for the thesis (due April 1, 2007)

part of my thesis introduction

now...which part? i don't know...lol

(2 Samuel 13)

Tamar is sent on a "pilgrimage"[1] that is fraught with religio-cultural implications, an idea which I appropriate to make the claims about journey and return, memory and loss, bodily conquest and shame. She is not only sent to the house of Amnon but is likewise sent away, sent back to her place of origin to tell the story, to give testimony, to tell of the horrors of Yahweh and the abuse through tradition. The reader is only privy to her voice in the moments of conquest but not allowed to understand the psychological affects that conquest imbued on her; we do not hear her speak when the pilgrimage is completed.

Contemporary discourse of identity politics and power structures tend to focus on the momentary ruptures of identity, of the proclamation of the self above the demoralization of the identity, of the disruptive character. Though I initially sought to focus on how her Tamar's voice evinces through the space of silence, allowing her character to be disruptive of her own cultural normativity, I have switched gears. Though I do not seek to be dismissive of her forceful claims of religious and cultic practices that should have buffered her from harm and victimization, I want to look at the journey from rape to home, the return of the pilgrim to the place of origin.

It is in what should be home, the sanctuary of her brother Absalom's quarters, where she exists as a desolate woman. What does this intimate about the curious tension between performance of the self and of culture in diverse spaces? It is through this journey back toward the home that a new identity must be inculcated. An integration of the self must occur within a culture that not only gave Tamar context for speaking against her ill-treatment gesturing toward liberation but also the same culture which allowed for the abuse occur wholesale, that allowed for her to perform an identity of desolation.

What is the process of reorienting the self to "home" once an occasion for liberation has occurred? How is the normative tendency of looking for occasions of liberative and disruptive acts damaging by way of minimalize the agency that must be invoked for the process of reintegration? Decentering the romantic notion of prolific moments of identity ruptures and instead focusing on mundane, recurrent, daily performance of reorienting the once ruptured self backward towards normative, oppressive space and performance, what do we learn of identity formation? Is Tamar's cry, removal of headdress and placing on of sackcloth and ashes a performance of lament for what has already occurred or a recognition of the amount of agency needed to go back home?

Instead of simply asking how identities are negotiated, this explication tries to ascertain how identities are consolidated, purposefully foreclosed and agentially neglected in ways that "aspire"[2] to norms that are deemed damaging. Moreover, what is remembered and forgotten in the Tamar character that allows her desolation to take residence in her being. I want to purposefully utilize the definition of desolate: "joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful through or as if through separation from a loved one." Here, I am positing the separated loved one in this discussion to be the realization of her voice in the space of Amnon's house. Amnon's house functions in a very peculiar way: it allows for voice to be heard but also is the site of victimization.

Performance creates but that which is created is multivocal, to be sure. As an example, Tamar asserts that "such a thing" is not to be done in Israel. At the moment she utters the cultural understanding of rape, she performs knowledge of the text and tradition, she advances the voice of the woman's body. This is a momentary rupture of normative identity for women in the biblical writ. But is this all that is performed? In her statement regarding what is right and good in Israel, Tamar oscillates between disrupting and venerating her tradition and culture. By citing Israel as her context, she implicitly displays that the culture and tradition is not to be challenged and rather tries to function through the constraints of the culture.

For the purpose of this study, I want to ask how this procedure of pilgrimage is replicated in the lives of black queers whom are religiously oriented. Looking particularly at the black Christian religious tradition, this exploration will make meaning from the peregrinations of black queers from the momentary ruptures back to the church. As one such example, I note the usage of gospel music in black gay clubs such as the Clark Sister's You Brought the Sunshine or Kirk Franklin's I've Been Looking for You.

E. Patrick Johnson focuses on the performance of gospel music in the space of the seemingly profane black gay club (during Atlanta Pride, he records) as a bringing the spirit and the flesh together in an orgiastic moment.[3] The focus of his work is on how the performance of queer gender utilizing gospel music disrupts notions of the queer body, the bifurcations of soul from flesh in normative Christian discourse and how these moments are evinces of agency.

