Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (8 page)

22
Similarly "A Black Feminist Statement" by the Combahee River Collective rejected the ap, peal for lesbian separatism made by white feminists on the grounds that the history of racial op, pression required black women to make alliances with male members of their communities in or, der to continue fi against institutionalized racism (Hull, Bell,Scott, and Smith 1982).

23
For an interesting discussion of the contradictions generated by the privileged position ac, corded to the concept of autonomy in feminist theory, see Adams and M inson 1978.

nine, emotional, nonrational, and intersubjective ( Butler 1999; Gatens 1 996; Grosz 1 994). This exclusion cannot be substantively or conceptually recuper.. ated, however, through recourse to an unproblematic feminine experience,

body, or imaginary
(pac
Beauvoir and lrigaray), but must be thought through

the very terms of the discourse of metaphysical transcendence that enacts these exclusions.24

In what follows, I would like to push further in the direction opened by these poststructuralist debates. In particular, my argument for uncoupling the notion of self-- ealization from that of the autonomous will is indebted to post.. structuralist critiques of the transcendental subject, voluntarism, and repres.. sive models of power. Yet, as will become clear, my analysis also departs from these frameworks insomuch as I question the overwhelming tendency within poststructuralist feminist scholarship to conceptualize agency in terms of sub.. version or resignifi ation of social norms, to locate agency within those oper� ations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power. In other words, I will argue that the normative political subject of poststructuralist feminist theory often remains a liberatory one, whose agency is conceptual.. ized on the binary model of subordination and subversion. In doing so, this scholarship elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and res istance. In order to grasp these modes of action indebted to other reasons and histories, I will sug.. gest that it is crucial to detach the notion of agency from the goals of progres.. sive politics.

It is quite clear that the idea of freedom and liberty as
the
political ideal is

relatively new in modem history. Many societies, including Western ones, have fl with aspirations other than this. Nor, for that matter, does the narrative of individual and collective liberty exhaust the desires with which people live in liberal societies. If we recognize that the desire for freedom from, or subversion of, norms is not an innate desire that motivates all beings at all times, but is also profoundly mediated by cultural and historical condi.. tions, then the question arises: how do we analyze operations of power that construct different kinds of bodies, knowledges, and subjectivities whose tra- jectories do not follow the entelechy of liberatory politics?

Put simply, my point is this: if the ability to effect change in the world and in oneself is historically and culturally specifi (both in terms of what consti.. tutes "change" and the means by which it is effected), then the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fi in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specifi modes of being, respon..

24
For an excellent discussion of this point in the scholarship on feminist ethics, see Colebrook

.1997.

sibility, and effectivity. Viewed in this way, what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actu.. ally be a form of agency-but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one
inhabits
norms.

It may be argued in response that this kind of challenge to the natural sta.. tus accorded to the desire for freedom in analyses of gender runs the risk of Orientalizing Arab and Muslim women all over again-repeating the errors of pre.- 1 970s Orientalist scholarship that defi Middle Eastern women as passive submissive Others, bereft of the enlightened consciousness of their "Western sisters," and hence doomed to lives of servile submission to men. I would contend, however, that to examine the discursive and practical condi.. tions within which women come to cultivate various forms of desire and ca.. pacities of ethical action is a radically different project than an Orientalizing one that locates the desire for submission in an innate ahistorical cultural essence. Indeed, if we accept the notion that all forms of desire are discur.. sively organized ( as much of recent feminist scholarship has argued), then it is important to interrogate the practical and conceptual conditions under which different forms of desire emerge, including desire for submission to recognized authority. We cannot treat as natural and imitable only those desires that en.. sure the emergence of feminist politics.

Consider, for example, the women from the mosque movement with whom I worked. The task of realizing piety placed these women in confl with sev.. eral structures of authority. Some of these structures were grounded in insti.. tuted standards of Islamic orthodoxy, and others in norms of liberal discourse; some were grounded in the authority of parents and male kin, and others in state institutions. Yet the
rationale
behind these confl was not predicated upon, and therefore cannot be understood only by reference to, arguments for gender equality or resistance to male authority. Nor can these women's prac.. tices be read as a reinscription of traditional roles, since the women's mosque movement has signifi reconfi the gendered practice of Islamic ped.. agogy and the social institution of mosques (see chapters 3 and 5). One could, of course, argue in response that, the intent of these women notwithstanding, the actual effects of their practices may be analyzed in terms of their role in re.. inforcing or undermining structures of male domination. While conceding that such an analysis is feasible and has been useful at times, I would never.. theless argue that it remains encumbered by the binary terms of resistance and subordination, and ignores projects, discourses, and desires that are not cap.. tured by these terms (such as those pursued by the women I worked with).

Studies on the resurgent popularity of the veil in urban Egypt since the

1970s
provide excellent examples of these issues. The proliferation of such studies ( El Guindi
1 981 ;
Hoffman..Ladd
1 987 ;
MacLeod
1 991;
Radwan
1 982 ;
Zuhur
1992 )
refl scholars' surprise that, contrary to their expectations, so many "modem Egyptian women" have returned to wearing the veil. Some of these studies off functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily ( for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodifi of women's bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil fre1 their deci.. sion precisely in these terms.25 Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phan.. tom imaginings of the hegemonized.26 I do not, of course, mean to suggest that we should restrict our analyses to folk categories. Rather, I want to argue for a critical vigilance against the elisions any process of translation entails, espe.. cially when the language of social science claims for itself a transparent uni.. versalism while portraying the language used by "ordinary people" as a poor approximation of their reality.27

My argument should be familiar to anthropologists who have long acknowl.. edged that the terms people use to organize their lives are not simply a gloss for universally shared assumptions about the world and one's place in it, but are actually constitutive of different forms of personhood, knowledge, and experi.. ence�28 For this reason I have found it necessary, in the chapters that follow, to

25
See, in contrast, Lila Abu..Lughod's interesting discussion of the veil as a critical aspect of the concept of modesty
(l)asha
among Egyptian Bedouins (1986, 159-67 ).

26
For example, in a survey conducted among veiled university students in Cairo, a majority of the interviewees cited piety as their primary motivation for taking up the veil. In commenting on the results of this survey, the sociologist Sherifa Zuhur argues that "rather than the newfound piety" her informants claimed, the real motivations for veiling inhered in the socioeconomic in.. centives and benefits that accrue to veiled women in Egyptian society (Zuhur 1 992, 83 ).

27
For a thoughtful discussion of the problems entailed in the translation of supern and metaphysical concepts into the language of secular time and history, see Chakrabarty 2000; Ran.. ciere 1 994.

28
For an excellent exploration of the use of language in the cultural construction of person.. hood, see Caton 1990; Keane 1997; Rosaldo 1982. Also see Marilyn Strathern's critique of West.. ern conceptions of "society and culture" that feminist deconstructivist approaches assume in ana.. lyzing gender relations in non.-Western societies (1992b).