Agency, Gender, and Embodiment

In the chapter “Agency, Gender, and Embodiment” Saba Mahmood argues, in the mosque movement specifically, that if one wants to understand how the women involved have remained attached to the very patriarchal norms that led to their agency and oppression, it is first necessary to understand how these practices developed rather than instantly associate their attachment to backwardness or subordination.

She asks the question, "how does the particularity of this attachment challenge familiar ways of conceptualizing "subordination" and "change" within liberal and post-structuralist feminist debates?" How does it also challenge what we perceive as progression and liberation? How do we set our perceptions of these norms aside in order to attempt to understand how feminism can still exist in these different terms?

She also argues that one not look at the women of the mosque movement as “feminist others”, because to do so would be to say that there is one way of being that all people should mold into. She expresses her 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.”

She goes on to suggest that one not reduce agency to simply being a form of rebellion or resistance to social norms, but instead as an expression of action, which raises the questions "between performative behavior and inward disposition.”

The most impactful misconception that she discusses is that “innate human desires” are the controlling factor behind one’s outward conduct, rather than looking at desires and feelings as the result of the practices that a person is engaged with. “In other words, action does not issue forth from natural feelings but creates them. …. It is through ones bodily acts that one trains one’s memory, desire, and intellect to behave according to established standards of conduct.”

This point stood out to me the most in the reading. The notion that acknowledging the role the body plays in the self is crucial to understanding why people do things differently. For example, in the attempt to understand why a woman who identifies as a feminist would still choose to live by the patriarchal norms of her society, or why she would also choose to veil. Just because the system and surroundings in which I have been submerged in the entirety of my life cultivated different desires in me, does not mean that she would not look at me and have some reversed but similar questions about the way I live my life.

In approaching desires and actions in this way, rather than believing one naturally has thoughts, desires, and emotions that manifest themselves into actions, we can see that our desires are dictated by the environment we are surrounded by. Lack of understanding of this notion is what leads us to question, “why would someone want to do that?”

What more could we also better understand if we attempted to learn more about a person or a society through analyzing the framework that supports their perception, rather than assuming that because it is different than ours it is wrong?