Week 8: Saba Mahmood: "Agency, Gender, and Embodiment"

In Chapter 5 “Agency, Gender, and Embodiment”, the author Saba Mahmood carefully studied the cause of women’s shyness and how repeated actions could lead to the virtue of shyness of women. During the mosque movement of women, Mahmood explained how external expressions could affect and shape the internal, and how the secular women passively self-cultivated shyness.

Furthermore, Mahmood also introduced and valued Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and she learned that it does not necessary represent the mosque movement even though it is based on the concept of repeated performance for self-formation and creation of agency. Therefore, to get a better understanding of the concept of agency, Mahmood studied the relationship between women and marriage in a patriarchal society. She was trying to prove that secular women had a different view on traditional marriage, but it wasn’t necessarily focused on altering patriarchal structures. Instead, it was focused on the mosque movement. “Mosque movement women are agents even in the patriarchal system because she recognizes her responsibility to deal with her situation even if she cannot change it.”

The last but not the least, Mahmood examined the different ways of how women dealt with or taught to deal with their not so pious husbands. “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 proves resistance and subordination way of looking at agency is not quite enough.