Agency as Quest and Question: Feminism, Religious Studies, and Modern Jewish Thought

Modern European liberal thought is built on the idea that (male, European, adult) individuals are agents primarily by virtue of their capacity for reason. The identification of agency with reason long shaped the study of both religion and gender. In classic accounts of religion as a human construction, modern Western theorists—Marx, Freud, Durkheim—imagined religion as a veil over an ontologically prior social force. Individual agency, by extension, constituted liberating oneself from religious belief, worship, and communal structures through the exercise of reason.

A parallel structure characterized the emergence of liberal feminism in the modern West. Women's self-determination and autonomy required liberation from oppressive social norms, public policy, and domestic arrangements. Even when feminists strayed from the emphasis on reason, liberal activist quests relied on the equation of agency with liberation from the strictures that deny personal and political autonomy to women.

In recent years, agency has become a compelling—and substantially more complicated—topic in the fertile intersection of religious studies and gender studies. The topic of agency provokes a confrontation between the philosophical structures of modern rationalism, upon which both egalitarian feminism and formative elements in the study of religion are based, and more recent postmodern destabilizations of the rational subject. The explosion of research on gender in the study of Judaism in the last two decades has harnessed this intellectual energy to reexamine women's religious lives.

Feminist scholarship initially focused on the denial of agentic status to women in rabbinic traditions. As the title of Judith Romney Wegner's Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (1988) implies, personhood in the Mishnah includes capacities correlated with rational agency: a legal person has the capacity to own, buy, and sell property; to enter into contracts with others; to testify in court; and so on.¹ Though tannaitic literature, not being systematic, does not present a clear theory of personhood, Wegner argued that the "autonomous woman" was the legal exception that proved the rule of women's denial of agency in much of rabbinic law.² Likewise, Rachel Biale's Women in Jewish Law (1984), which collected and analyzed key halakhic texts concerning women's status in rabbinic Judaism, acknowledged that "traditionally, women played a second-string role in this process of fashioning Jewish identity and attributing meaning to Jewish lives."³ Using her book, readers would understand the rabbinic sources that shaped women's lives and circumscribed their power. But since women were excluded from the community of sages, leaving almost no textual record of their own, women's agency is nowhere to be found.⁴

In recent decades, theoretically minded scholars of religion have worked relentlessly to wrest the concept of agency from its liberal origins. Influential theorists like Talal Asad built on Michel Foucault's investigation of how different regimes of power/knowledge produce subjectivities, a move that undermined the stability of the self-constituting subject. This poststructuralist model has enriched the scholarly toolkit, rendering agency more plastic if also more amorphous. The challenge to a feminist model in which women's agency was simply construed as either present or absent has been profound; increasingly, scholars of women in religion have sought to "develop an analytical language for thinking about modalities of agency that exceed liberatory projects (feminist, leftist, or liberal)," in the words of Saba Mahmood.⁵

Mahmood's study of the Islamic piety movement in Egypt inspired scholars of other religious traditions to extend their attention to "non-liberal" religious phenomena that had been tacitly relegated to the margins of feminist scholarly concern. Feminist religionists pursued complex notions of agency by giving new attention to precisely those practices and sites that, in earlier theoretical moments, appeared most hostile to liberal notions of agency: spirit possession; evangelical proselytizing; and, in Judaism, ultra-Orthodoxy.⁶ Maternity, the subject of my recent research, constitutes yet another such topic. Among many white second-wave feminists, the maternal itself was often conflated with the patriarchal imperative that oppressed women, and the refusal of motherhood with liberation.⁷ By contrast, I...