Received: 31 December 2018 Revised: 19 March 2019 Accepted: 5 May 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lands.12427

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Race, class, and agency: A return to

Marxist feminism

Shahrzad Mojab1 | Afiya S. Zia2

1
University of Toronto, Ringgold Standard
Institution—Leadership Higher and Adult
Education, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2
University of Toronto, Women and Gender
Studies Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Correspondence
Shahrzad Mojab, University of Toronto,
Ringgold Standard Institution—Leadership
Higher and Adult Education, 252 Bloor
St. West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6,
Canada.
E-mail: shahrzad.mojab@utoronto.ca
Abstract
This article argues that the starting point for Marxist feminist
praxis is not rooted in questions of identity, agency, authen-
ticity, space, or body but in the oppression and the exploita-
tion of women and men of the working class, peasants,
urban poor, and national minorities. The analysis herein
departs from the postmodernist study of language, represen-
tation, or culture and reaffirms how capitalization and mod-
ernization have bolstered traditional patriarchal gender
relations. Tracing the limits of postmodernist, postcolonial,
and transnational feminist theories, the authors scrutinize
the renewed academic interest and treatment of Muslim
women's “agency” after the events of September 2001.
Using the case of the Lady Health Workers of Pakistan
and retracing the collusive role of imperialism and
Islamic politics in the Middle East, the authors argue for
the need to return to a Marxist feminist analysis that is
based on social materiality rather than on a trade between
class and gender.

1 | INTRODUCTION

The rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s has generated new theoretical debates on all sorts of “post-
ality,” the term that Ebert uses for various theoretical positions prefixed with “post,” such as post-
modernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism (Ebert, 1996). Authors of these “post-al” posi-
tions claim that we are in the midst of a radical rupture with modernity, hence the postmodern
“condition,” “era,” “age,” or “world.” Although there is no agreement among scholars on the histori-
cal timing of this theoretical turning point, some date the rupture back to the mid-19th century while

© 2019 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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260 MOJAB AND ZIA

many trace it to the 1960s. Notwithstanding the temporality of this debate, it is the critique of moder-
nity and its association with Enlightenment movements of the late 17th to late 18th century that con-
stitutes the core of this series of intellectual, social, and political debates (Carey & Festa, 2009).
By the 1980s, the “post-al” theoretical turn permeated all social sciences and humanities, in par-
ticular feminist studies. A major theoretical shift took place, characterized by a retreat from structural
analysis—associated predominantly with Marxism—and instead, privileged “agency” as the analyti-
cal tool. Postmodernism provides a critique of modernism whereby the modern is usually associated
with a belief in rationalism, universal truth, and linear progress. It also signals a “war on totality” and
an “absence of metanarratives” (Harvey, 1990, 2005; Lyotard, 1984). If unity and depth were the
privileged tropes of the modern, postmodernism favored the ephemeral, fragmentary, performative,
and the discursive.
The argument was also centered around the conceptualization that the state was “withering
away,” and that “ideology” was less significant than “identity.” This vexing dichotomization of
agency/structure or self/sociality unsettled those of us who observed and experienced different reali-
ties as the world around us rapidly changed. Given our understanding of and involvement with anti-
colonial and national liberation movements, from Palestine to Kurdistan, Dhofar, Iran, Turkey, or
East Pakistan in the 1970s, it was difficult to overlook issues of structure, in particular the collusion
of the nation state with the rise of capitalist imperialist forces globally. States were not retracting
from organizing, managing, disciplining, and governing relations of power; they were indeed consol-
idating themselves within new-founded postcolonial territorial boundaries, often under the helm of
military dictatorships. They were fiercely executing “modernization,” “land reform,” “structural
adjustment programs,” and (re)coding new rules of morality and propriety to govern gender relations
and sexuality, which implicated the subjectivities of millions of women and men.
As Zaidi (2015, p. 7) notes with reference to Pakistan, the second military government under
General Zia ul Haq, (1977–88) who had purported to “Islamize” the country, was “more liberal in
economic terms – though certainly not politically – than any of his predecessors.” Zaidi also recalls the
rise of a civilian-military bureaucracy in this period that was invested in acquiring capital and monopo-
lizing entrepreneurship and finance capitalism. Moreover, this trend to liberalize the economy was
supported by an economic growth enabled by the political involvement of Pakistan in assisting the
United States to oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. Most critically, remittances from
the Middle East by Pakistani labor helped launch what Zaidi terms as Pakistan's “second economic
revolution” where “the middle class emerged as a formidable economic and political category” (Zaidi,
2015, p. 8). Pakistani feminists have noted the impact of the “Saudi-ization” of gendered relations over
this time period, particularly in the northern areas from where men migrated for work to the gulf coun-
tries. Pakistan's political economy is a good example of the merging of a fundamentalist Islam—
sandwiched as the country was between the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the rise of the Mujahideen
in Afghanistan—with a neoliberal economy that has been managed predominantly by military regimes.
This has been a trend that continued even after the September 2001 attacks in America and the advent
of the “War on Terror,” which entrenched the “liberal” General Pervez Musharraf who continued to
rule Pakistan under a praetorian arrangement and during which religious militancy peaked and took
hundreds of thousands of lives over the next decade. This concomitance of neoliberal economic
regimes emerging and enduring under authoritarian rules and compatible with political Islam is a com-
mon trend to be found in the Middle East and South Asia as also discussed in the works of Aijaz
Ahmed (1996) Hamza Alavi (1988) and Ali Kadri (2014). The rise of this form of capitalism in these
neocolonial nation states has polarized and reinforced the gendered division of labor. We call this
process the capitalization/modernization of traditional patriarchal relations.
MOJAB AND ZIA 261

