Earlier versions of this article were given as lectures at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge (as the Juliet Mitchell Lecture at the Centre for Gender Studies). I am grateful for discussions with the audiences and other colleagues that sharpened the work.

Almost forty years ago, in 1987, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern published an article in Signs, the newly established American Journal of Women in Culture and Society titled “An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology.” (Strathern, 1987). She argued against the idea that feminist perspectives could bring about a paradigm shift in anthropology. The two intellectual fields, she argued, differed in their subject matters, scholarly practices, and most specifically in the ways they each dealt with difference: Anthropology is comparative in its attempt to understand and represent difference while questioning the self, whereas at the core of feminism is an antagonistic view of difference and a practice of challenging the Other—in this case, men and patriarchy. In a passing sentence, she characterized feminism as ethnocentric.

These were the early days of feminist anthropology in the Anglo-American academy, a field that has widened to encompass and critique many forms of power and domination. It is hardly recognizable today from the debates of the late 1970s and 1980s about women and gender that Strathern describes. There are now thoughtful textbooks such as the one by Dana-Ain Davis and Christa Craven on Feminist Ethnography (2016) that draw new genealogies and offer methodologies, reflections on ethics, and affirmations of activism. In a recent review article, the anthropologist Lilith Mahmud insists that many of the early feminist contributions such as a focus on embodiment, analysis of power in the fieldwork encounter, reflexivity, giving voice to subjects, and refusing the God’s eye views in ethnography have actually become “mainstream tenets of ethnographic methods and writing” (Mahmud , 2021, p. 345 ). However, she deplores the fact that the marginalization of feminist anthropology within the field has not diminished, writing that “[F]eminist anthropology has paradoxically been relegated to the margins of the discipline it helped shape.” (Mahmud , 2021, p. 346). In a less pessimistic vein than Strathern, however, Mahmud concludes brightly that feminist anthropology could give hope to a discipline that some have famously said should burn and that she retorts as long having been on a slow burn for Black, brown, queer, indigenous and feminist scholars. She suggests that feminism and queer studies that also took seriously race could now force a paradigm shift in anthropology, turning it into “an antiracist, anticapitalist, antifascist, decolonial, and abolitionist feminist project.” (Mahmud , 2021, p. 355).

I am not convinced that this aspirational vision would resolve the knotty problem to which Strathern alerted us. So I would like to revisit in this article this formulation of the awkwardness between anthropology and feminism. I will reflect on ambivalences I have experienced over the years and talk about how I have confronted this awkwardness in my own work, going back to the formative fieldwork that resulted in my first book Veiled Sentiments. I will structure this argument around my encounters with three women I have admired: a woman I call Gateefa who was a key mentor in my first fieldwork with Awlad ‘Ali in Egypt in the late 70s and early 80s, and two compelling feminist theorists, Adrienne Rich and Sara Ahmed, whose work I read later.

Because of my inadequate graduate training in the second half of the 1970s, I had barely been exposed to the emerging field of feminist anthropology when I went to Egypt to do my dissertation research. I knew I was interested in women’s lives and gender relations. I intended and expected to work mostly with women, though it did turn out a bit differently because of the extraordinary character of the man who headed the family with whom I lived.

The current ferment in anthropology and the debates about decolonizing research pushed me to some further reflexive introspection about how to more explicitly acknowledge my indebtedness to the unique set of people and experiences that formed me during my first fieldwork (Sukarieh, Lila Abu-Lughod, 2024). Especially Gateefa, the woman whose household I lived in. As anthropologists we are all more keenly aware now of the uneven power and privileges that shape our work. But what I still think is most distinctive about us as anthropologists is the way we live and think intimately with all those from whom we learn as we move between “field” and “home,” to use that imperfect binary (Gupta, Ferguson, 1997; Narayan, 1993). I had seen myself as vaguely connected to the community I was working with in the field in terms of having Arab Muslim roots, though I did not belong there. But for us as scholars, the academy also becomes one of our key “homes” as well as “fields” when at home.

