Philosophy Seminar Series

Allison Weir presents 'Reconceiving Freedom'

Abstract: In her book,The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and The Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood analyzes the practices of the women in the piety movement in Cairo, arguing that in order to recognize the participants as agents, we need to question the feminist allegiance to a liberal ideal of freedom. In this paper, I take up Mahmood’s analysis to begin to rethink what freedom might mean. I argue that reconceiving freedom requires that we move beyond the limitations of the “paradox of subjectivation” model that Mahmood takes from Butler, and within which she locates the question of agency, and I sketch some alternative conceptions of freedom.

Biography: Allison Weir is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies in the Doctoral Program in Political and Social Thought at the University of Western Sydney, and is a member of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford 2013) and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (Routledge 1996). She is currently at work on a new book, Reconceiving Freedom.