Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (7 page)

person to be considered free, Christman argues, an account is required of the process by which the person acquired her desire for slavery. Christman asserts that as long as these desires and values are "generated in accordance with the

procedural
conditions of autonomous preference formation that are constitu..

tive of fr dom, then no matter what the 'content' of those desires, the ac.. tions which they stimulate will be (positively) free" (1991, 359).19 In other words, it is not the substance of a desire but its "origin that matters in judg.. ments about autonomy" ( Christman 1991, 359). Freedom, in this formula.. tion, consists in the ability to autonomously "choose" one's desires no matter how illiberal they may be.
20

The concepts of positive and negative freedom, with the attendant require.. ment of procedural autonomy, provide the ground on which much of the fern.. inist debate unfolds. For example, the positive conception of fr edom seems to predominate in projects of feminist historiography ( sometimes referred to as "her..story") that seek to capture historically and culturally specifi in.. stances of women's se}f..directed action, unencumbered by patriarchal norms or the will of others.
21
The negative conception of freedom seems to prevail in studies of gender that explore those spaces in women's lives that are indepen.. dent of men's infl , and possibly coercive presence, treating such spaces as pregnant with possibilities for women's fulfi or self..realization. Many feminist historians and anthropologists of the Arab Muslim world have thus sought to delimit those conditions and situations in which women seem to au.. tonomously articulate "their own" discourse (such as that of poetry, weaving, cult possession, and the like), at times conferring a potentially liberatory meaning to practices of sex segregation that had traditionally been under..

19
This "procedural" or "content,neutral'' account of autonomy is most infl advocated by contemporary theorists like Rawls, Habermas, and Dworkin ( their diff notwithstand, ing).It contrasts with a "substantive" account of autonomy in which a person's actions are not only required to be the result of her own choice, but also must, in their
content,
abide by prede.. termined standards and values that defi the ideal of autonomy. In the latter version, a person who willingly chooses to become a slave would not be considered free. It should be noted, how.. ever, that the substantive account is only a more robust and stronger version of the procedural ac.. count of autonomy.On this and related issues, see Friedman
2003,
especially pages 1 9-29.

2
0
This long.- liberal principle has generated a number of paradoxes in history.For ex.. ample, the British tolerated acts of
sati
(widow burn in colonial India, despite their offi opposition to the practice, in those cases where the offi could determine that the widow was

not coerced but went "willingly to the pyre" (for an excellent discussion of this debate, see Mani 1 998
).
Similarly, some critics of sadomasochism in the United States argue that the practice may
be
tolerated on the condition that it is undertaken by consenting adults who have a "choice, in
the
m
a
tt
er
,
and is
not the result
of "coercion.,

21
For an illuminating discussion of the historiographical project of "her,story," see Joan Scott 1988, 15-2 7.

stood as making women marginal to the public arena of conventional politics ( Ahmed 1982; Boddy 1989; Wikan 1991 ).

My intention here is not to question the profound transformation that the liberal discourse of freedom and individual autonomy has enabled in women's lives around the world, but rather to draw attention to the ways in which these liberal presuppositions have become naturalized in the scholarship on gender. It is quite clear that both positive and negative notions of freedom have been used productively to expand the horizon of what constitutes the domain of legitimate feminist practice and debate. For example, in the 1970s, in response to the call by white middle..class feminists to dismantle the insti.. tution of the nuclear family, which they believed to be a key source of women's oppression, Native.. and African American feminists argued that freedom, for them, consisted in being able to form families, since the long history of slav.. ery, genocide, and racism had operated precisely by breaking up their com.. munities and social networks (see, for example, Brant 1984; Collins 1991;

A. Davis 1983 ; Lorde 1984). 22 Such arguments successfully expanded feminist understandings of "self..realization/self..fulfi by making considerations of class, race, and ethnicity central, thereby forcing feminists to rethink the concept of individual autonomy in light of other issues.

Since then a number of feminist theorists have launched trenchant cri.. tiques of the liberal notion of autonomy from a variety of perspectives.
23
While earlier critics had drawn attention to the masculinist assumptions un.. derpinning the ideal of autonomy ( Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1 982 ), later scholars faulted this ideal for its emphasis on the atomistic, individualized, and bounded characteristics of the self at the expense of its relational qualities formed through social interactions within forms of human community (Ben.. habib 1992 ; Young 1990 ). Consequently, there have been various attempts to redefi autonomy so as to capture the emotional, embodied, and socially em.. bedded character of people, particularly of women (Friedman 1997, 2003 ; Joseph 1999; Nedelsky 1989 ). A more radical strain of poststructuralist theory has situated its critique of autonomy within a larger challenge posed to the
il.. lusory
character of the rationalist, self..authorizing, transcendental subject pre.. supposed by Enlightenment thought in general, and the liberal tradition in particular. Rational thought, these critics argue, secures its universal scope and authority by performing a necessary exclusion of all that is bodily, femi..