| Abstrakt: |
My aim in this article is both to identify and move beyond what I argue is a dominant interpretive practice in feminist debates on gender and culture: centering liberalism as a condition of and for feminist interventions. This preoccupation with liberalism constitutes a method of inquiry in and of itself, functioning as a starting point for scholarly work: liberalism has become a textual anchor in the gender/culture debate. Where scholars rely on liberalism as a point of departure for analysis, divisions between liberal/nonliberal, West/non-West, will unavoidably be established at the outset. This has problematic consequences for the ways in which scholars are able to respond not only to each other but also to the appropriation of feminist discourses by the state and in public deliberations—from the recent "travel ban" in the United States to the "burkini ban" in France. I offer an alternative to this entrenched vocabulary through a comparative textual analysis of two authors: Susan Moller Okin and Saba Mahmood. I first illustrate how a shared reliance on liberalism locks both authors in an oppositional binary between liberal West and nonliberal non-West. To unsettle this framework, I show that suspending their reliance on a liberal referent reveals points for negotiation between their considerations of autonomy, selfhood, and deliberation. These opportunities for negotiation are precisely what get buried beneath their mutual focus on liberalism. My reading thus suggests that possibilities for cross-cultural collaboration might well require a shift beyond feminist preoccupations with liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