What is the effect of joining people in worlds different from ours and getting close to them with the goal of doing our best to understand and appreciate them and produce anthropological knowledge about them for others, for those “at home”? That is the anthropological imperative and its core ethic. As my colleague Elizabeth Povinelli wrote, fieldwork leads to an existential “coming to terms” with what it means to be part of incommensurate worlds (Povinelli, 2007). It is precisely in this incommensurability that I want to argue the awkwardness arises.

So let me share something that happened a few years ago that triggered my reflections about anthropology. The youngest daughter of the family I had lived with in Egypt sent me a whatsapp message. I had been present at her birth and loved watching her grow up as I came on successive visits over the years. Exchanging voice messages before the connection dropped, we managed to ask each other about how our families were doing in “Corona.” That is the colloquial they preferred for Covid-19. Searching for words to express how much I missed them, I quickly looked up a poem or ghinnaawa in one of my books. It was song that had always moved me. I recited it. Her response made me wonder if I had missed the poem’s meaning. She put it obliquely: “Maybe you didn’t know that our mother has died?” I cried out. Had the word “separation” in the poem connoted something more permanent than I had thought? Or had she actually got in touch because she planned all along to break the news to me? Gently, as they always do for those who are far away.

It was a terrible moment. I had been worried about her mother ever since my last visit a couple of years before Corona. I had sensed then that Gateefa, the pseudonym I had given her in my writings, wasn’t herself. She had been stronger the time before. That had not been long after her husband’s death. I had come for condolences. She had just returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca with her eldest son and she seemed philosophical about the loss. Quietly she had confided the details of his illness, his last words to his children, and his calm acceptance of the end. With pride she described just how many people from all over Egypt had come to offer condolences.

This time though she seemed subdued during an evening celebration that we had as an informal sendoff for one of her daughters’ cousins who was getting married. Everyone had gathered, in part because I had come for a visit. Gateefa’s daughters were now all young mothers and they took turns dancing with and for each other. They took pleasure in being together again, now that they had scattered into marriages, motherhood, and new lives. One grabbed an aluminum washbasin and turned it over to start drumming. The faster wedding songs, the shittawas, began. Amidst wild clapping, I heard the familiar sound of Gateefa interrupting the singing, as the older women do, with a ghinnaawa (poem/song) in honor of the bride. Her voice was strong and pure.

But the next morning she was pale. She told me that she was now on blood pressure medicine. I figured that the riotous chaos of so many grandchildren running around might have tired her. When I photographed her later sitting on the front steps of their house she had a distant look. Her grandsons crowded around her to get into the picture. I reflected on how much had changed since the intense life I had shared with her decades before. I felt the haunting of the empty places left by those who had passed away, especially her husband.

Hearing the news about Gateefa’s passing made me want to acknowledge her. I wanted to put together some remembrances for her daughters. So I dug out my old fieldnotes. There I described our first meeting. I wrote that two women had sat close to me in the tent, one on either side, as other women and girls settled in nearby on the straw mat. I noted that both women were beautiful, one in a matronly sort of way. It was she who listened closely to my broken Arabic and talked to me very slowly and clearly. It was she who would become my “mother” when, as the Haj, as we called him, the head of the family who took me in and her husband told me I was to consider myself his daughter. She would repeat to people meeting me for the first time that he had instructed them to treat me as family not stranger (gareeb not ghareeb).

It turned out the two women were co-wives. I was curious. She gave me a pat story whose layers would unfold over the years. The presence of co-wives and the importance of kin, especially relatives on the paternal side, were front and center in her story and would become themes of my social analysis, because they were the stuff of everyday life. She seemed most in charge and at one point in my first visit, she asked if I needed the bathroom and took me into the house. She showed me the rooms of her brother-in-law and his wife. She showed me her co-wife’s room. She asked me if I wanted to rest. I was grateful. We went into her room and lay down on the low mattress. She told me that the Haj had a third wife who was living in the nearby town. Then she mentioned that the Haj had informed her that they were going to move soon to the big new house they had built across the road. She said it would be more comfortable for me. This was my first moment of embarrassment at how my presence might impose on them.

