There’s been a fair amount of good work on the intersection of sex, gender and sexual identity in Islam generally, from Judith Tucker to Kecia Ali to Khaled Rouayheb, and Samar Habib’s edited book (includes article from Junaid Jahangir).  Christian Lange as well on the liwat as hadd or tazir, and I’m sure I’m missing a ton of others.  However, there has not been much on Shi’ism.  Rouayheb touches on Shi’ism in his excellent book “Before Homosexuality” and Tucker discusses it some in her work on gender and family law in Islam.  But it’s ancillary, and the result are broad statements about an “Islamic” position toward, say, lesbianism, which is fundamentally at odds with the opinion laid down by the Shi’i jurists.  If the Sunni jurists had a hard time thinking much about lesbianism or how to punish it because there was no penis involved and there could thus be no penetration, rest assured the Shi’a did not have this problem.  Lesbianism is a scriptural crime, one man “thighing” another was a scriptural crime, and even two men or two women naked together under a blanket had a set punishment for it.  This is to say nothing of what the very institution of temporary marriage does in terms of creating particular sexual values that are not quite as easy to get to within Sunnism, at least in modernity (the focus of my paper) where the traditional dispensation of the male master to use his female slaves for sexual enjoyment is normatively and descriptively lacking, ISIS depradations notwithstanding.

So to do justice to my sect, I wrote this journal article to be published with the Fordham International Law Journal later this year.

HAH