IMC 2004: Sessions

Session 518: Sex Change, Pawned Marriages, and Minor Brides: Masculinity and Femininity in Medieval Islam

Organiser:	Yossef Rapoport, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford
Moderator/Chair:	Alex Metcalfe, Department of History, Lancaster University
Paper 518-b	On the Privilege and Duty of Divorcing your Wife: Oaths of Repudiation in Medieval Islam (Language: English) Yossef Rapoport, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Index terms: Gender Studies, Islamic & Arabic Studies, Law, Sexuality
Paper 518-c	Norms and Social Practice in al-Andalus: The Case of Child Marriage (Language: English) Amalia Zomeño Rodriguez, Escuela de Estudios Árabes, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Granada Index terms: Gender Studies, Islamic & Arabic Studies, Law, Sexuality
Abstract	Medieval Muslims and Latins found gender roles in each other's society equally strange, and equally promiscuous. Yet the modern understanding of gender roles in medieval Islam has only recently gone beyond inherited stereotypes. This session brings together novel approaches to the study of gender in medieval Islam, approaches that are grounded in a comparative perspective, and that refuse to accept traditional distinctions between public and private. The papers discuss medieval Islamic attitudes to hermaphrodites and to voluntary sex change, the extraordinary power of the oath on pain of divorce, and the rights accorded to minor brides and grooms.