Pious bodily practice constitutes identity rather than symbolizing it

Evidence

Mahmood rejects the tendency in Western discourses to read women’s modes of dress and behavior in Islam as somehow symbolizing identity. In her study of the mosque movement, she insists that bodily practice should not be read as politically symbolic but rather as “the terrain upon which the topography of a subject comes to be mapped.” Ritualized behavior constitutes the pious self. It does not symbolize it. This is part of Mahmood’s modification of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, wherein resistance can be articulated by exaggerated or parodic performance of, for instance, gender norms. For Mahmood’s mosque women, performance is not about subverting norms but about upholding them. Moreover, language-based approaches such as semiotics miss the point for Mahmood because performance is intrinsic to the creation of identity, not an expression of it. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 491

Mahmood rejects the tendency in Western discourses to read women’s modes of dress and behavior in Islam as somehow symbolizing identity. In her study of the mosque movement, she insists that bodily practice should not be read as politically symbolic but rather as “the terrain upon which the topography of a subject comes to be mapped.” Ritualized behavior constitutes the pious self. It does not symbolize it. This is part of Mahmood’s modification of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, wherein resistance can be articulated by exaggerated or parodic performance of, for instance, gender norms. For Mahmood’s mosque women, performance is not about subverting norms but about upholding them. Moreover, language-based approaches such as semiotics miss the point for Mahmood because performance is intrinsic to the creation of identity, not an expression of it. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 491

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core critical vocabulary for the reader’s hinge: a mode of reading Islamic dress and ritual that contests the symbolic frame stereotyping assumes.
• XREF: Connects to Butler’s performativity and to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article — dress as constitution of self vs. dress as symbol. — connects to: Group solidarity can form through shared bodily practice, not shared ideas — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 686
• DEEPTHINKING: The constitutive-vs-symbolic distinction for ritualized practice is a genuinely sharp analytical tool that resists simple summary and reframes how one reads piety in fiction.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the piety novel as genre problem’ — how fiction resolves the tension between reading a character and reading a text, when the character’s own reading is non-hermeneutic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 491