Saba Mehmood and Politics of Piety

One of the most pertinent question that is brought up is: how might be recognise instances of women's resistance without "misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience- something like a feminist consciousness or feminist politics?" It is in this regard that Saba Mehmood highlights the importance of challenging the notion of "resistence" itself. Citing the example of young Bedouin women, she suggests how simple acts such as the type of clothing one wears should not only be viewed as opposition to dominant relations of power. Rather, they should be understood as reinscribing alternative forms of power that are rooted in practices of capitalist consumerism and urban bourgeois values and aesthetics. Abu-Lughod beautifully summaries this idea of locating resistence necessarily as a failure of system(s) of oppression when when she writes: "it seems to me that we respect everyday resistance not just by arguing for the dignity or heroism of the resisters but by letting their practices teach us about complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power".

Mehmood argues that if the ability to effect change in the world and in oneself is historically and culturally specific (both in terms of what constitutes "change" and the means by which it is effected), then the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility and effectivity. Thus, what is viewed passivity from a progressive point of view might actually be a form of agency. Her insistence on holding open the possibility that we may come to ask of politics a whole series of questions that seemed settled when we first embarked upon the inquiry, is a point I'm particularly interested in.