From Bad Feminist Subjects to New Ones? Female Religious Agency and Muslim Feminist Activism in India

The genealogy of liberal Western feminist discourses regarding individual rights, agency and autonomy is often characterised by the idea that secular liberal societies provide more space and tolerance for ‘free’ and liberated female bodies while religious traditions are viewed as spaces inhabited by specific, affected and ‘oppressed’ female bodies. According to this logic, female embodiment that follows religious dogmas constitutes a form of ‘false consciousness’. There has been indeed a tendency among feminists to initially assume that women wanted (or should want) liberation and thus to naturalise women's desire to break free of their subordinate status. However when women do not seem to embody the same desire for freedom or adopt different routes to emancipation that depart from the liberal conception of freedom and agency, they are constructed as victims of the patriarchal ideology and therefore constitute a ‘bad subject’ of feminism. Following this logic and given the common perception within feminist circles that ‘Islam oppresses women’, Muslim women who embrace the Islamic framework to champion their rights are considered to be erroneous and are thought of as in need of saving. Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork within the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement, my paper analyses how Muslim feminists in India are challenging the hegemonic feminist discourses on emancipation that assume that religion constitutes an impossible impediment to women’s freedom. These Muslim women activists invest the religious domain to defend their rights to gender equality and ultimately take distance vis-à-vis dominant local and international feminist movements which tend to imply that Muslim women are suffering because of their ‘oppressive’ and ‘backward’ religion, thus reproducing cultural norms within feminism. This case study will help us to question the ways Western feminism perpetuates the production of subjectivities along the ‘modern liberal West VS traditional repressive East’ binary trope.