Week 7: Agency, Gender and Embodiment

Similar women mosque movement emerges in Indonesia.
(Photo: www.ptpnix.co.id)

The movement is also popular among young Indonesian women.
(Photo: www.julianadewi.com)

                                               

In the chapter “Agency, Gender and Embodiment” in her book Politics of the Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood invited us to think about the notions of agency that might be unsuited with the liberal and hegemonic feminist narratives which are mostly related with subversion. Mahmood argued that there are different notions of agency in the participants of women mosque movement in Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt, especially in the creation of their pious selves. Bodily acts, such as donning the veil, are not masks used in public presentation as an expression of the pious self but they are the tools in making of a pious self, “Rather they are the critical markers of piety as well as ineluctable means by which one trains oneself to be pious.” (Mahmood, 158)

            As the core of agency, Mahmood also presented the performativity of these women as similar of the concept offered by Judith Butler that considers performativity which “consists in reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer's 'will' or 'choice' ” (Butler 1993, 234).  Though the two concepts might seem similar, there is one big difference in the concepts of performativity between Butler and the women in the mosque movement: disruption of norms. For Butler, the excellence at piety puts the hetero-normative structure and its stability at risk. Meanwhile, for the women, the excellence at piety consolidates the structure. Furthermore, Mahmood posited that for the women, agency is about individual responsibility, restrained by religious doctrines and social structures. This also leads to the argument of the account privileges of individual ethics that argues each person is responsible of her own actions.

            Eventually Mahmood emphasized not offering a theory of agency and instead analyzing agency with the different modalities and grammar of concepts it have. As a person who is influenced with secularism and liberalism, this piece makes me understand better how the piety is formed in these Muslim women and in general to not judge the choice they made just because on the surface their choices might seem very submissive. It also helps me to appreciate that there the other notions of agency which might not always be about actions, resistance and rebellions.