Taking this analysis to its logical conclusion, modern nation states were reinforcing and protecting
the patriarchal ruling class interest (the emerging national bourgeoisies) by bolstering the ties with capital-
ist market economy and secular or religious sectors of civil society. These relations were solidified glob-
ally in accordance with the governing rules of institutions such as the World Bank (1944) and the World
Trade Organization (1995). Therefore, this contrived separation/dichotomization of structure/agency pro-
duced a new body of knowledge strong on ontological explications of self/agency/subjectivity but less
concerned with the inner connectivity of ontology/subjectivity and structure/objectivity/epistemology.
The debate, which originated in academia, soon reached social movements. The slogans of the
1960s such as “Down with Imperialism” or “Down with Capitalism” in union struggles, for example,
in the radical Black movement in the United States, in the anti-Vietnam war movement, or in the stu-
dent movements of the 1960s in Europe, Asia, and the Arab World, were deemed too “state-centrist”
and too “structuralist,” with a proclivity to undermine the “agency,” “subjectivity,” “autonomy,” or
“power” of other social actors. It was around the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–1985) that
feminists from around the world came together in three global conferences where these splits and dif-
ferences in experiences and strategic priorities surfaced strongly. Broadly, women of the North/West
focused on equal rights in the labor force and reproductive rights, while women of the South/East artic-
ulated concerns about neocolonialism, capitalism and poverty. These differences forced feminists to
expand their perspectives so as to include issues of class and global economic inequalities in their
efforts to build a solidarity framework in the form of transnational feminist networks (Moghadam,
2005). It was at this time that a key new feminist concept of intersectionality emerged, which pointed
to the organization of human life along lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and directed to
ways in which feminist political projects should respond to this reality (Mojab and Carpenter, 2019).
This analytical development had a profound impact on Marxist feminism, which was challenged for
privileging exploitation over social and cultural oppression. The main point here is that the outcome of
such shifts in theoretical perspectives resulted in an intellectual and political milieu where a fragmen-
ted, de-historicized, and de-radicalized mode of knowledge production and praxis was advanced; the
self was disarticulated from social relations and the structure of power.
This “historical digest” of contemporary knowledge contestation contextualizes our Marxist femi-
nist discussion in this article. We aim to show how the challenge put forward by postmodernist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonialist theories greatly influenced the discussion within feminism on
the issue of “difference,” in particular on race, class, and culture. Drawing on our extensive research
on gender, Islam, agency, and culture, we will examine the Marxist feminist theorization of social
difference and the limits of “agency” as conceptualized in/by postmodern and poststructuralist femi-
nisms. We argue that the postmodern feminist analysis has contributed to an epistemological confu-
sion among scholars and activists that has resulted, in recent years, in scholarship and politics that
tend to disconnect religion and culture from the social relations of capitalist imperialism and treat
them as autonomous entities with their own logic and ambitions. We make a case for a renewed
Marxist feminist synthesis that advances a dialectical and historical materialist approach.

2 | DE MAT E RI AL I Z I NG AGE NCY

The emergence of “postal-studies,” as mentioned above, became influential in Western academia in

the 1980s and 1990s. Their critique of the Eurocentrism that defined narratives and systems of repre-
sentations of the third world subject offered a political challenge to Western hegemony over material
conditions, but even more so over subjectivities and their representations. Several feminist scholars
extended the postcolonial theoretical critique to challenge Western and postmodern feminism and
262 MOJAB AND ZIA

