week 8: Saba Mahmood: Agency, Gender and Embodiment (post by Sophie de Seriere)

Agency, Gender and Embodiment

In the The Subject of Freedom we have seen Saba Mahmood analyze certain concepts and issues such as freedom, agency, piety, subjectivation and power. She offered a critique to liberal assumptions about human nature against which Islamic movements are often held accountable, specifically in relation to the role women play in Islamic religion. In Agency, Gender and Embodiment, Mahmood wants to focus on the ethical practices of the mosque movement in the context of gender inequality and the disavowment of the humanist subject. I believe that the possible modalities of agency she explores and the examples she offers raise important questions regarding what freedom is and how one achieves the agency to acquire and exercise this freedom: ''I hope to redress the profound inability within current feminist political thought to envision valuable forms of human flourishing outside the bounds of a liberal progressive imaginary.''¹

An important example I think Mahmood gives of the way in which someone can flourish that differs from the liberalist assumption of flourishing, is the practice of the Islamic virtue al-haya, which means shyness or modesty. The conversation of al-haya raises interesting questions on the kind of relationship between subject and norm, and performative behaviour and inward disposition.² We often think of the motivation for our actions being natural feelings or intuition, but Mahmood explains that in the case of al-haya and other muslim practices - like veiling - it is the sequence of practices and actions that determines these natural feelings.³ Mahmood explains that in liberal conceptions of the self a dissonance between internal feelings and external expressions would be considered a form of dishonesty. For me this raised an interesting question on how we for example treat criminals. Maybe repeating bodily acts to train one's memory, desire and intellect to behave according to established standards of conduct, could serve as an alternative solution to locking up criminals without reeducating them?

Another important theme I believe Mahmood explores in this chapter is how living in a society where subjects are not seen as completely responsible for their own actions can affect women's ability to survive within a system of inequality and to flourish despite its constraints.⁴ Certain virtues Mahmood argues, - like sabr, the ability to persevere within the face of difficulty - have lost their value in the liberal imagination and are considered as a symbol of passivity and inaction. The case of Nadia however offers an important counter example: for her the virtue sabr is constructive! So to end with the important lesson Mahmood gives the reader: ''Analyzing people in terms of attempts at social transformation is reducing lives to the flat narrative of succumbing to or resisting narratives of domination.''⁵ This again connects to the 'white saviour' narrative of many (feminist) scholars regarding muslim women. Mahmood urges us to understand that there are different modalities of agency and we should think about the hierarchy we commonly attribute to these modalities of agency.

1Mahmood, Saba. p. 155

2Mahmood, Saba. p. 157

3Mahmood, Saba. p. 157

4Mahmood, Saba. p. 168

5Mahmood, Saba. p. 174