Modern constructs of gender have been embedded in political projects for decades to institute, mobilize and discipline populations across the globe. This is particularly true in societies and cultures of the Middle East where colonialist and nationalist forces have vied to produce competing but often paralleling discourses. Though feminist scholarship has contributed to clarifying the underlying patriarchal and oppressive agendas of civilizing and modernizing projects, much of this literature has concerned itself with unpacking patriarchal values, its systems, abuses and its changing discourses and economies. Few have investigated the epistemological tools employed to critique the foundational narratives of gender and gender oppression. Some studies questioned whether modernization is truly the answer to gender injustice with fewer studies interrogating the entanglements of gender and sexuality in legacies of modernity that offer secularism as the binary other of the religious in Middle Eastern societies (and also in EuroAmerican Muslim contexts). This proposed paper, therefore aims to trouble the uncritical deployment of binaristic categories of religion and secularism in normative epistemologies informing the study of gender and sexuality in Muslim cultures and societies. The paper argues that a gendered and posthumanist critical epistemology that not only historicizes normative categories of religion and secularism but that also decenters the primacy of western notions of the human, is central for a contextual understanding of gender and sexuality and the experiences of being a Muslim and/or Middle Eastern subject. This is because when we question the normative notions of, “the modern subject” or “the religious subject,” and interrogate the tools we take up to grapple with the social and economic processes that help shape personhood, it becomes clear that there is a disjuncture between normative epistemology and the complexity of lived experience. Moreover, debates about the secular/religious divide consistently surface as integral to the processes of “othering,” and marginalization in which the western “human” is defined by means of xenophobic but liberal civilizational and imperialist discourses as the epitome of technical sophistication and progressive gender politics. Deploying modern discourses of gender and secularism in these discourses is both a means of guaranteeing the rights of Euro American citizens as well as denying them to others. These strategies of social closure particularly deployed against “Islam,”—perceived as the quintessential “other” of the liberal civic order—are grounded in normative modern epistemologies that will be unpacked in this paper.