Abstract
This essay questions assumptions about agency expressed in prevailing concepts of freedom understood as autonomy. It also turns to contexts of bondedness, where one endures and negotiates one’s embeddedness in relations of power and thick webs of sociality, to explore alternative modes of agency, of response-ability. The theoretical analysis engages two sites of communal agency, particularly women’s: first, I draw from Saba Mahmood’s study of the women’s mosque movement in contemporary Egypt; and second, I look closely at Hồ Xuân Hương folk poetry in eighteenth-century Confucian-dominated Việt Nam. One can be conceived as a politics of piety, whereas the other can be aptly called a politics of impiety. Both offer glimpses into alternative ways of being and acting in the world. Together they challenge the prevalence of a freedom-centered approach in international relations and political theory.
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