Subordination to tradition can itself enable transgressive agency.

Evidence

Paradoxically, Abir’s ability to break from the norms of what it meant to be a dutiful wife were predicated upon her learning to perfect a tradition that accorded her a subordinate status to her husband. Abir’s diver.. gence from approved standards of wifely conduct, therefore, did not represent a break with the signifi ory system of Islamic norms, but was saturated with them, and enabled by the capacities that the practice of these norms endowed her with. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1200

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Core of Mahmood’s argument — agency immanent to, not opposed to, subjection — directly unsettles the liberal-feminist binary of freedom vs. subordination that the reader’s cluster critique hinges on.
• XREF: Corroborates Spivak’s critique of epistemic violence: resistance framed only as breaking from normativity erases forms of agency internal to tradition.
• SEED: Essay angle: the paradox of ‘breakthrough through obedience’ as a general social mechanism beyond Islam — applies to craft apprenticeships, ascetic disciplines, institutional reform.