Gendering Sex Delineating the Licit from the Illicit

Abstract

Understanding how sex was constructed and gendered is a crucial first step to understanding historical Muslim discourses regarding male–male and female–female sexual practices. In this article I highlight the extent to which sex was gendered and the ways in which this gendering of sex and sex roles transcended male–female sexual transgressions and shaped how other sexual practices were perceived socially and treated legally. Gendering sex holds the key to our understanding of how and why Muslim jurists developed the legal norms that they did to differentiate between various sex acts and sexual transgressions. Ultimately, Muslim jurists gendered sex along the axis of phallic penetration. As a result, they gendered sex by mapping gendered sex roles onto sexed bodies and defined male–male and female–female sexual practices in light of how they defined sex itself.