Commitment or commitment-kitsch? Rethinking the 'woman question', agency, and feminist politics

I have attempted to explain how contemporary feminist inquiries focusing on the (in)compatibility of Islam with gender equality have often paralyzed rather than contributed meaningfully to fem inist theory. Instead it has created an impasse by forcing contrary and binary positions ending up in reproducing either/or arrangements. Afsaneh Najmabadi is right to observe that these forced divisions have demanded 'contrary speaking positions: I must either speak as a Muslim woman or as a secular, anti-Islamic feminist' (1997: 73). In exploring spaces that stand outside of these absolute dichotomies, she further argues that these spaces should resist acts of inclusion that are premised on recognizability but contends however, that these spaces that feminist scholarship is longing for are yet 'unavailable intersections' (74). As I have proposed in this chapter, one way of making such an intersection available is to scrutinize how the 'woman question' has been deployed as a mode of inquiry in feminist theory and practice. Agreeing with Najmabadi that we should resist acts of inclusions that are premised on recognizability, the urgent call lies not so much in the commitment to include the other so that the other becomes one of us, nor, to 'speak for' the other as if we are able to know, recognize or embody the other. Such claims of feminist commitments in both theory and politics have been responsible for the convenient application of liberal and progressive feminist understandings of agency onto unrecognizable bodies. In articulating feminist engagements it is important therefore to look carefully at how these articulations are complicit to that which it strongly resisted in the first place.