Politically responsible scholarship cannot assume gender equality is universally fulfilling

Evidence

It is in the course of this encounter between the texture of my own repugnance and the textures of the lives of the women I worked with that the political and the ethical have converged for me again in a personal sense. In the course of conducting fi ldwork and writing this book, I have come to recognize that a politically responsible scholarship entails not simply being faithful to the desires and aspirations of “my informants” and urging my audience to “understand and respect” the diversity of desires that characterizes our world today ( cf. Mahmood 2001a). Nor is it enough to reveal the assumptions of my own or my fellow scholars’ biases and ( in)tolerances. As someone who has come to believe, along with a number of other feminists, that the political project of feminism is not predetermined but needs to be continually negoti.. ated within specifi contexts, the questions I have come to ask myself again and again are: What do we mean when we as feminists say that gender equality is the central principle of our analysis and politics? How does my enmeshment within the thick texture of my informants’ lives affect my openness to this question ? Are we willing to countenance the sometimes violent task of remaking sensibilities, life worlds, and attachments so that women of the kind I worked with may be taught to value the principle of “freedom” ? Furthermore, does a commitment to the ideal of equality in our own lives endow us with the capacity to know that this ideal captures what is or should be fulfi .. ing for everyone else? If it does not, as is surely the case, then I think we need to rethink, with far more humility than we are accustomed to, what feminist politics really means. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 271

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core epistemological humility of the whole book: the feminist commitment to equality is itself a contingency, not a universal, and field encounter with piety movements should destabilize rather than confirm it. This is the argument the rest of the book builds on.
• XREF: connects to: Gender scholarship that omits feminist framing undermines the very movement it depends on — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 230