pushed the latter to broaden their fields of representations and knowledge production. Some key
debates around the postcolonial can be found in Appiah (1991), Bartolovich & Lazarus (2002), Bhabha
(1994), McClintock (1992), Olaniyan (1993), Prakash (1992), Shohat (1992). Poonam Pillai notes
(1996, p. 62) that the term “postcolonial” has been widely criticized for “blurring important differences
in history, perspective and location; for signifying an ambiguous political agency and not sufficiently
distinguishing between the perspectives of the colonizer and the colonized; not clearly demarcating
when the postcolonial begins and for whom; and for paying inadequate attention to contemporary
forms of power that are historically linked to colonial rule.” The term has also been criticized for
reorienting “global history around the single rubric of European time” (McClintock, 1992, p. 86) and
focusing insufficiently on social and institutional critique (Appadurai, 1993).
Transnational feminism developed out of postcolonial feminisms and Black feminist thoughts
(e.g., the Combahee River Collective and This Bridge Called My Back; Moraga & Gloria, 1981),
both of which critiqued the idea that “sisterhood is global” (Robin Morgan, 1984). These works were
critical not only of the epistemic violence resulting from the privileging of Western feminist studies
of Third World women, but also of the gender-blindness that defined postcolonial scholarship. Some
texts that epitomize this challenge include Gayatri Spivak's (1988) question of whether the subaltern
woman could speak, Chandra T. Mohanty's (1988) interrogative phrase “Under Western Eyes,” and
Ella Shohat's critical “Notes on the Postcolonial” (1992), to name but a few.
Himani Bannerji (2000), however, pointed out an epistemological shift in postcolonial theorizing
from historical materialism to a dependency on cultural theory. She notes that the implantation of a
Gramscian language of a subaltern agency within the nationalist project of upper class/caste Bengali
Hindus (notably, by Partha Chatterjee) “makes the Subaltern Studies project somewhat different from
conventional post-colonialism,” thus offering “a historiographical and epistemological basis for illib-
eral forms of nationalism” where the “subalternists” end up becoming supporters of an anti-modern
national enterprise (2000, p. 904). Nationalism is hierarchical in its ethnic manifestation, and in its
bourgeois form of civic nationalism, and is only partially democratic since it obscures class differ-
ences and has a limited capacity for social transformation (Bannerji, Mojab, & Whitehead, 2001).
Subsequently, transnational feminism emerged as a more advanced version of postcolonial theory,
in that it is comprised of a body of theories and commitment to practice which recognizes differences
while building solidarity and trying to transcend the national and cultural borders. It critiques Western
mainstream feminism for using itself as a referent for communities of color, and calls for a decentering
from hegemonic Western discourse. Anti-globalization and anti-capitalism are central components of
this decentering, decolonizing project, but the contentious focus is still on what Mohanty (2003) refers
to as the persistence of the “discursive colonization” of Third World women.
As potent symbols of Islamic resurgent movements globally, Muslim women's agency and its co-
optation by masculinised religious nationalisms had been well documented in postcolonial and transna-
tional feminist critiques (Lewis & Sara, 2003). However, in the post-9/11 era, the treatment of agency
was revisited. Specifically, in the influential work of Saba Mahmood (2005), Muslim women's docile
agency was redefined as a dormant condition signified through their piety and acts of virtuosity.
Mahmood proposed a detachment of Muslim women's agency from the goals of liberal and feminist
politics or as a synonym for resistance to relations of dominance. Instead, she redefined agency as a
capacity for action through the “performance of gendered Islamic virtues” without the expectations
associated with the politics of emancipation (Mahmood, 2001, p. 203).
Once the definition of agency, freedoms and liberation is dislodged from its political base and
converted into a form of privatized docility with potential for dissonance, then the newly-formed,
desirous and knowledgeable subject is not required to measure up to emancipatory and liberatory
MOJAB AND ZIA 263

possibilities. As Roseann Mandzuick (1993, p. 178) suggested, postmodernism offers a critique of

essentialism and universalism and advocates or celebrates finding alternative politics in local sites as
“dispersed into a series of random and unpredictable cultural interruptions.” She also pointed out that
postmodernism's dissolution of the subject is depoliticizing for women because it conflates personal
aspiration for political power with social criticism and justice. Bannerji explains further that “[F]eminist
essentialism, with its hypothetical/synthetic woman subject, cannot situate women in history and soci-
ety. As such, it eradicates real contradictions among women themselves and creates a myth (‘woman’)
and an abstraction, by isolating gender from all other social relations” (Bannerji, 1995, p. 68). In this
articulation, gender is not theorized in connection to other social relations, so we cannot see how
women participate either in race/class domination or in the reproduction of patriarchal relations.
Postmodern sociological and anthropological research has also been committed to uncovering the
“presumption of secularization as an inevitable and uniform process” (Reilly, 2011, p. 7) and
questioned the accepted coherence of the secular-religion binary. The notion of imposed secularism
leads postmodernists to unsettle the “secularization as modernization” thesis and even leads other
scholars engaged in normative political theory to concede greater space to religious-based arguments
of a role for religion in the public sphere of civil society. In the post-9/11 period, postmodernist and
poststructuralist theories converged their interest toward a postsecularist stream. While debunking
the validity of modernity and rationality as instruments of emancipation in the light of postmodernist
theory, postsecularist scholars do not reject the autonomous subject but instead challenge the very
notion and definition of autonomy, emancipation, and secularism as Eurocentric or, as products of
Western colonialism and modernity. Once agency is redefined in this vein, then Islamist subjects do
not have to adhere to or fulfill the universalist goals or even the commonly accepted expressions or
products of rational thought or emancipatory processes or, for that matter, democratic politics.
The influence of postcolonial, poststructuralist theories of agency that seek to invert the gaze onto
the liberal-secular script is demonstrated through the work of those who seek to “grasp practices of
self-governance” by Muslim women in a post-9/11 context—one which is free of liberal bias (Amir-
Moazami, Jacobsen, & Malik, 2011, p. 5). Such scholarship has encouraged a cultural investigation
into subjectivities in particular. It has tended to focus almost exclusively on Muslim women and their
pietism, which is to be understood as “an aesthetic or technique of the self” (Amir-Moazami et al.,
2011). This aesthetic turn of interest toward the “Woman Question” in “Muslim Contexts” has
tended to be void of the relationship between religion or politics and to invest in separating Muslim
subjectivity from material relations of religion and politics. Despite being an individual resource of
personal growth and virtue, ultimately, such agency seems to offer a limited service to women and in
fact serves the benefit of capitalist theocratic and secular patriarchy.
Feminists in the South have historically been invited to observe such silence but usually by religi-
ous/conservative and even liberal men and nationalists who warn feminists to not wash their “dirty
laundry in front of Western eyes,” so to speak. This is particularly seen in the urgings to conceal
and privatize cases of domestic violence, “honor killing,” female genital mutilation, rapes, and other
violations in times of war and insurgencies, and to resist exposing “collateral damage” to women in
times of national crisis, foreign occupation, or conflict. The advice is to maintain this moratorium
(over discussing rapes, murders, and misogyny) at the very least, until after the conflict, after
modernization, after national liberation, after gender consciousness, after neoliberalism, or after a
true Islamicate has been established.
The persistence of debates on secularism, piety, agency, subjectivity, body, sexuality, and gender
performativity in women and gender studies leaves the lingering problem of how to make sense of
the lives of women throughout the Middle East and North Africa entangled with incongruities,
264 MOJAB AND ZIA

