Judging practices by feminist potential rests on superiority hierarchies that ally with coercion.

Evidence

Personally, it was this certainty that came to dissolve before my eyes as I be.. came enmeshed within the thick texture of the lives of the mosque partici.. pants, women whose practices I had found objectionable, to put it mildly, at the outset of my fi ldwork. I had approached the study of this movement with a sense of foreknowledge of what I was going to encounter, of how I was going to explain these women’s “intransigent behavior” in regard to the ideals of freedom, equality, and autonomy that I myself have held so dear. Over time, I found these ideals could no longer serve as arbiters of the lives I was studying because the sentiments, commitments, and sensibilities that ground these women’s existence could not be contained within the stringent molds of these ideals. … Nor did I fi myself capable of factoring this difference into my old calculus of what in their behavior had more “feminist potential” and what was hopelessly irr ble. This language of assessment, I realized, is not neutral but depends upon notions of progressive and backward, superior and inferior, higher and lower-a set of oppositions frequently connected with a com.. pelling desire to erase the second modifi even if it means implicitly forming alliances with coercive modes of power. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1309

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that even assessing others by ‘feminist potential’ depends on progressive/backward oppositions that erase the subordinated term — including allying with coercive power — is a paradigm-level challenge.
• XREF: Corroborates Spivak’s point about the itinerant subaltern refusing help; connects to reader’s strategic-essentialism and Islamophobia clusters.
• QUESTION: How far does this dissolve-the-arbiter move go? If feminist ideals can’t arbitrate across lives, what normative ground remains for cross-cultural critique?