A trend of mostly Islamist feminist scholars argues that the presence of slave women as licit sexual commodities through legal concubinage contributed to a conception of women as sexually submitted beings with detrimental consequences on the legal status of free women. This approach does not focus on the conditions imposed on slave women but rather emphasizes the dialectical aspect of the relationship linking slave women to free women. Moreover, the ‘freedom’ of Abbasid slave women tends to be apprehended in modern terms with no explicit reference to the meaning of ‘freedom’ in the Abbasid period and the ways in which it relates to slavery. Other scholars have engaged in investigating legal discourse for a better understanding of the roles and positions attributed to slave women as well as the possibilities and limitations thus created. They have analyzed a variety of legal texts and shown that, despite its popular and scholarly depiction as an uninhibited sexual relationship free of any legal, social or moral constraints, concubinage has followed, in legal discourse, a set of clearly delineated rules. Building a clearer understanding of the ethical principles underlying the legal regulations of the bodies and sexuality of slave women is a necessary step in evaluating their impact on the perception of womanhood and the status of free women. This paper investigates the regularization of the bodies and sexuality of slave women by analyzing a representative selection of anaf legal texts from the third/ ninth, fourth/tenth, and fifth/eleventh centuries (al-Shaybān’s (d.189/805) Kitāb al-al and al-Jāmi al-kabr; al-Sarakhs’s (d.1090) al-Mabs) with the purpose of providing substantiated answers to the following questions: Under which categories and through which vocabulary did legal discourse regulate the bodies and the sexuality of slave women? What were the rights (if any) and duties attributed to slave women regarding their sexuality through the legalization of concubinage and mixed marriages? How do gender, status, and pleasure intervene in regulating the sexuality of slave women? What ethical principles, concerns, and anxieties informed the conceptual framework of the classical jurists and consequently legal discourse? How does the regulation of the sexuality of slave women inform us about the images or the representations of slave women and more generally of ‘womanhood’ in the conceptual framework of the classical jurists? How do the status and the ‘image(s)’ of slave women in legal discourse contribute to a better appreciation of the Abbasid understanding of slavery and freedom?