ambiguities, and conflicts that remain predominantly mired in material and economic inequalities
and in class differences. In sum, dematerialized agency analysis separates the subjectivity of women
from the objective material reality of capitalist imperialist social order.
In the 1980s, feminist movements in Muslim contexts were often challenged as Western imposi-
tions and feminists suspected for their secularist intent (understood as anti-religion or la deen-iyut).
Urban women's groups were criticized for being limited in their cultural resonance with the poor,
rural, or faith-empowered women of the country. Much of the current postsecularist scholarship that
seeks to resuscitate religious empowerment for Muslim women relies on this same premise and
argues that secularization (considered to be premised on the immanent framework of Western secu-
larism) has failed, and that religion has not disappeared from the public sphere as an expected out-
come of modernization (Zia, 2018). Secondly, such scholarship argues for a review and inclusivity
of religion into the mainstream of development research and policy itself. Such calls are expressed in
the hope of Rewriting the Secular Script (Deneulin & Bano, 2009) in development work. Interna-
tional financial aid and donor initiatives have colluded to re-embed a gendered identity through the
lens of Islam and seek to ensconce Muslim women's rights within Islamic-defined rights. The inter-
play of Islam and donor-funded development projects in Pakistan has imposed counter-intuitive
effect on the secular women's movement. These projects do not involve any discussion of class iden-
tities and reduce all analyses to be viewed through the singular lens of religious identities. These ven-
tures are defeatist, as they employ pragmatic methods that call for negotiating rather than demanding
rights. The emphasis is on pragmatic necessities, such as ensuring equal enrolment for girls in mad-
rasas as a practical, demand-driven necessity, or the related research studies recommend a certain
amount of mosque space for women rather than challenging the absence of secular public alterna-
tives. They even suggest that health for women should be delivered through the approval, involve-
ment, and mediation of local clergyman or “Rent-a-Maulvi projects” (Zia, 2018).
Several working class women's movements in Pakistan such as the Lady Health Workers, the
women network and those who work in Union Councils and women who belong to the Okara peas-
ant movement as well as women of the rural-based progressive movement, the Sindhiani Tehreek—
all have deployed agency not toward Saba Mahmood's “gendered Islamic virtues” but very much for
emancipatory ends, political power, provincial autonomy, using a liberal vocabulary, lay legal aid
and secular means toward social transformation. However, the demands of these movements have
been directly opposed by religious fundamentalism, Islamist politics and men of varying faith. Sev-
eral non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on women's issues have given rise to a com-
munity of social leaders across Pakistan. Their struggle against local patriarchies and organized
religious power-brokers at local levels has yielded a women's rights consciousness in the most unex-
pected sites across the country. Meanwhile, the Islamist's political opposition to Western lifestyles,
democracy, human rights regimes and values does not prevent them from sponsoring global or West-
ern economics or capitalism and neoliberalism. Simply making the market “Sharia complaint” does
not challenge capitalism itself and does not change the ownership or modes of production.
One interesting example of the interpellation of work, autonomy, agency, and resistance to reli-
gious politics can be found in the activism of the Lady Health Workers of Pakistan. The Lady Health
Workers Program (LHWP) of Pakistan has been termed a successful government program in large
part because it has succeeded in increasing reversible and modern contraceptive use, particularly in
many inaccessible rural areas. What interests most researchers is that the LHWP has proven to be an
instrument of social change in the communities to which they belong. Not only have these women
successfully broken the private-public dichotomy quite literally, they also provide an essential ser-
vice to women in their child-bearing years which would otherwise be absolutely denied to them.
MOJAB AND ZIA 265

