Theorizing Paradox and Agency: Muslim Women between Creativity and Constraint

This thesis analyzes critical conceptions of human agency, resistance and freedom as well as their implications for conceiving of human action and experience in complex, life affirming ways. I pursue this analysis by examining the contemporary debate surrounding the agential capacity and embodied practices of the "Muslim woman." I argue that contemporary feminist disagreements regarding how the "Muslim woman" exercise and embody their agency belittle the possibility of paradox from entering the discursive realm. Current debates eclipse the idea that there is an essential existential tension where human agency is understood as being entangled within the terrains of creativity and constraint. Addressing paradox in the face of the worldwide cultural preoccupation with the "Muslim woman" can help reconfigure our social imagining of the practice of agency and resistance, while revealing the living paradox that we are both bound and free.M.A