Conjugating the Modern/ Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency

Abstract

This article is concerned with thinking transformations of the secular, and does so in relation to two theoretical terrains, while empirically grounded in ethnographies of Christian and Islamic pious women in the Netherlands. A first theoretical terrain under consideration is that of how the relation between modernity and religion is elaborated, notably in secularization theories, and how these established frameworks are challenged by a different kind of articulation between modernity and religion that I observed in narratives and practices of young Evangelical and Islamic women in the Netherlands. The article traces the contours of a `pious modern', showing how from a faith-centred perspective the modern can be incorporated and indeed produced. In this context, I argue that the way in which notions of modernization and secularization have been theoretically hinged on each other needs to be further revisited, and I propose to consider the `post-secular' as a new disarticulation between the modern and the secular. A second theoretical terrain concerns questions of agency and subjectivity. Here I trace how situating religious agency in its own grammar makes secular assumptions in social, critical and feminist theory visible, and generates different understandings not only of agency but also of notions such as autonomy, and the capacity to act and shape the world.

Troublesome Threesome: Feminism, Anthropology and Muslim Women's Piety

“…Mahmood's perspective has been crucial to theorizing women's piety in the Arab world but also in Europe and South East Asia (jacobsen, 2006;Jouili, 2006;Minganti, 2007;Scott, 2007;Bracke, 2008;Fadil, 2008;Turner and Tong, 2008). A central concern to Mahmood (2001aMahmood ( , b, 2003Mahmood ( , 2005 is that the liberal-progressive agenda undergirding feminist theorizing on freedom, agency and the human subject limits the ability to comprehend women's piety in its complexity.…”

Revisited: Muslim Women’s agency and feminist anthropology of the Middle East

“…In doing so, Mahmood convincingly demonstrated that pious women's appropriation of religious concepts in fact contains a particular form of agency that had previously been neglected by feminist theory. Her ground-breaking work triggered a post-secular diversion in the ontology of feminist agency as it forced feminist theorists to question the limits of feminist thinking in realms of piety (Bracke 2008;Braidotti 2009) and contributed to post-colonial feminist theory.…”

Handshaking in the Secular: Understanding Agency of Veiled Turkish-Dutch Muslim Students

“…Such a secular liberal view has been challenged on grounds of a postcolonial ethnocentrism that frames pious Muslim women as the Other of an autonomous Eurocentric subject. Another line of theory, which from here on I will call the 'doing religion' paradigm (Avishai, 2008) put forth the idea that women comply with and participate in conservative religions for the sake of religious ends only rather than any other gains (Avishai, 2008;Bracke, 2008;Mahmood, 2005;Jacobsen, 2011), with a view to 'doing religion'; 'as a mode of conduct and being' (Avishai, 2008, p. 412).…”