Practices that destabilize male authority need not be motivated by resistance to it

Evidence

This caution against reading the agency of this movement primarily in terms of resistance holds even more weight when we turn our attention to the analysis of gender relations. In what follows , I want to show why this is the case through ethnographic examples in which women may be seen as resisting aspects of male kin authority. While conceding that one of the effects of the mosque participants’ pursuit of piety is the destabilization of certain norms of male kin authority, I \Vant to argue that attention to the terms and concepts deployed by women in these struggles directs us to analytical questions that are closed off by an undue emphasis on resistance. … But the fact that discourses of piety and male superiority are in.. eluctably intertwined does not mean that we can assume that the women who inhabit this conjoined matrix are motivated by the desire to subvert or resist terms that secure male domination; neither can we assume that an analysis that focuses on the subversive effects their practices produce adequately cap.. tures the meanings20 of these practices, that is, what these practices “do” within the discursive context of their enactment. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1181

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core methodological argument of the book: separating the subversive effects of an act from the intentions and meaning-structures that animate it. Dense, paradigm-shifting for anyone analyzing agency in conservative or religious movements.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier critique of resistance-based models of agency in feminist theory, and to the debate over whether Butler’s performativity theory applies to non-liberal subjects. — connects to: The original sexual contest need not have resolved in man’s favor — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 58; Prostitutes’ frigidity is a revolt against male domination rather than mere incapacity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1686
• SEED: An essay on how social scientists and activists systematically over-read ‘resistance’ into acts that are actually motivated by piety, duty, or other non-liberal projects — and what that misreading costs analytically.