Women’s Agency within Feminist Historiography

Women’s Agency within Feminist HistoriographyAuthor(s): Saba MahmoodSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 84, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 573-579Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/422481 .

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Responses

Women’s Agency within Feminist Historiography

Saba Mahmood / University of California, Berkeley

In commenting upon these essays by three feminist historians of Chris-tianity, I have been struck by how some of the analytical problems thatI have been dealing with in my work as an anthropologist of Islam areshared across our disciplinary boundaries, especially given the distinctlydifferent character of “evidence” in our respective fields. If there is onequestion that is shared across the three articles presented here, it couldperhaps be summarized as follows: what are the analytical problemsthat confront a feminist historian when dealing with accounts ofwomen’s agency within Christian historiography? Ann Braude, AmyHollywood, and Ulrike Strasser bring very different kinds of issues tothe table in addressing this question.

Let me start with Ulrike Strasser, who brings her critique of Weberianunderstandings of religion and politics to bear upon her explorationof the role played by nuns in the creation of the early modern state inEurope in her article, “Early Modern Nuns and the (Feminist) Politicsof Religion” (in this issue). While Strasser takes exception to a numberof elements crucial to Weberian renditions of early modern Europeanhistory, her main criticism of this approach is that “Protestantismplayed at once too great and too little of a part in Weber’s tale ofprogressive rationalization of state power” (p. 532): too great “becauseProtestant doctrine . . . is credited with the force to single-handedlypropel the inhabitants of the medieval world of ritual and magic intoa modern universe of reason, hard work, and capital accumulation,”and too little because once Protestantism is understood to have playedits role in the consolidation of the secular state, it loses its force andbecomes marginal to the rationalized system of governance it helpedcreate in the first place (pp. 532–33). Strasser goes on to argue thatthe modernizing state remains the “driving and organizing principle”in this narrative such that it fails to ask how subjects who acted in the



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name of the new nation-state came to be produced in the first place(p. 535).

In Strasser’s view, the work of feminist historians is beset by similarproblems in that they continue to treat nuns as harbingers of a medi-eval past who resisted the winds of change and needed to be reformedso as to bring them into the modernizing fold of the new polity. Nunsin this scholarship, she argues, figure in one of two ways: either they“represent future objects of the modernizing state’s domestication ef-forts” or they are the “guardians of a moribund past” (p. 538). Againstthis tradition of scholarship, Strasser draws upon recent historical workthat examines the lives of “religious virgins” and shows that they “actedin cooperation and not in antithesis with the modernizing state” (p. 538;emphasis added). Strasser goes on to draw upon a number of examplesfrom Venice, France, Bavaria, and Peru (under Spanish rule) to showthat enclosed convents and religious virgins often played a crucial rolein the consolidation and centralization of state authority—and werenot, therefore, the impediments that they are portrayed to be in theolder scholarship (pp. 538–47). She also gives examples of instances(from Spain and England) when convents actually resisted the central-izing ambitions of the modernizing state. Against those who would readthis resistance as a sign of the nuns’ premodern proclivities that neededto be remade, Strasser suggests that this intertwining of the “conventand [the] court” should be read as the necessarily related character ofreligion and politics in this period (p. 551).

Strasser raises important points about the limitations of Weber’s tel-eological framework for the analysis of the role religious virgins playedin this period, arguing that the nuns’ commitments and activities donot easily fit this mold. But it seems to me that in emphasizing theagency of the nuns in the making of the modern state, Strasser rein-scribes the Weberian framework that she wanted to displace in the firstplace, in particular its state-driven mode of analysis. Even when sheanalyzes how the nuns (in alliance with the courts) served as agents of“political subversion” (p. 547), the center of gravity of Strasser’s analysisremains state focused. One might ask, can all the activities of the nunsat the time be appropriately analyzed through the lens of state/courtpolitics or were there other forms of commitments, demands, andstruggles that might lead us to conceptualize this period differently? Ifindeed one of the problems with the scholarship on early modern Eu-rope is that it tends to locate the motor of history within the central-izing impetus of the modernizing state, then how do we conceptualizethe domain of politics such that its contours are not already given inthe actions and logics of the emergent state? Furthermore, if religion



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and politics are, as Strasser correctly observes, not separate units butare conceptually intertwined, then what difference does it make tothink about politics from a position that is not “of-the-state”—especiallyin a time period when the apparatus of modern governance was not asomnipresent as it became later on?

