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Knowing Oneself Complexly: The Struggle for Khuntha Self-Determination
Abstract
Muslim legal treatises and narratives discussing khuntha matters tend to overlook the very subjects they describe. Recent scholarship on the khuntha in pre-modern discourses of medicine and law have paved the way for a re-imagining of how we can understand a khuntha as existing as a person within the first millennium of Islamic societies that locates them within Islamic legal and gender systems. While much of the legal manuals and medical manuals vacate the discourses from mundane everyday social specificities, we may be able to revisit these discourses to read how the khuntha themselves were active and embodied subjects rather than hypothetical bodies used to discuss legal doctrines of inheritance and physiological theories of generation. This paper builds on insights and methodologies in contemporary Feminist and Trans and Intersex scholarship on engaging with the archive to explore how these discourses may offer us a way to construct critical narratives of the khuntha as a complexly embodied and active subject in the face of societal power structures. In a re-examination of primary sources narratives involving khuntha subjects, we can see how a khuntha in all their complexity may exercise agency and use their knowledge of their own bodies and their knowledge of their own ambiguous gender status within society as a path for gender self-determination.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Medieval