Status Updates From Politics of Piety: The Isla...

should be required reading for the self-proclaimed socially conscious Western liberals studying IR but also ( so far) so steeped in Foucauldian jargon that it could never dream of reaching a broad audience if it tried (or wanted to) which makes it painful . but really compelling either way !

The ending of the first chapter is much more vague and cautious than I was prepared for after the energy and the robustness of Mahmood's arguments up to this point. In the final paragraphs she's all . . . Well, I'm not actually proposing any answers or value judgments, just maybe a different posture for feminism when it encounters social conservatism. Maybe that's more shocking in her setting than in mine?

But that's not a shot against her argument - that agency is currently (pub. 2005) understood in such exclusively liberal-progressive terms that political/feminist language and analytical modes fail to recognize or respect (real!) agency that operates outside its assumptions. Mahmood is preparing the ground to analyze this failure particularly in context of religious activity. Why/how/could a woman choose submission?

It IS amusing when an author has to spend 7 pages on Judith Butler and poststructuralist feminist theory in order to suggest that "Norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted, I would suggest, but performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways." 🤷‍♀️

rereading a couple of these chapters!