Karoline’s Reviews > Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject > Status Update

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!