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Paper short abstract

Mahmood profoundly shifted the feminist discussion of agency. Using my research on bride abduction, I query the idea of the “autonomous individual” underdeveloped her text, arguing that selves are complexly intertwined in bonds of love and power that belie liberal ideas of individuals and choice.

Paper long abstract

Nearly 25 years ago, Saba Mahmood critically engaged the feminist discussion of agency which, so firmly rooted in the liberal project, she argued, could only conceive of it as resistance. In response, she put forth a notion which had to do with “the capacity for action” including the willed desire to modesty. Mahmood mobilized the Butlerian critique of the autonomous individual in her work to understand how domination and desire are cultivated in the process of subjectivation. Yet beyond a reaffirmation of Butler’s subjectivation, Mahmood left the question of the individual rather unexplored. In this presentation, I pick up the idea of the “autonomous individual” not worked out in Mahmood’s text, to explore agency once again. I do so using my research on bride abduction in Kyrgyzstan, a topic which has been treated by feminists as little other than grounds for an analytical and political debate on (liberal) agency, just like veiling was when Mahmood wrote her article. I critically engage with the feminist literature on the self/individual to argue that the complex relationships of love and power imbricated in familial and wider kin/social relationships mean that that a woman’s “choice” in bride abduction cannot be thought of as a (liberal) individual’s decision or desire; the women involved are much more complexly intertwined and emergent than that. Choice, for these 'intertwined-selves' in Kyrgyzstan, stands in direct tension with the liberal feminist conception premised on an imagined total autonomy, forcing a further rethinking of liberal ideas of agency.