This state-centered perspective seems also to color Strasser’s provoc-ative suggestion that scholars need to pay more attention to the waysin which the “monastic ideals of self-regulation and techniques of dis-cipline” were harnessed to create modern citizen-subjects (p. 552). In-deed, the work of Michel Foucault and others on the notion of “gov-ernmentality” begins to point to the ways in which certain monasticconceptions were transmuted into modern forms of disciplinary prac-tice—such as the incorporation of the confessional model into theemergent practice governing psychological normativity.1 Given thislinkage, I think a place where Strasser’s analysis can benefit furtherfrom attention to historical specificity is where she turns to Judith But-ler’s theory of subject formation to argue that, far from being “antip-odes to the modern,” the nuns and monks of the early modern periodwere the “prototype[s] of the subject.” What leads her to make thissomewhat surprising claim (given her focus on the historicity of prac-tices) is the observation that insomuch as the nuns and monks culti-vated a “voluntary attachment to obedience” (p. 553), their disciplinarypractices show how the process by which one becomes subjected torelations of power also constitutes the conditions for the exercise ofone’s agency.

Aside from the fact that the term “voluntary attachment” does notfind any resonance in Butler’s account of the subject (her formulationof the subject aims to precisely call into question the notion of volun-teerism inscribed in regnant theories of the subject),2 I think that Stras-ser’s attention to how the conception of self-reflexivity historicallychanges among the nuns of the early modern period can deepen ourunderstandings of the very conception of the “disciplined subject”(rather than making these nuns the “prototypes” of modern theories

1 See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordin, and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); andNikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998).

2 See Butler’s discussion of this point in Judith Butler and William Connolly, “Politics, Powerand Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly,” Theory and Event 24(2000), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.2butler.html. Also see Ju-dith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. SeylaBenhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995),pp. 127–44.




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of the subject). On this view, self-reflexivity would not be considered auniversal human attribute but a historical object whose precise form isdetermined by historically specific conditions of power and forms of“subjectivation” that enable it. Some of the questions emerging fromStrasser’s closing remarks that would be interesting to explore are:What were the forms of self-reflexivity, the ways in which the nuns ar-ticulated their relationship to structures of authority, in the early mod-ern period that did not simply reproduce the dictates of the modernstate but were products of imaginaries and lifeworlds that cannot beinscribed within the logic of the state? What questions and strugglescome to the fore when one shifts one’s gaze from the hegemonic nar-rative of state building to the struggles that characterized the lives ofcloistered nuns and religious virgins?

These are questions that I think resonate with Amy Hollywood’s in-terest in exploring forms of agency and lifeworlds of medieval religiouswomen that she argues, on the one hand, often escape modernist cat-egories of analysis and, on the other hand, confound feminist politics.In her article, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Histori-ography” (in this issue), Hollywood argues that as a feminist historianshe has tended to read medieval mystics’ (such as Mechthild of Mag-deburg) claim that God spoke through them as “self-authorizing,” areading that elides the important ways in which these women ascribeagency to the divine (rather than to themselves) (pp. 514–15). Whatwould it do to the writing of history and to feminist politics, Hollywoodasks, if one were to take these women’s claims seriously? Hollywooddraws upon Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work to argue that the epistemolog-ical assumptions of Newtonian causality that are at the core of the mod-ern discipline of history (with its concomitant understanding of tem-porality as “secular, empty, and homogenous”) cannot allow forsupernatural modes of agency, with the result that they are often trans-lated into terms of evidence that are internal to secular historiography(p. 522).

Hollywood finds the solution that Chakrabarty proposes to this di-lemma compelling: to write a form of history that seeks to dispel thecertainty of its own secular epistemology by rendering the claims todivine agency visible and plausible. What this allows an academic his-torian to do is both to engage the hegemonic terms of the disciplineof secular history constructively and to expose the violence this narra-tive commits against lifeworlds and imaginaries that are not encom-passable within a secular framework. But how does this mode of writingaffect the capacity of the feminist historian, Hollywood asks, to critiquethe misogynist and patriarchal values that undergird many of the prac-



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tices of the medieval religious women wherein claims to divine agencyare also those that buttress gender subordination? According to Hol-lywood, Chakrabarty’s answer to this question (albeit under the generalregister of progressive politics) is that the historian must maintain acertain tension between, on the one hand, her engagement with termsof secular historiography because this enables her to “maintain thespace for critique” (p. 526) and, on the other hand, a radical opennessto difference.

