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<p>This dissertation examines the construction of gendered legal subjects in the influential
legal works of the eleventh century Ḥanafī jurist, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī
(d. 483 A.H./1090 C.E.). In particular, I explore how gendered subjects are imagined
in legal matters pertaining to sexual desire. Through a close reading of several legal
cases, I argue that gendered subjects in his legal work al-Mabsūṭ are constructed
through an ontological framework that conceptualizes men as active and desiring and
women as passive and desirable. This binary construal of gendered nature serves as
a hermeneutical given in al-Sarakhsī’s legal argumentation and is produced through
a phallocentric epistemology. Al-Sarakhsī’s discussions of desire and sexuality are
mediated through the experience of the male body. While the dissertation endeavors
to show the centrality of the active/passive binary in al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning,
it also highlights the dissonances and fissures in the text’s construction of gendered
subjects of desire. By tracing the intricacies of al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, I
note moments in which the text makes contradictory claims about gender and desire,
as well as moments in which al-Sarakhsī must contend with realities that seemingly
run up against his ontological framework. These moments in the text draw our attention
to al-Sarakhsī’s active attempt at maintaining the coherence of the gendered ontology.
I thus argue that the gendered ontology in al-Sarakhsī’s text is a legal fiction that
both reflects his assumptions about gendered nature but is also constructed to rationalize
legal precedence.</p>
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