However, scholarship on the history of the body has shown that sexual dimorphism may not have always underpinned scientific or religious thought. (4) In the field of Islamic history, Indira Falk Gesink argues that despite the importance of a gender binary to the realms of marriage, the household, inheritance, and ritual, Muslim scholars from across the spectrum of premodern jurisprudence exhibited flexibility when confronted with morphological ambiguity. They adopted a category of “complex sex” and allowed people to hold different sex designations simultaneously or to pass from one to another. (5) Medieval Arabic medical texts go a step further and elaborate what Ahmed Ragab calls a “sexscape” in which bodies were observed and placed along a continuum from ultramasculine males at one extreme to ultrafeminine females at the other, with plenty of options in between. Although these texts predictably focus on anatomy and morphology, they deemphasize genitalia, at least in comparison to other physical markers, in locating a body on the continuum. (6) This scholarship highlights the inadequacy of a binary construction of sex for understanding the way bodies were perceived and positioned in premodern legal and medical discourses.
Zayde Antrim, “Qamarayn: The Erotics of Sameness in the 1001 Nights” in Al-Usur Al-Wusta