One LHW serves a population of 1,000–1,500 persons, which is approximately 100 households,
and she regularly visits them to maintain her health records. Her monthly salary, until recently, was
equivalent to approximately $25. For a negligible stipend, the LHWs are also routinely recruited
for administering polio vaccinations because they are such an expansive and effective labor force.
In 2010, intermittent protests over unfair termination, salary increase or harassment that had been
brewing for the past decade, grew into a countrywide boycott of the polio vaccination drive sched-
uled for February of that year. The LHWs in Sindh province were especially active and there was
even a deeply symbolic protest demonstration at the mausoleum of the assassinated Prime Minister
and founder of the LHWP Benazir Bhutto. The daily Dawn reported that at this protest the LHWs
demanded that the promise to regularize their work, made by the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto,
should be fulfilled (“Anti-polio campaign faces threats of boycott” Dawn, 2010, February 9). This
may be read as a political and alternative rendering of a “performance of gendered secular virtues,”
when compared to Mahmood's readings of pietist women's “performance of gendered Islamic
virtues” (Mahmood, 2001, p. 203).
In September 2010, after protracted nation-wide strikes and protests and a legal battle, the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered that the LHWs should be paid the minimum wage
of a skilled (full-time) worker (at the time, Rs. 7,000 or roughly US $70, per month). The president
of the All Pakistan Lady Health Workers Employees Association, and leader of these protests, Bus-
hra Arain, told the press that, “whatever success Pakistan has achieved towards bringing down infant
and maternal mortality rates, or in meeting the targets for the Millennium Development Goals four
and five would not have been possible had the LHWs not been going door to door” (Ebrahim, 2011).
In early 2011, the Sindh provincial government was forced to delay the launch of its three-day
polio campaign because the LHWs now staged further city-based protests against the government's
non-implementation of the Supreme Court's legal orders. This was followed by nation-wide protests,
which included direct action by the LHWs in blocking of major highways, courting arrests and fol-
lowing up their legal case at the Supreme Court which adjudicated in favor of the LHWs. Apart from
framing their own rights in a liberal, universalist light, the Supreme Court of Pakistan chose to inter-
pret the case of the LHWs in the frame of Pakistan's agreement with International Labor Organization
terms rather than any Islamic provision or indeed, cultural specific code or ethos. The matter did not
end for the LHWs, who had registered another case demanding regularization of their jobs, which
was adjudicated in their favor (Government of Pakistan, 2012–2013).
In the backdrop of these developments, the proceeding wave of attacks on health and aid workers
in Pakistan in the same year of their struggle for wage rights signified the tense and entangled rela-
tionship between women and religion. Of the 15 aid workers targeted by militants across Pakistan in
2012, nine of the victims were health workers associated with the national polio campaign. At the
time, Pakistan was one of three countries where polio still persisted. Some 58 cases were registered
in 2012 and the World Health Organization warned of travel/visa restrictions and sanctions to be
imposed, if polio continued to spread (Government of Pakistan, National Emergency Action Plan for
Polio Education, 2016–2017). The majority of cases are found in the tribal areas, which are less pop-
ulated but where militants have actively resisted the vaccination program, terming it an un-Islamic
practice and believing it to be a conspiracy against Muslims (Khan et al., 2017).
The Lady Health Workers are also contracted to administer polio drops in recognition of their suc-
cessful access to communities and involvement with postnatal services. In so far as they represent
modernist ideas and transgress the patriarchal division between private and public roles for women,
as well as the fact that they are officials of the Pakistani state, the LHWs were specifically targeted
by the militants in the Taliban controlled areas (which reach beyond the tribal areas and in several
266 MOJAB AND ZIA

metropolitan centers). Between 2006 and 2009, the Taliban's invasion of Swat in the Himalayan
region of Pakistan was followed by their systematic and violent pogrom to enforce its version of
Sharia on the already Islamic, Republic of Pakistan. The Taliban destroyed Swat's famed tourist
industry through a series of public beheadings and hangings (of prostitutes, barbers, and entertainers)
in town squares. Once they controlled Swat, over their three-year siege, the Taliban prohibited polio
vaccination campaigns, destroyed 122 girls' schools, 22 barber shops, and banned all music, cinema
and most NGOs in the area. According to regular news reports, the Taliban also killed those health
workers who attempted to save people wounded in suicide blasts.
In a British Medical Journal (BMJ) study on “How the Taliban undermined community healthcare
in Swat, Pakistan,” (Ud Din, Mumtaz, & Ataullahjan, 2012), the authors conducted in-depth interviews
with Swat-residing, Pushtoon-ethnic LHWs, to gauge the effects of the Taliban's threats and violence
against them. According to the study, not only did the overall infrastructure of community health suffer
drastically, maternal mortality increased and individual LHWs were socially ostracized through a vilifi-
cation campaign, while many left or stopped working due to direct threats to their lives. Some of the
strategies adopted by the Taliban are quoted in the BMJ study, based on the direct experiences of the
affected LHWs (although, the authors make the proviso that the worst affected could not be inter-
viewed due to the high risk this entailed for those women's lives). The most effective strategy employed
by the Taliban was to “name and shame” the LHWs on FM radio and the issuing of three fatwas (reli-
gious edicts) against them. The LHWs interviewed in the BMJ study (Ud Din et al., 2012, p. 2) cite
specific examples of beheadings, as well as public beatings and firing on their houses and murders of
their colleagues' family members. The study notes that the LHW program to provide family planning
services made it “an ideological target.” This is very similar to the campaigns and political positions
taken by some mainstream Islamists who argue that, family planning, contraception and sex education
promote “vulgarity,” “obscenity,” and encourage extramarital sex. The BMJ study cites allegations by
the leader of the Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah that “LHWs want to promote prostitution and sin in our
society.”
As we have argued so far, the theoretical explanations offered by postmodernist perspectives have
added to the epistemological confusion and ontological doubts among some scholars and activists.
They are in particular members of racialized and marginalized groups, enthralled by the possibilities
opened up to them by notions such as “contingency,” “fluidity,” “tentativeness,” “locality,” “agency,”
“precarity,” and “identity.” The eviction of “class” from social theory came with the installation of
“culture” in its stead. Within this theoretical framework, the oppression, exploitation, and resistance of
women around the world are either ignored or explained through the lens of agency and culture without
history and materiality, thus giving us a detailed culturalized, traditionalized, static notion of gen-
der, culture, and, in particular, religion. To move beyond this uncritical engagement with notions
of self/agency/subjectivity to notions of social relations and material differences requires retrieving
social materiality, and doing critical class and gender analysis. This is a topic that we will further
explore in the context of the contradictions in (but codependency of) colonialism, orientalism,
imperialism, and political Islam.