However, I am very concerned with the return from the club to the church, from the moment of disruption to reorientation into a normative community. Though it can be said that a (dis)orientation occurs in both directions (i.e., that the black queer must orient the self situationally, whether in the church of the club and must perform and reform the self whenever they move to places of antithetical appreciation and acceptance of the body, of sexuality, of religion and spirituality), I want to focus squarely on the pilgrimage back to the church, the religio-cultural tradition.

Just as the scripture positions Absalom's house as home for Tamar, I position the church as home for the black queer within this discussion. I posit it as home because 1) the church was instructive for those with whom I interviewed long before they had knowledge of their sexuality, 2) the resonance of church within the larger black community as a socio-political force, no matter how elusive that force is today, 3) the family members of those whom I interviewed are generally all still very active in black churches so the discourse is located for the interviewees outside the walls of a church and lastly 4) many of the interviewees attend a variety of church communities or "miss" the communities of this sort if they don't attend one currently.

Thus, I approximate home with the place that is radically involved in identity formation from a young age. I want to hone in on the agency that is called upon to go back to the church continually, to continually cite it in daily life. Even gospel music in the black gay club speaks to the power of home as nurturing and sustaining. The purpose of the exploration, then, is to ask questions regarding identity (re)formation from the momentary rupture back into a normative posturing of the self. I want to ask how are black queers existing within, and in some ways advancing, the norms in which we inhabit.

______
[1] See Charles Long's Significations (1980) for a discussion on pilgrimage and the religious implications.
[2] Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (2003)
[3] Feeling the Spirit in the Drark. Callaloo 21.2 (1998) 399-416

on Politics of Piety

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject – Saba Mahmood

Ashon T Crawley

Brief Biography

Saba Mahmood is a member of the Anthropology Faculty at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, California. Her research interests, in general, are Anthropology of subject formation, liberalism, and secular modernity; feminist and poststructuralist theory; religion and politics; Islam, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Politics of Piety

The book seeks to disrupt the “arrogantly assume[d]” notion that “secular forms of life and secularism’s progressive formulations necessarily exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in this world,” over and above other forms of life (xi-xii). As well, it seeks to “analyze the conceptions of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement, in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it (5).” Simply put, Mahmood wants to interrogate what are seemingly generally accepted prescriptions of Western feminist projects and rather allow for a feminist discourse to emerge from the Islamic Revival.

The scope of her project necessitates her ethnographic research with women who are apart of this revival and privileging their voices. This is particularly important in a post-9/11 world where the Islamic subject has unjustly been held up for scrutiny and ridicule. The Islamic feminine subject is oft appropriated in Western feminist discourse as a means to show the backward nature of, the non-enlightened mindset and the need for intervention in the Muslim world.

It should be noted that feminist projects run this risk when they refuse to listen to the voices of those for whom they speak. The utilization of the Islamic feminine subject only towards the goal of critiquing what are deemed patriarchal and oppressive practices from a liberal, secularist/humanist standpoint essentially objectifies the Islamic feminine subject. It evinces dishonest scholarship as there is no true engagement of the women and their lives but they stand as symbols for what is wrong in the whole of the Muslim world. Because the women of the mosque movement take seriously what they deem divinely ordered edicts, Mahmood asks the following:

How did the women of the mosque movement practically work upon themselves in order to become the desirous subjects of this authoritative discourse? What were the forms of reasoning and modes of persuasion they used to convince themselves and others of the truth of this discourse? And what were the practical consequences that followed when the truth of this discourse was argumentatively established? (112-3)

Thus speaks Mahmood.

Main Argument

The overarching postulation of the text is that there must be a radically different way to think about and through issues of resistance and power in particular cultures. She tries to untangle one assumption that asserts that resistance is antithetical to and that which works against power structures, taking very particular forms, which are easily recognizable and transferable from one situation to another. For Mahmood, there is a tendency to “romanticize resistance” instead of understanding the “workings of power” in all of their iterations (8).

