Different accounts of human agency shape women’s capacity to endure inequality

Evidence

In particular I want to understand the practical and conceptual implications of a religious imaginary in which humans are considered to be only partially responsible for their own actions, versus an imaginary in which humans are regarded as the sole authors of their actions. It is not so much the epistemological repercussions of these different accounts of human action that interest me (cf. Chakrabarty 2000; Hollywood 2004), but how these two accounts affect women’s ability to survive within a system of inequality and to flourish despite its constraints. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1132

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s stated purpose — religious vs secular-liberal accounts of action and how they bear on agency under patriarchy, connecting to Spivak’s strategic essentialism and the secularism critiques.