Virtues that militate against autonomy can still constitute agency

Evidence

I want to highlight the strikingly dif.. ferent ways in which these two women dealt with the pressures of being single in a society where heterosexual marriage is regarded as a compulsory norm. Even though it would be customary to consider one of these strategies “more agentival” than the other, I wish to show that such a reading is in fact reduc.. tive of the eff entailed in the learning and practicing of virtues-virtues that might not be palatable to humanist sensibilities but are nonetheless con.. stitutive of agency in important ways. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1133

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how feminist theory’s unexamined humanist assumption that agency equals autonomous resistance blinds it to other, equally real forms of ethical agency — the piety as agency argument made visible through singlehood in Egypt.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the book’s central thesis in miniature — that virtue ethics, not autonomy, can be the substrate of agency — resisting a one-sentence summary precisely because it requires rethinking both ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’.
• XREF: connects to: Imperfect practice can still be politically valuable and prefigurative — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning:…, 77; Agency is better understood as accomplished social action than as individual autonomous intent. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 114; Agency is best theorized as accomplished social action, not individual autonomy. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 114