Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (6 page)

What perceptive studies such as these by Boddy and Abu..Lughod fail to problematize is the universality of the desire-central for liberal and progres.. sive thought, and presupposed by the concept of resistance it authorizes-to be free from relations of subordination and, for women, from structures of male domination. This positing of women's agency as consubstantial with re.. sistance to relations of domination, and the concomitant naturalization of freedom as a social ideal, are not simply analytical oversights on the part of

feminist authors. Rather, I would argue that their assumptions refl a deeper tension within feminism attributable to its dual character as both an
analytical
and a
politically pr criptive
project. 13 Despite the many strands and differences

within feminism, what accords the feminist tradition an analytical and politi.. cal coherence is the premise that where society is structured to serve male in..

terests, the result will be either neglect, or direct suppression, of women's con.. cems.
14
Feminism, therefore, offers both a
diagn
of women's status across cultures and a
prescription
for changing the situation of women who are under.. stood to be marginalized, subordinated, or oppressed (see Strathern
1988,
2 6-28). Thus the articulation of conditions of relative freedom that enable women both to formulate and to enact self..determined goals and interests re..

mains the object of feminist politics and theorizing. Freedom is normative to feminism, as it is to liberalism, and critical scrutiny is applied to those who want to limit women's freedom rather than those who want to extend it. 15

feminism and fr edom

In order to explore in greater depth the notion of freedom that informs femi.. nist scholarship, I fi it useful to think about a key distinction that liberal theorists often make between negative and positive freedom ( Berlin 1969; Green 1986; Simhony 1 993 ; Taylor 1985 c). Negative freedom refers to the

1. As a number of feminist scholars have noted, these two dimensions of the feminist project often stand in a productive tension against each other.See
   W.
   Brown 2001; Butler 1999; Mo. hanty 1 991; Rosaldo 1983; Strathern 1987, 1988.
   

2. Despite the differences within feminism, this is a premise that is shared across various femi.
   

nist political positions-including radical, socialist, liberal, and psychoanalytic-and that marks the domain of feminist discourse.Even in the case of Marxist and socialist feminists who argue that women's subordination is determined by social relations of economic production, there is at least an acknowledgment of the inherent tension between women's interests
an
those of the larger society dominated and shaped by men (see Hartsock 1983; MacKinnon 1989).For an an. thropological argument about the universal character of gender inequality, see Collier and Yanag.. isako 1989.

15
John Stuart Mill, a fi central to liberal and feminist thought, argues: "the burden of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibi.. tion.... The a pr presumption is in favour of fr .. .." (Milll99 1, 472).

absence of external obstacles to self.guided choice and action, whether im- posed by the state, corporations, or private individuals.
i6
Positive freedom, on the other hand, is understood as the capacity to realize an autonomous will, one generally fashioned in accord with the dictates of "universal reason" or "self-- nterest," and hence unencumbered by the weight of custom, transcen.. dental will, and tradition. In short, positive freedom may be best described as the capacity for self..mastery and self-- and negative freedom as the absence of restraints of various kinds on one's ability to act as one wants. It is important to note that the idea of self..realization itself is not an inven- tion of the liberal tradition but has existed historically in a variety of forms, such as the Platonic notion of self..mastery over one's passions, or the more re.. ligious notion of realizing oneself through self-- ormation, present in Bud- dhism and a variety of mystical traditions, including Islam and Christianity. Liberalism's unique contribution is to link the notion of self-- ealization with individual autonomy, wherein the process of realizing oneself is equated with the ability to realize the desires of one's "true will" (Gray
1991).17

Although there continues to be considerable debate about these entwined notions of negative and positive freedom,
18
I want to emphasize the concept of individual autonomy that is central to both, and the concomitant elements of coercion and consent that are critical to this topography of freedom. In order for an individual to be free, her actions
must
be the consequence of her "own will" rather than of custom, tradition, or social coercion. To the degree that autonomy in this tradition of liberal political theory is a
procedural
principle, and not an ontological or substantive feature of the subject, it delimits the necessary condition for the enactment of the ethics of freedom. Thus, even il.. liberal actions can arguably be tolerated if it is determined that they are un- dertaken by a freely consenting individual who is acting of her own accord. Political theorist John Christman, for example, considers the interesting situ.. ation wherein a slave
chooses
to continue being a slave even when external obstacles and constraints are removed ( Christman
199 1) .
In order for such a

16
Within classical political philosophy, this notion ( identifi with the thought of Bentham and Hobbes) fi its most common application in debates about the proper role of state inter. vention within the private lives of individuals. This is also the ground on which feminists have debated proposals for antipornographic legislation (see, for example, Bartky 1990; MacKinnon 1993 ; Rubin 1984; Samois Collective 1 987).

1
7
The slippery character of the human will formed in accord with reason and self..interest is it.. self a point of much discussion among a range of liberal thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel, and Rousseau (Heller, Sosna, and Wellberry 1986; Taylor 1989 ). In late.- iberal Western societies, the disciplines of psychoanalysis and psychology have played a crucial role in determining what the "true inner self' really is, and what its concomitant needs and desires should be (see, for ex. ample, Hacking 1995 ; Rose 1998 ).

18
See Hunt 1991; MacCallum 1967; Simhony 1993 ; West 1993 .

I I