I asked her some naïve anthropological type questions. Did the women go to weddings or other events together? No, she said, only she and the Haj would go. She had taken this as a question about co-wives. When I asked if the Haj’s younger brother had more than one wife she said no, but that he wanted to marry. “We women,” she explained, “like to have another wife to help with the work.”

I have expressed my gratitude and admiration for the Haj, my host “father” in multiple publications. I am pretty sure he got a lot out of knowing and teaching me. But as I read my notes, I began to think that I had not given Gateefa her due. She was the senior wife on whom fell the main burden of hosting and caring for me. How mutual were the feelings and affection between us? I worried, could my relationship with the community, and particularly her, be judged “extractive”? These are the charges that motivate the new stage of reflexive apologies that anthropologists are making.

How had Gateefa felt about me? I was imposed on her because her husband had agreed to take me in. I depended on her, day in and day out, because I was part of her household. I learned more from Gateefa than anyone else about how women in this community experienced their lives. I followed her around. I talked with her. I tried to help out with some of the chores that kept everyone busy. I listened attentively as she talked to others who were better conversation companions than I was. I observed how she interacted with people and how she raised her children to live up to the ideals of the community. I also came to know how she and her husband got along.

My debts were not just intellectual, for the person in me who would become an anthropologist. The experiences of living with Gateefa and her family were indelible. Gateefa would show me how this business of having co-wives was handled, especially when the third wife finally moved in with us in the new house. She taught me about the difference between relatives and strangers, as her husband who was a well-known mediator and judge had an endless stream of visitors. I would learn about family dynamics and moral values in a world built around kin and guided by God and ways to be a good Muslim. These were not abstract principles, even if I worked hard to figure out the social logic. I learned from her how these principles were “lived.” She hadn’t chosen this vocation of teaching me but I comfort myself with the thought that she may have found some of the satisfactions we all get from teaching: pride in our students’ progress and an affirmation of the value of the knowledge we have. But I didn’t think about it at the time.

She had been saddled with this odd houseguest for almost two years, and then during subsequent periods. She had not chosen it, though I am sure she was consulted. But she responded with unfailing grace and patience. She guided me to that most treasured creative form they had, and of which she was a master: the poem/songs that carried the “veiled sentiments” of “life as lived”—an art form being lost by the next generation. My book Veiled Sentiments was centered on these poems that also gave shape to my feelings.

Which brings us to the hard questions we wrestle with now. How to know what, as anthropologists, we give back. I’ve become impatient with some standard answers and am not so satisfied these days with the justifications I have always given myself. I had comforted myself with the thought that despite having no direct personal value for the actual individuals I had lived and worked with in Egypt, my writing in the West about any Muslim and Arab community would contribute by humanizing groups like them that dominant societies and groups disdain or vilify. More than scholars in other fields, we anthropologists often see ourselves as “speaking truth to power” in a global world.

But I began to ask myself whether there might be less grand and high-minded things we give back to those who give us so much. Could my presence in Gateefa’s life have had some unexpected value for her? By the time I came to live with them, a month after this first meeting, they were in this large house they had built across the road from the rest of the extended family. It was still unfinished. Rooms had been allocated to the Haj’s second wife and to his brother. But neither had yet moved in. It was just Gateefa and her kids, though they all begged for help with the enormous work of hosting all those who came to congratulate them on the new house. Some of the women from the camp, including her co-wife, came to lend a hand. But the move had exacerbated what I would learn later was her sense of isolation from the other women.

I was not the reason they had built this new house, just the occasion for moving. Space was tight in their old house. The children were growing up. Still, the move did change her life. Her rugs were piled up on the wooden chest in her new bedroom. She was surrounded by her children and busy with them. She was living apart from the other women who had been her social world. Her co-wife, her mother-in-law, her many cousins and sisters-in-law. We had plenty of visitors but Gateefa had mostly to turn to her children and me for company, at least for the first year, until the third co-wife joined us and her brother-in-law took a second wife and brought her to live with us too. How did she feel? There I was following her around, not competent enough to help with most of the work, trying to talk to everyone I could, and staying up late to write in my notebooks. After supper I would sit with her and the girls, often with a little one falling asleep in my lap. I helped put away the things for the night. I did a few chores. I massaged her back when she was pregnant. But what kind of company was I?

