Liberal feminism’s agency frame blinds analysis of pious women’s movements

Evidence

The ongoing importance of feminist scholarship on women’s agency cannot be emphasized enough, especially when one remembers that Western popular media continues to portray Muslim women as incomparably bound by the un. breakable chains of religious and patriarchal oppression. This acknowledg.. ment notwithstanding, it is critical to examine the assumptions and elisions that attend this focus on agency, especially the ways in which these assumptions constitute a barrier to the exploration of movements such as the one I am dealing with here. In what follows, I will explore how the notion of human agency most often invoked by feminist scholars-one that locates agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject-has been brought to bear upon the study of women involved in patriarchal religious traditions such as Islam. Later, in the second half of this chapter, I will suggest alternative ways of thinking about agency, especially as it relates to embodied capacities and means of subject formation. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to the strategic-essentialism/postcolonial cluster — Mahmood diagnosing the limits of the liberal-autonomy subject echoes Spivak and Ahmad on how Western frames miss non-Western subjectivity.
• DEFINE: Defines the liberal-feminist notion of agency — located in political and moral autonomy of the subject — as precisely the frame that misfits piety movements.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the binary of ‘oppression or resistance’ collapses when subjects actively desire traditions outsiders read as subordination.