Women’s agency can operate through subordination, not against it

Evidence

Abir was able to hold her position in part because she could claim a higher moral ground than her husband. Her training in dac: had given her substantial authority from which to speak and challenge her husband on is.. sues of proper Islamic conduct. … 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: The central paradox of the book: an act of insubordination made possible by perfecting the very tradition that assigns subordinate status. Challenges the liberal assumption that agency requires autonomy from norms.
• XREF: Echoes my reading of Coral Lansbury and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich — women gaining power within patriarchal systems by mastering their codes, similar to the paradoxical agency in A Midwife’s Tale. — connects to: Structural factors, not ideology, gave women bridging roles — Silke Roth, Intersectionality and coalitions in…, 159
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘how subordination enables agency’ — using religious women’s da’wa training to complicate feminist assumptions that agency and resistance are synonymous.