3 | MARXIST FEMINISM, POLITICAL ISLAM, AND

IMPE RIAL ISM

It is well known, especially after Edward Said's critique of orientalism, that colonialist constructions
of societies practicing Islam have treated this religion as essentially different from Christianity or
other religions. The colonialist/orientalist and now imperialist/orientalist constructions of Muslims
MOJAB AND ZIA 267

treat the West and Islamic East as inherently different entities; however, many Muslim intellectuals
and politicians do the same although for different reasons. For instance, they treat feminism, moder-
nity, secularism, liberalism, and socialism as inherently Western, and therefore as incompatible with
Islamic traditions.
After World War II, US imperialist interests promoted Islam against secular social movements
in the Middle East. In the midst of the Cold War, Saudi Arabia (a staunch ally of the United
States) used fundamentalist Wahabism against Arab nationalist movements, the revolutionary
movement in Oman in the late 1960s and early 1970s, communist movements, women's move-
ments, and secular and leftist Palestinian resistance. Washington relied on Saudi Arabia as the
major headquarters for a religious war against democracy, secularism, and socialism. To give
another example, the United States and other Western powers made close alliances with Afghan
and foreign fundamentalists against Afghanistan's pro-Soviet regime. They led, organized, and
trained them for more than a decade. Some of these fundamentalists later turned against the
United States before and on 9/11.
The second US war against Iraq in 2003 aimed at changing the Ba'thist regime of Saddam
Hussein and replacing it with a colluding state. This war brought Shi'ite leaders into alliance with the
warring and occupying power. As a result of the ongoing war, women in the Arab regions of Iraq
have been subjected to unprecedented violence, including abduction and rape; they are unable to
leave their homes without male protection. While women were excluded from the “post-war” nation-
building process, tribal and feudal lords, religious patriarchs, exiled nationalists, former Ba'thist dissi-
dents, aristocrats, pro-American technocrats and bureaucrats, and US advisors worked as architects
of the new patriarchal theocratic state.
A Marxist feminist framework differentiates religion from other social formations such as
nation, state, family, patriarchy, ethnicity, economy, or culture. However, unlike other positions,
which confer on religion an independent, usually determining, role, Marxist feminism emphasizes
interconnections between religion and other institutions. For instance, while religion and state can
be distinguished even in theocratic political orders such as Iran or the Taliban's Afghanistan, Marx-
ist feminist dialectics unravels their coexistence even in secular democratic regimes in the West
such as in France, Canada, and the United States, where the separation of state and church is a
credo of these “civic nations.” Thus, dialectically speaking, the autonomous status of religion is
not the negation of its dependence. In other words, independence and dependence, far from being a
binary opposition, form a dialectical contradiction in which opposites exist in unity and conflict,
rather than in mutually exclusive relationships.
Islam, then, cannot be understood qua Islam. Put differently, Islam should be treated not simply
as religion but at the same time as politics, culture, economy, ethnicity, nationality, and much more.
From a dialectical perspective, religious claims should be assessed in the context in which they are
expressed. First and foremost, the claim of a religious group to return to fundamentals or origins is a
statement about the present. All such claims express contemporary interests in this world. It is
worldly concerns rather than “divinity” that drive some clerical authorities to create an Islamic state.
Western imperialism, now in conflict with its former Islamist allies, uses both fire and water in
order to defeat its enemy. While the United States violates domestic and international law regarding
the laws of war, it also speaks the language of constitutions and the rule of law in the Middle East
and North Africa. From a Marxist feminist perspective, in this historical conjuncture, the major con-
tradiction in this web of contradictions is between fundamentalism, imperialism, and growing rise of
fascism. This fight, inevitably, targets and includes women, workers, youth, peasants, and secular,
democratic, and socialist individuals and institutions.
268 MOJAB AND ZIA

