Re-thinking Agency

In her book, Politics of Piety, in relation to the Mosque Movement Saba Mahmood questions why such a large number of women across the Muslim world actively support a movement that does not favor their own “interests and agendas”? In explaining women’s attitude to the notion of piety and its practice, she subverts existing modes of thinking about Muslim women’s agency “beyond the simplistic registers of submission and patriarchy”. In the Subject of Freedom, Mahmood expands on this insufficiency that attend to feminist scholarship which through Western media portrays Muslim women as suppressed by religion and patriarchal oppression. She argues that the normative political subject of poststructuralist feminist theory often remains a liberatory one, whose agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion. In doing so, western scholarship elides dimensions of human action that does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance elsewhere.  There is a need to then understand certain behaviors “in their own terms”, something that first, undermines the totalizing image of feminist theory and reinforces the significance of cultural context- What are then the limits of feminist scholarship?  Secondly, it allows for a departure from a conceptualization of social change that focuses on visible and obvious sites of resistance to subordination in order to understand a movement that is focused on moral reform and would not be considered political by most scholars. Mahmood, taking her lead from James Boddy’s ethnographic study argues that women’s agency can be understood as part of a “subordinate discourse- as a medium for the cultivation of women’s consciousness”. To my mind, the strength of her work lies in the attempt at articulating non-explicit/ blatant forms of feminine agency- her insistence on what she calls “moments of disruption and articulation of points of points of opposition to male authority”. In analyzing Boddy she says “even in instances when an explicit feminist agency is difficult to locate, there is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that challenge male domination”. It is the subtle modes of agency that suggest not just the complexities and nuances that govern human behavior but also the various other ways in which we may come to think of how women find ways of “voicing” themselves. How else can we expand the question of whether the subaltern can speak? Spivak argued, in relation to the case of sati that that the women’s voice, her agency is irretrievable as it is lost between two opposing patriarchal discourses that attempt to define the parameters of her free will. On the other hand, Politics of Piety is hopeful in the sense that she lays out the different modalities of agency that go beyond resistance. She tries to show how despite dominant forms of Western knowledge, one can locate the voice of the non-Western woman and come to terms with her experience and subject formation.  She starts with the formation of the virtue of shyness: woman cultivates the virtue of shyness by repeated action. For the women in the mosque movement the external shapes the internal, though the secular woman she describes sees the cultivation of shyness as passivity. Mahmood evaluates Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and concludes that it does not describe adequately the mosque movement even though it is based on the concept of repeated performance for self-formation and creation of agency. In contrast, she examines how women navigate marriage in a patriarchal society. The Mosque movement women are agents even in the patriarchal system because they recognize their responsibility to deal with their situation even if they cannot change it. To my mind, this points to agency itself being a layered concept. If patriarchal system exerts agency upon the woman, what is the form of a female counter-agency?  Is this a kind of an alternative form of power? Thus, Mahmood looks at different ways women deal with husbands who are not pious. How does one practice da’wa in a patriarchal system if the husband disapproves? Women navigate the textual tradition to choose how to deal with it. This is another modality of agency that dispels the popular binary of resistance/subordination as the only way of looking at female agency.  Or in other words, can we think of resistance as comprising a range of human actions?