Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

An analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. The author's exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are linked within the context of such movements.

This revised and expanded edition, new in paperback, provides a definitive collection on the current period in feminism known by many as the 'third wave'. Three sections - genealogies and generations, locales and locations, politics and popular culture - interrogate the wave metaphor and, through questioning the generational account of feminism, indicate possible future trajectories for the feminist movement. New to this edition are an interview with Luce Irigaray, a foreword by Imelda Whelehan as well as newly commissioned chapters.

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how (...) temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality. (shrink)

In universities and colleges across the country, feminists are debating their histories and future legacies. Some older feminists accuse younger ones of being overly theoretical, insufficiently political, and ungrateful to previous generations. The younger ones consider their foremothers naive or elitist. GENERATIONS explores these conflicts and challenges between older and younger feminist scholars.

This article is concerned with thinking transformations of the secular, and does so in relation to two theoretical terrains, while empirically grounded in ethnographies of Christian and Islamic pious women in the Netherlands. A first theoretical terrain under consideration is that of how the relation between modernity and religion is elaborated, notably in secularization theories, and how these established frameworks are challenged by a different kind of articulation between modernity and religion that I observed in narratives and practices of young (...) Evangelical and Islamic women in the Netherlands. The article traces the contours of a `pious modern', showing how from a faith-centred perspective the modern can be incorporated and indeed produced. In this context, I argue that the way in which notions of modernization and secularization have been theoretically hinged on each other needs to be further revisited, and I propose to consider the `post-secular' as a new disarticulation between the modern and the secular. A second theoretical terrain concerns questions of agency and subjectivity. Here I trace how situating religious agency in its own grammar makes secular assumptions in social, critical and feminist theory visible, and generates different understandings not only of agency but also of notions such as autonomy, and the capacity to act and shape the world. (shrink)

This article explores the so-called `postsecular' turn from two different but intersecting angles. The first part of the argument offers a reasoned cartography of the postsecular discourses, both in general and within feminist theory. The former includes the impact of extremism on all monotheistic religions in a global context of neo-conservative politics and perpetual war. The context of international violence has dire consequences for the social space, which is increasingly militarized, but also for academic debates, which become more and more (...) restricted in scope and freedom. The article then shifts to mapping the intersection between feminism and the postsecular condition. The main argument is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement also implies that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability. The double challenge of linking subjectivity to religious agency, and disengaging both from oppositional consciousness and critique defined as negativity, is one of the main issues this article wants to address. In the conclusion the article raises the issue of the affirmative power of critical theory and the kind of ethical values it may be able to engender. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of women's agency in traditionalist religion, through a study of self-narratives by women in the Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Women who study or work outside the boundaries of their community were interviewed about their experiences in negotiating gender ideologies by moving in and between the `secular' and `religious' spaces of higher education, work and home. Various subject positions emerged in terms of either rejecting, separating or reconciling dominant community norms regarding women's proper role (...) with personal trajectories of self-realization and individual autonomy. On the one hand, the results confirm the possibility of women's agency within religious-traditionalist settings and in that sense subscribe to some recent feminist theoretical challenges to secularism. However, it is argued that the younger generation faces more restrictions in negotiating religious and secular gender-role expectations in the Antwerp context. Their prospects depend on the dynamic between global fundamentalist tendencies and local liberal state policies of multicultural accommodation. (shrink)