The contradiction between religion and secularism, or between patriarchy and women, is a product
of a long history, and will take a long time to resolve. This is not to suggest that religion and patriarchy
are synonymous, but to note that faith-based activism does not seek to contradict or over ride the base
of patriarchy, nor does it necessarily challenge capitalism. While gender relations are regulated by the
state in a theocracy (to the extent feasible through law, courts, prisons, etc.), the oppression of women
is also perpetrated every minute and every hour in the privacy of the home, on the streets, and in the
workplace. Oppression is also reproduced in language, music, arts, literature, media, and education.
To claim that “Muslim women” will achieve equality with woman-friendly readings of the Qur'an
and shari'a would at best amount to an under-rating of patriarchy as a social and political institution.
Far less examined has been the co-optation of Muslim women's religious identities by market forces
(Zia & Mojab, 2016). Zia (2018, p. 106) notes that the forces of

capitalist consumerism necessarily [compete] against any limiting, purist notions of

inner, spiritual, non-material desires. Instead, the market seeks to tap into and reify, re-
inscribe and reinforce (therefore, profit from) Muslim women's outward identities,
external lifestyles and public belonging, in relation to their beliefs. In the case of the
Islamic industry, the opportunity to promote Islamist conservatism is much wider.

Capitalist social relations also open up the “marketization processes [which] tend to produce univer-
sal essentialist tendencies to create a ‘Muslim woman’ in the singular who stands for global Muslim
society” (Gökariksel & McLarney, 2010, p. 5). Muslim women's difference becomes a “marketable
product, a logic of profitability” (p. 6). It also privileges some representations (for Muslim women)
and renders others undesirable. Such products range in representative form and include Muslim
women's memoirs, autobiographies and images of veiled women in a plethora of Western publica-
tions that invite their readership to be part of a fashionable self-orientalisation.
We further argue that Islam thrives on patriarchy, and patriarchy is anchored in this religion. No
woman-friendly reading of this system, even if it is rooted in mass “Islamic feminist” movements,
can displace let alone replace it. In his dialectical historical approach to the Protestant Reformation,
Marx said that Martin Luther (Marx, 1975, p. 182):

…shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests
into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity
because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he
enchained the heart.

In other words, bourgeois democracy was interested only in driving religion out of the seat of
state power. Marx noted that emancipation required continuing secularization, this time even more
difficult than “pillaging the churches,” because it has to be against the “priest inside” (Marx, 1975).
If orientalism treats the Islamic world as an exception to world history, if it treats secularism as a
question of us/them or self/other (Muslims cannot be secular), poststructuralists appeal to the politics
of difference to arrive at similar conclusions. The claim to the particularism of “Muslim women”
found a ready confirmation in the new intellectual environment. If some Islamists sell their patriar-
chal politics under the guise of particularism, Western academia provides them with the most rigor-
ous theorization of their “exceptional” gender politics. If Muslim women constitute a unique
phenomenon in the history of the world, Western social theory confirms it by claiming that difference
is the essence of the universe.
MOJAB AND ZIA 269

Part of the poststructuralist theoretical baggage is branding universal women's rights as

“grand narratives,” and rejecting them as “totalitarianism” (Butler, 1992; Gannon & Davies,
2006; Hassan, 1987). This is the best theoretical shielding of political Islam and Islamic patriar-
chy transnationally. This line of argument is not useful, however. Our task is to unravel the limi-
tations of any feminist project based on any group identity such as religion, ethnicity or
nationality. In sum, the reduction of the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa to the
question of religion/Islam/fundamentalism serves the interests of different sources of power. The
United States and other Western powers benefit from the simplistic construction of an enemy,
which can be used to mobilize their citizens in support of imperialist domination. Islamists of
diverse tendencies also benefit from promoting Islam as the only source of resistance against
oppression, exploitation and imperialist domination, and to mobilize people under the flag of
religion.
A dialectical and historical materialist feminist approach has a very different problematization.
The starting point is not problems of identity, agency, authenticity, space, or body. If such concepts
or phenomena are pertinent they find their relevance in the context of the central issue: the oppres-
sion and the exploitation of women and men of the working class, peasants, urban poor and
national minorities. For Marxist feminism, accounting for social differences such as gender,
class, race, agency, and sexuality is of the utmost importance. A theory of difference and social
relations in Marxist feminism addresses the question of why our social world is organized along
the lines of “difference,” that is, race, gender, sexuality, class, and more. However, in our analy-
sis we depart from the postmodernist study of language and representation, from how these “dif-
ferences” arise as cultural phenomena, and focus on an explanation of how these “differences”
organize social relations. Carpenter and Mojab have argued that “the ‘social’ or ‘society’ is not
a ‘thing,’ ‘structure,’ or ‘system’ that exists outside of people and determines their activity or
thought.” (Carpenter & Mojab, 2011, p. 5). Their main point is that the social is organized
human activity, which means that social is a historically evolved form of social organization and
human cooperation. It is in this sense that the term social relations describe the social world.
Therefore, social relations are both the point of departure for inquiry and the point of arrival.
We cannot take ourselves/agency out of them as we seek to understand them. Social relations
are both forms of consciousness and practical, sensuous, human activity—that is to say, not just
what we think, but also what we do. These social relations are understood to exist in dialectical
relationships. Dialectical conceptualization means looking at the social world as sets of relations
between multiple phenomena occurring simultaneously at both local/particular and glo-
bal/universal levels. The dialectical relationships that make up our social world are constantly
moving and changing. This movement and change is due primarily to two dynamics: (a) the
internal contradictions of these relations, and (b) the external conditions of other social phenom-
ena. In other words, the social consists of sets of mutually determining relations that comprise
our everyday experience. Dialectical thinking allows us to understand experience through these
dynamic webs of relations.
To summarize, our understanding of the social world is a relational one that sees human social
organization as actual human activity. The social world is something we participate in and repro-
duce through our own labor and consciousness. In this analysis, we can observe the ways in which
women's lives are shaped by and entangled in interlocking structures of oppression and exploita-
tion. Therefore, if we agree that there is a “war on women” in the Middle East, the origin of this
war cannot only be explained through the ideological constitution of culture and religion. It is
rather a capitalist imperialist and fundamentalist war moving more and more toward fascism.
270 MOJAB AND ZIA

