Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Read Online Free PDF

question, Abu..Lughod criticizes herself and others for being too preoccupied with "explaining resistance and fi re.. sisters" at the expense of understanding the workings of power ( 1990b, 43). She argues:
    In some of my earlier work, as in that of others, there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resista to read all forms of resistance as signs ofineff veness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated. By reading resistance in this way, we collapse distinctions between forms of resistance and foreclose certain questions about the workings of power. (1990b, 42; emphasis added)

    12 For a somewhat diff rent approach to women's zar practices in the Sudan, which, nonetheless, utilizes a similar notion of agency, see Hale 1986, 1987.
    As a corrective, Abu..Lughod recommends that resistance be used as a "di.. agnostic of power" ( 1990b, 42), to locate the shifts in social relations of power that influence the resisters as well as those who dominate. To illustrate her point, Abu..Lughod gives the example of young Bedouin women who wear sexy lingerie to challenge parental authority and dominant social mores. She suggests that instead of simply reading such acts as moments of opposition to, and escape from, dominant relations of power, they should also be understood as reinscribing altern forms of power that are rooted in practices of capi.. talist consumerism and urban bourgeois values and aesthetics ( 1990b, 50).
    Abu..Lughod concludes her provocative essay with the following observation:

    My argument . . . has been that we should learn to read in various local and everyday resistances the existence of a range of specifi strategies and structures of power. Attention to the forms of resistance in particular societies can help us become critical of partial or reductionist theories of power. The problem has been that those of us who have sensed that there is something admirable about resistance have tended to look to it for hopeful confi of the failure-or partial failure-of systems of oppression. Yet it seems to me that we respect everyday resistance not just by arguing for the dignity or heroism of the resisters but by letting their practices teach us about complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power. ( 1990b, 53; emphasis added)
    While Abu..Lughod's attention to understanding resistance as a diagnostic of differential forms of power marks an important analytical step that allows us to move beyond the simple binary of resistance/subordination, she never.. theless implies that the task of identify an act as one of "resistance" is a fairly unproblematic enterprise. She revises her earlier analysis by suggesting that in order to describe the specifi forms that acts of resistance take, they need to be located within fi s of power rather than outside of them. Thus, even though Abu.. Lughod starts her essay by questioning the ascription of a "feminist consciousness" to those for whom this is not a meaningful category ( 1990b, 47), this does not lead her to challenge the use of the term "resis.. tance" to describe a whole range of human actions, including those which may be socially, ethically, or politically indifferent to the goal of opposing hegemonic norms. I believe it is critical that we ask whether it is even possible to identify a universal category of acts-such as those of resistance-outside of the ethical and political conditions within which such acts acquire their particular meaning. Equally important is the question that follows: does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analyt.. ics of power-a teleology that makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms?

    What perceptive studies such as these by Boddy and Abu..Lughod fail to problematize is the universality of the desire-central