Aditi Sharif :
Agency is a recurring concept in the study of gender and culture. The concept of agency is often associated with the potential or freedom of individuals or groups to resist dominant norms, narratives, and power structures (Guest 2023). However, the concept of agency is predominantly used to understand the capacity of women and marginalized genders to resist male dominance in the study of gender and culture. In this regard, feminist anthropological works provide valuable insights.
Since the 1970s, feminist anthropologists, particularly those who have researched women in the Middle East, have started to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of women of non-Western societies as submissive objects of patriarchy (Mahmood 2016). I consider the ethnographic account of the women in the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin community, conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod, would be significant in this regard. Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin was a sexually-segregated community that belonged to Egypt’s Western Desert (Abu-Lughod 2016). In her article “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformation of Power Through Bedouin Women”(1990), she showed that women of this community enacted their agency by adopting different minor deviances of strict patriarchal norms in their everyday lives, resisting marriages, making fun of men and manhood, and reciting oral poetry (Abu-Lughod 2016).
However, Abu-Lughod didn’t treat resistance as “ signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (Abu-Lughod 2016, 37). Rather than romanticizing the notion of resistance, she utilized it as “a diagnostic of power” (Abu-Lughod 2016, 37). In other words, Abu-Lughod went beyond the simplistic understanding of agency as a form of independent consciousness and sought to understand the specific power structures by analysing forms of resistance (Abu-Lughod 2016). For instance, the minor deviances in the everyday activities of women, such as hiding knowledge from men, covering each other in trivial matters, and smoking secretly, reflected the strict norms and regulations of the community that they both supported and resisted (Abu-Lughod 2016).
Her analysis of resistance also showed the transformation of power dynamics in the social and economic lives of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin Community (Abu-Lughod 2016).
Now, can women equally utilize their agency in a particular context? I think the ethnographic study on the surrogate mothers in India, by Daisy Deomampo, can be a clear example of how different aspects, including class, education, and language, mediate women’s agency (Deomampo 2016). Commercial Surrogacy is considered legal in India, and many working-class women in this country have been involved in this process to reduce their financial burdens. Rather than relying on the simplistic division between “agent and victim, rich and poor, East and West” (Deomampo 2016, 57), she showed how surrogate women utilized individual and collective agency to resist gender norms and create financial opportunities (Deomampo 2016). However, their capacity to resist and enact agency depends on their subject positions within the “intraclass social positions” of the transnational surrogacy (Deomampo 2016, 57).
I found the arguments of Lila Abu-Lughod and Daisy Deomampo compelling. Instead of considering agency as an isolated symbol of human consciousness and freedom, they situate it in particular power structures. While Lila Abu-Lughod’s analysis of women’s resistance made us aware of multiple power structures and power transformation in the Bedouin community, the ethnographic research of Daisy Deomampo shows us the influence of class, social position, education, and language in asserting female agency in the power structures of transnational surrogacy (Deomampo 2016).
However, these studies of agency highlight the binary division between resistance and subordination, which fails to “understand and interrogate the lives of women, whose sense of self, aspirations, and projects have been shaped by non-liberal traditions” (Mahmood 2016, 46). In other words, considering the notion of agency as a challenge to male domination and cultural norms is often insufficient to capture the motivation and desire of the women whose subjectivity is not guided by the liberal discourse (Mahmood 2016). By critiquing such a conceptualization of agency, Saba Mahmood redefined the concept of agency differently in her ethnography (Mahmood 2016). Saba Mahmood conducted her ethnographic research on the women’s Islamic piety movement in Egypt, which comprises women from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds (Mahmood 2016). Women’s participation in this movement challenged the male-dominated character of mosques and Islamic pedagogy (Mahmood 2016). But this movement was often reduced to something associated with fundamentalism and the subjugation of women.
In contrast to these stereotypes, Mahmood’s analysis revealed the agency of the women associated with the piety movement (Mahmood 2016). However, her conceptualization of agency doesn’t rely on the binary division between resistance and subordination. In other words, she didn’t view agency as the human capacity to resist the male-dominant cultural norms. (Mahmood 2016) Rather, Mahmood defined agency “as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create” (Mahmood 2016, 47). Drawing from Butler’s analysis, Mahmood recognized that performing social norms plays an important role in cultivating agency (Mahmood 2016). Rather than conceptualizing norms in terms of consolidation or subversion of power, she emphasized how these norms are lived and inhabited. She gave an example of the Islamic virtue of female modesty (Al-Haya) to interpret the matter (Mahmood 2016). According to the female participants of the piety movement, bodily embodiment was the principal element of realizing the norm properly.
By representing an alternative vision of agency, she suggests that to analyse any norm, we need to consider the desires, motivations, commitments, and aspirations of people who practice the norms (Mahmood 2016). In her words, “in order to explore the kinds of injury specific to women located in particular historical and cultural situations, it is not enough simply to point, for example, that a tradition of female piety or modesty serves to give legitimacy to women’s subordination. Rather, it is only by exploring these traditions in relation to the practical engagements and forms of life in which they are embedded that we can come to understand the significance of the subordination to the women who embody it” (Mahmood 2016, 54).
I found Mahmood’s conceptualization of agency very insightful, which emphasizes the performance of the social norms of women involved in the piety movement. By doing so, Mahmood went beyond the conceptualization of agency in terms of the binary opposition between resistance and subordination and showed how the female practitioners of the piety movement utilize their agency by performing social norms and cultivating their selves (Mahmood 2016).
From the above discussion, it is evident that the agency in the study of gender and culture should be understood in relation to power structures, the position of individuals in the hierarchy, and the social norms that are associated with the desires, motivations, and aspirations of the practitioners (Abu-Lughod 2016; Deomampo 2016; Mahmood 2016).
In this light, I argue that treating agency as the sign of women’s capacity to resist against male-dominated cultural norms without considering the power structures in which it is enacted is insufficient. Agency in the study of gender and culture should be analysed in terms of the power structures and the positions of the subjects who enact agency (Abu-Lughod 2016; Deomampo 2016). However, the meaning of agency can be changed based on the context it is used. So, the conceptualization of agency should not be limited to the Western dichotomy of resistance and subordination (Mahmood 2016). Rather, we should try to understand how the meaning of agency can be different in diverse contexts by highlighting the lived experiences of social norms and desires, motivations, and aspirations of the people associated with it (Mahmood 2016).
References
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2016. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformation of Power Through Bedouin Women.” In The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, 36-44. New York: Oxford University Press.
Deomampo, Daisy. 2016. “Transnational Surrogacy in India: Interrogating Power and Women’s Agency.” In The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, 56-64. New York: Oxford University Press.
Guest, Kenneth J. 2023. Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. 4th Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mahmood, Saba. 2016. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” In The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, 45-55. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author’s Biography:
Aditi Sharif is a Social Researcher, currently doing PhD in Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research interests lie in Gender, Feminism, Migration, and Religion.