Capitalism subsumes the patriarchal, religious, racist, and colonialist mode of social organizing so
as to maintain, strengthen, and reproduce its modes of domination. In this articulation of capital,
we encounter capitalism as social relations and not as things. As an ideological formation, capital-
ism is also a set of cultural and political practices that obscures relations of domination while
simultaneously co-constituting patriarchal, racist and class exploitation and oppression (Sangari,
2015). Women's oppression and exploitation, therefore, is an intense expression of the violence of
patriarchal capitalism. Bannerji reminds us that an “ideological view of society which breaks the
social into fragments without constitutive relations, or homogenizes or essentializes social reality,
makes both social analysis and revolutionary social transformation inconceivable” (Bannerji, 2015,
pp. 176–77). An analysis that culturalizes, orientalizes, and essentializes the struggle and resistance
of women, or one that de-historicizes and de-materializes patriarchy represents the ideological
view of the social that prevents us from apprehending the material historical condition to enable a
Marxist feminist revolutionary project.

4 | TO CONCLUDE

The main project of Marxist feminism is not to engage in a trade between class and gender. We will
not break new ground by a simple exchange or interchange of two theoretical commodities. Diversity
is turned into uniformity if they fail to treat patriarchy as a component of the socio-economic system,
as a part in a whole, and as both dependent and independent, and capable of reproducing itself across
space and time.
We can surely move away from the problematization of women's emancipation as a question of
rights, and the regime of rights and equality, and instead treat the so-called “woman question” as a
major divide in world history, one that needs historical and materialist understanding. This requires a
radical rupture with current theorization, which confuses essences with essentialism, structures with
structuralism, and universalism with totalitarianism.
Under the pressure of women's movements and women of color movements, the bourgeois regime
of rights has surrendered more territory to women. This is best exemplified in the expansion of femi-
nist politics in academia, their “leaning” into the corporate sector (Sandberg, 2013), and government
policies internationally. It can also be seen, as observed by Janet Halley (2006) and other scholars, in
the inclusion of feminists into the corridors of elite power, and its influence over international bodies
such as the United Nations has resulted in the birth of a new field of “governance feminism” (Goetz,
2009; Reeves, 2012; Shepherd, 2015). However, the relationship between formal equality and social
inequality has not changed: it is more elaborated, sophisticated, better managed, but inequality has
not been eliminated; the formal equality still reproduces gender/race inequality outside the realm of
law. This is because all social relations of capitalist society are organized on the basis of inequality
of race, gender, class, sexuality, among others.
Feminist theories, which see the regime of gender relations as a patriarchal system, often do not
theorize the dynamics of its production and reproduction. Patriarchy is a universal structure of power
dominating gender relations with particularities of culture, religion, traditions, and histories. Feudal
patriarchal systems morphed into capitalist patriarchy, and under socialism in Soviet Unions and
China, for instance, into patriarchal-socialism. Now we are witnessing the rise of neoliberal, imperi-
alist, racist, theocratic patriarchy that is reproducing itself in and outside the state, market, and civil
society. Marxist feminism enables an insight, grasp and framing to these multiple and mutually bene-
ficial forces of masculinist economies and politics and enables an organization of oppositional and
secular feminist praxis to resist these.
MOJAB AND ZIA 271

O R C ID

Shahrzad Mojab https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4103-2979

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MOJAB AND ZIA 273

A U T H O R B IO G R A P H I E S

SHAHRZAD MOJAB is a professor of education and gender studies at the University of Toronto.
Her most recent books include Youth as/in Crisis: Young People, Public Policy, and the Politics
of Learning (co-edited with Sara Carpenter, 2017); Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism
and Knowledge (co-authored with Sara Carpenter, 2017); Marxism and Feminism (edited, 2015);
and Educating from Marx: Race, Gender and Learning (co-edited with Sara Carpenter, 2012).
She is the author of many articles on women in the Middle East.

AFIYA SHEHRBANO ZIA (Ph.D Women and Gender Studies) is currently an adjunct professor at
Habib University, Pakistan. In 2018, she taught at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is
author of Faith and Feminism in Pakistan; Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? (2018, Sus-
sex Academic Press) and Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994, ASR). She has edited a series
of books and authored a dozen peer-reviewed essays in scholarly publications – the most recent
is, “Can the Rescue Narrative Save Lives?” (Signs, 2019). Afiya is an active member of the
Women's Action Forum, Pakistan.

How to cite this article: Mojab S, Zia AS. Race, class, and agency: A return to Marxist
feminism. Labor and Society. 2019;22:259–273. https://doi.org/10.1111/lands.12427