Saba Mahmood: Agency, Gender, and Embodiment

Saba Mahmood's chapter "Agency, Gender, and Embodiment" offers us a different way in which to think about what agency means and how this different agency meaning offers a more inclusive analysis that the other meaning of agency did not. Agency traditionally being equated to resistance to social norms, where as Mahmood wants us to think of agency as a modality of action. She uses this agency to be able to compare and contrast aspects of the piety movement from both perspectives of agency, to demonstrate the different types of questions that are raised that wouldn't be raised when restricting it to only an act of resistance. One example is in her analysis of Abir's struggle with her husband and her involvement in da'wa activities. Abir can be seen as resisting the control of her husband by going against social norms but it can also be seen as her being able to break social norms by operating within the control of her husband instead of going against it. Therefore, her overall message is that we might have to retrain ourselves to take on particular perspectives, in a similar way that Nama had to overcome her embarrassment of wearing the hijab only to feel uncomfortable when she had to take it off so that she would be able to practice piety more devotedly.

This might be far fetched but reading this quote saying that "patriarchal ideologies work by objectifying  women's bodies and subjecting them to masculine systems of representation, thereby negating and distorting women's own experience of their corporeality and subjectivity (Mahmood p. 158). " sparked an analysis in me between American and Muslim women or girls attire (that's not to say that American's are not Muslim). I couldn't help but think of dress code "violations" of high school girls, where wearing articles of clothing such as tank tops, anything strapless, form fitting, etc is prohibited and will result in girls being sent home from school. I thought is is interesting to compare this practice that girls in America need to cover their bodies so that they are not seen as a "distraction" to boys and then for America to see the covering of Muslim women's bodies as something that is foreign and as people who need to be saved. It is pretty ironic how the same system that penalizes American girls in high school is the same system that wishes to uproot women covering their bodies in particular ways. I also find it interesting that wearing less clothes is seen as a western thing but within this western society girls are always going to be sexualized and that is embedded in our frameworks and are taught this the moment we start school. I don't really know where I was going with this but I thought this is just something I thought was relevant.