The Qur'ān’s narrative content is seldomly addressed by feminist scholarship within the field, which is primarily concerned with the text’s prescriptive verses. When scholars do consider the stories of the Qur'ān, such as the ones attributed to Mary in sūrat Āl ʿImrān (Q 3) and Maryam (Q 19), they typically emphasize the text’s positive valuation of Mary or of maternal experiences as evidence of “gender egalitarianism” in the Qur'ān. Similar positions arguing that the Qur'ān is an inherently egalitarian text have been the subject of contentious debates and critiques by both Muslim and secular scholars alike. This essay begins with the assumption that feminist inquiries into the Qur'ān should extend beyond the binary question of whether or not the muṣḥaf is “pro-women” to include a complexity of approaches that interrogate the text’s own nuanced conceptualization of the category of gender. Thinking along with Kecia Ali, who argues that an examination of the Qur'ān’s narrative content from a literary perspective offers an important avenue to feminist thinkers, I examine the annunciation stories associated with the text’s two foundational families: Āl-Ibrāhīm and Āl-ʿImrān. The Qur'ānic leitmotif of the miraculous conception of a son to a barren wife and aging husband or to a chaste, unwed woman is rife with textual representations of gender—including barrenness (ʿ-q-m or ʿ-q-r), the fertile womb (raḥm), female old age (ʿ-j-z) and aging male bodies—that are also used rhetorically by the text to help situate the Qur'ān’s theological perspective. Using a literary-critical approach that draws primarily on the methodological recommendations of Angelika Neuwirth, I bring the Qur'ān into conversation with gender, masculinity and disability critical theories. I maintain that this dynamic approach offers a more complex understanding of the Qur'ān’s own conceptualization of gender as well as the normative assumptions that were presumably held by its original 7th century audience. I argue that the Qur'ānic narratives both assert gender binaries—in a way that would be considered problematic by contemporary feminist thinkers—and destabilize this rigid system of classification. Barrenness and its conceptual binary the fertile womb, for example, are used to rhetorically symbolize Divine Punishment and Divine Mercy, respectively. This arguably reinforces the stereotype that women are most valued for sex and reproduction. However, the text’s engagement with the concept of male aging, infertility and vulnerability disrupts stereotypes of male sexual agency and power over female bodies.