While Hollywood does not completely disagree with Chakrabarty’sconclusion, in her closing remarks she does raise the interesting pos-sibility of what it would mean to conceptualize emancipatory politicsoutside the narrative of secular history. And what would it mean toanalyze “ends other than those of emancipation” that a feminist his-torian must attend in order to “understand, explain, and promote theflourishing of women’s lives” (p. 528)? While I agree with the importantquestions Hollywood raises against the provocative framework providedby Chakrabarty,3 I think that her implicit acceptance of Chakrabarty’sclaims about the relationship between Newtonian and secular episte-mology and the possibility of radical politics can be complicatedfurther.

I am not sure that in order to question the truth of emancipatorypolitics or to explore other understandings of emancipation, one needsto engage in a debate about the epistemological truth of divine agents.In my reading, neither Chakrabarty nor Hollywood make clear howNewtonian conceptions of causality are linked with progressive politics,or how a secular conception of history necessarily entails a criticalstance against oppressive, unjust, or subordinating practices. After all,many of the recent poststructuralist writers and philosophers who ques-tion the truth of Newtonian science often also abide by progressive/leftist positions (and the reverse is equally, if not more, true). Alter-natively, I am not sure that unsettling the certainty of epistemologicalclaims of secular history necessarily leads one to question conceptionsof freedom and emancipation that are hegemonic within feminist andother left-liberal imaginaries. In other words, I think that probing thecertainty of secular epistemology belongs to a different domain of an-

3 I am sympathetic to the questions Hollywood raises and have addressed some of these inmy own work. See Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent:Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202–35.I have since then, however, come to think that the challenge of engaging in this kind of workis more complicated than granting the Other her epistemological premise and must beaddressed on political grounds as well. See my “Introduction” and “Epilogue” in Politics ofPiety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univeristy Press,2004).




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alytical labor than an attempt that seeks to question those political vi-sions that have become normative within progressive and feministscholarship.

In this regard, the notion of “critique” that Hollywood uses can per-haps be fruitfully expanded. Hollywood is concerned that as a feministhistorian she does not forgo the possibility of critique, particularly inregard to practices that buttress gender subordination through re-course to claims of divine causality or agency. But critique, I wouldpoint out, is always a situated practice, one that abides by certain pro-tocols of what is considered normative within a particular historicalmoment, and insofar as it does, it is never a completely “objective”enterprise. What appears to be horribly misogynist from one perspec-tive may appear to be quite normative from another. (One needs onlyto think of how tolerance for sadomasochist practices has increased inmodern societies as these practices have become associated with theright to sexual freedom.) So the function of critique is not simply toexpose how what was once considered acceptable has now becomequestionable—both ethically and empirically such a teleological un-derstanding of history is difficult to uphold. Instead, I would suggest,we need to consider how critique might be most powerful when it isundertaken not simply to condemn or expose the implausibility of an-other’s position or worldview but to leave open the possibility that onemay be remade through engagement with (an)Other perspective. ThisI think is also the impetus behind Hollywood’s closing remarks, as it isbehind Chakrabarty’s call for a radical openness to the Other; but inboth instances, it is the ethical definition of critique that is expandedimplicitly—something that in itself does not have much to do with ques-tioning the epistemological certainty of one’s worldview.

Ethically and politically speaking, if one were to think of critique inthis broad sense, then one’s openness to a “radical Other” would meanthat the certainty of one’s own political commitments could not be soeasily maintained and they would need to be rethought from withinthe context of what has been termed the process of subjectivation,which is the enabling condition for critique in the first place. This doesnot mean that one has to adopt the lifestyles of medieval women, orthat one stops fighting against the oppressive and unjust practices im-minent to one’s own life. To do so would be only to mimic the sameteleological certainty that we have been criticizing under the registerof secular history in the first place. It does mean, however, to keep openthe possibility that one can come to question the contingent impor-tance of emancipation and freedom to feminism (to mention only twoconflicted terms here) in a manner that one did not think was possible



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when one embarked upon an inquiry in the first place. This is a ques-tion that Hollywood’s essay might leave us with, a question that bringsthe analytical and politically prescriptive projects of the feminist tra-dition in some tension with each other.

Finally, let me turn to Ann Braude’s essay, “A Religious Feminist—Who Can Find Her? Historiographical Challenges from the NationalOrganization for Women” (in this issue), which aims to trace the eli-sions of their own history enacted by secular second wave feminists inregard to religious women. The provocative questions I think her essayraises are: If one were to prove empirically, as she does indeed, thatreligious women played a crucial role in second wave feminism, thenwould this necessarily cure the secular biases of this tradition? If not,then what are the terms of discourse that are endemic to this particularmoment within feminism (beyond the bias factor) that would makesuch a restoration difficult? In addressing these questions, do we haveto question the epistemological certainty of secularism or its politicaland ethical content, or both?



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Women’s Agency within Feminist Historiography