Saba Mahmood

Introduced by Janet Jakobsen, Saba Mahmood delivered the lecture, "The Politics of Freedom: Geopolitics, Minority Rights and Gender" on October 5, 2009 at Barnard College. Originally titled "Should Feminist Ethics Matter to Religious Politics?" Mahmood's talk marked the sixth annual Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture. Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Mahmood is an expert on issues of secularism, gender, and modernity within the context of Islamist movements in the Middle East and South Asia. In this lecture, she reflects on why ethical practice and forms of embodiment matter to questions of feminist politics and analysis. By engaging some common misreadings of her 2005 book Politics of Piety, Mahmood urges feminist scholars to critically re-think the normative status accorded to secular conceptions of the self and body in contemporary debates about religion.