Likewise, there is an assumption – a secular/humanist, liberal influence, to be sure – that implies that there is something inherently wrong with the practices of women participants in the Islamic Revival and the mosque movement. However, Mahmood wants to problematize these assumptions.

Yet, one may ask, is such an assumption valid? What is the history by which we have come to assume its truth? What kind of a political imagination would lead one to think in this manner? More importantly, if we discard such an assumption, what other analytical tools might be available to ask a different set of questions about women’s participation in the Islamist movement? (2)

Herein lays the crux of Mahmood’s work. She wants her readership to alter the ways in which we understand the workings of resistance and those factors that inculcate assumptions regarding what performative practices are oppressive. Enmeshed in her discussion of rethinking resistance and power, she also puts forth the idea that agency must be rethought as well.

In other words, concepts lodged in secular assumptions can and should be radically reimagined. As an example, she makes the case for the reworking of the concept of agency: “…the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity (14-15).” As another example, she also proposes to disrupt the notion of norms as inherently negative. At the very least, her project wants to alter the understanding of how people exist within cultural norms: “Norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted…but performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways (22).” In the same vein, she wants to “think about the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated (23).”

Simply put, how do women of the mosque movement perform normativity? An ambitious project, to be sure!

Questions Raised

Is the performance of piety the actual living out of piety? Mahmood makes a wonderful discussion of interiority/exteriority and Aristotelian ethics as a means for understanding some of the performative aspects of the women in the mosque movement. The frequently cited concept of veiling of women in Islam raises some interesting queries. Does the subject slip into a state of piety through the very performance of piety?

Utilizing the veil or abstractions such as shyness, some of the women purported that eventually, the performance of the veil (as I’ll call it) leads necessarily to the inculcation of the veiled self. Stated directly: the ability to wear the veil and reflect shyness – even if only façade initially – if done out of pureness and true desire for Allah, the subject will begin to reflect qualities inwardly. The pious subject “does not precede the performance of normative virtues but is enacted through the performance (163).” Moreover, excellence at piety does not expose the vulnerability of the system but consolidates normativity (164).Exteriority, the embodied performance on the self, meets with interiority, the intentions of the inward self.

What is apparent in this staging of exteriority/interiority is the eschatological idea of the exterior exceeding itself and the interior exceeding itself until they liminally meet. Yet, what is the result of such a bifurcation? It is also interesting that some of the women interviewed looked down on the secularization of Islam which they believed transformed the religious beliefs and fear of Allah to “ritual acts of worship in the popular imagination [which] have increasingly acquired the status of customs or conventions, a kind of ‘Muslim folklore’ undertaken as a form of entertainment or as a means to display a religio-cultural identity (48).”, given the attention given to the performance of piety that could lead to the quality of piety.

Mahmood discusses an exchange between older and younger Muslim women regarding the concept of modesty (101-6). In this explication, she says that, “the conversation between these women proceeds along remarkably equitable lines,” as something positive and good. However, I wonder if it is possible that the social status of women is likened to that of girls. More directly, I question if the same multigenerational discourse could have taken place between older women and younger men. If the space only allows for multigenerational woman conversation, what is being said about women and their status, regardless of age in the Islamic Revival context?

Significance

The significance of this work cannot be stated enough. Mahmood is successful in that she allows the voices of the women to issue forth; she stages their performance of piety in ways that cause the reader to ponder the multivocality of seemingly oppressive, patriarchal practices. I believe that she persuasively argues why “a change in the referential structure of the system of signs cannot produce the same effect of destabilization (167).” In the absence of these signs (such as veiling), would the same system of piety exist? Would women be still viewed as the “repositories of tradition and culture, their bodies made the potent symbols of collective identity (119),” and if so, why? We are forced to modify the ways in which we view corporeal significations of piety and redefine how the self relates to a norm (120).