Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg (Russia) between 2015 and 2016, this article weaves together gift exchange and affect theory to analyze how low-income Muslim women cultivated sisterly intimacies, a materially mediated and affect-laden form of attachment. Sustained through the practices of giving clothing, food, and other spiritually significant items to one another, sisterly intimacies illuminates not only how the women survived and thrived on the margins of Russian society amid socioeconomic crises and political volatility but also how their material exchanges facilitated their ability to remain continuously oriented toward their community and God while striving for an ethical Muslim life and a favorable afterlife. Sisterly intimacies as a cultural formation also offers a broader glimpse into the affective landscapes of Russia, where indignation about socioeconomic injustices and authoritarianism coexist with a desire for (religious) connectivity, ethical living, and collective world-making. Sisterly intimacies as a mode of relationality and self-making highlights the agentive capacity of intimacy to create worlds for those who struggle to live in ways that they consider meaningful.

Expanding the discussion highlighting the role of slavery in the production of medical knowledge beyond the much more extensively studied Atlantic world and the nineteenth-century US South, this article explores the exploitation of enslaved women’s bodies as clinical subjects in fifteenth-century Iberia. Menstrual disorders figured prominently among “hidden defects” cited in slave warranty suits filed by disgruntled buyers across the late medieval Mediterranean world. Reflective of their heightened interest in female physiology during this period, university-trained male physicians were the expert witnesses most frequently called on to resolve disputes concerning what an enslaved woman’s lack of menses meant. Through a close analysis of “expert” testimony in seven lawsuits filed before the court of the Justicia Civil in Valencia in the 1440s, the slave market emerges as a site offering unparalleled opportunities for physicians to directly touch and probe female genitalia. Insofar as they could be poked and prodded with relative impunity, the bodies of enslaved women bought and sold in late medieval Mediterranean markets were instrumental to the expansion of learned gynecological knowledge.