing bodies along gendered lines to the extent possible. For this reason, no single body could remain sexually neutral and ungendered after reaching the age of puberty, which was the age of legal accountability. The jurists’ ultimate goal was to sex and gender every single body, including indeterminate bodies, eventually categorizing them as either male or female. Not only did the answers to legal questions impact the individual directly, but they also affected the spiritual wellbeing of the social body, that is, the community as a whole. Given this framework, what did classical jurists do with indeterminate bodies that defied the male/female binary? Did they force them to fit into their constructed legal system? How did they legally accommodate unsexed or unsexable bodies? This paper explores such questions while examining the process by which Muslim jurists sought to sex and socialize all bodies and the exceptions they made in the most perplexing situations. In it, I contend that Muslim jurists were compelled to think creatively when it came to indeterminate bodies in order to create a medical space to legally and socially accommodate them in their highly gendered legal system. This paper places the body at the heart of our critical analyses and encourages us to consider the historical processes by which Muslim scholars sexed, gendered, socialized, and consequently regulated all bodies while also considering jurists’ reasoning and purpose in doing so.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None