I learned later that there was another side to this move that was positive. She told me when I returned for a visit almost ten years later that she had never spent much time with her husband until they moved to this house. Normally he had spent his free time with his brothers and cousins and the boys in the encampment, now made permanent by the houses they had built next to the tents. That is why she said she used to be so quiet and uncomfortable around him when I first came to live with them. She said this in front of him as we were sitting together on a quiet afternoon. He teased her, “Well, now she just sits there talking to herself and moaning “akh akh,” about her aches.” She was eight months pregnant at the time.

I noticed on this visit that they spent a lot of time alone together, in the morning in her/their room and in the afternoons or on quiet evenings when he wasn’t busy with guests. It was still not all smooth. But from another long chat we had, the three of us, I sensed that he regretted ways he had hurt her. I wrote up this conversation in my second book Writing Women’s Worlds. He told a long story about how and why he had ended up marrying her, a first cousin who was too young. He did this partly to protect her as an orphaned cousin. Partly it was to keep his dead uncle’s spirit alive. He gave a sense of the affection and care he felt for her. He told me about his own troubles and the tough times he had faced when he was left responsible for the family after his father and grandfather died in the same year as this uncle, Gateefa’s father. He then said she’d come around when she got older. Mischievously he looked at her when he said, “And the older she got the more beautiful she got.” She interrupted to mutter something about his other wife and his desire for more sons. (She kept having daughters.) But he protested: “I’m telling you the truth, Layla. Everything is hers. To this day she’s the mistress of my house, she’s the one with the last word, her requests are the ones honored. And it will be this way until she dies. Until she dies.”

Her own version of her wedding had been different. She said she had cried and missed her mother and ran away at night to sleep with her grandmother. She was only thirteen. But when I asked her, “Was the Haj good to you?” She said, “Yes of course. I wouldn’t have stayed if not. He turned out to be good.” Twenty years after this conversation and a year after the Haj had died, we were reminiscing about his many great qualities. I commented that she was very much like him. As if it were obvious, she simply said, “Aren’t we first cousins?”

I wish I had let her know then how much I appreciated her other qualities, ones that her husband didn’t have: the calm gravitas, the compassion, and the kindness. Her mother’s sister confided once that the other women resented her because outsiders always liked her. It was a role thrust upon her as senior wife and I was one of the outsiders to whom she been unfailingly gracious. Surely it must sometimes have been trying to have me around and to have me take so much of her husband’s time. This was an unheard of kind of relationship for the community.

Two small stories in my notebooks helped me see now how I might nevertheless have given her something back. When I returned 1986-1987 to start a second period of fieldwork, Gateefa happened to be away visiting her mother. Her daughters complained that their father just couldn’t live without her. He was at a complete loss and kept shouting for things and bothering them. A few weeks later as I sat with him and a new neighbor who was meeting me for the first time, he reported that he had a hard time with his wives and was always getting angry. But those two years when I had been living with them had been much better. I’d calm him down. I’d come between him and his wives to defend them.

I hope that my support of her meant something to Gateefa. I had been thrust on her but she made something of it. Maybe her situation as Haj’s senior wife, his cousin, and of the patriline, demanded this dignified behavior. Maybe she appreciated my complete loyalty. I think I played a role in the Haj’s realization and regret for ways he might have hurt her, and in their growing closeness.

I share this long story about my personal experiences with Gateefa to shed a different light on the ethical questions we struggle with now, raised most acutely by indigenous scholars in colonial situations about research that is not done for the direct benefit of the community being researched, or requested by the community. By acknowledging what Gateefa gave me and considering what I might have given back to her, I am suggesting that we could take a broader view of complicated human situations. Does this unevenness in what we give and take undermine the possibility of building meaningful relationships that change all of us? Granted, my context was not that of settler colonialism. My insider-outsider status, as Arab (ish) and Muslim but not Egyptian (thus not allied with the state that governed them) side-stepped the classic colonial alignments of the anthropologist with a dominant outside. The relative wealth and confidence of the families with whom I lived, and my gender and youth, further tipped the scales.

But whether through our eager greetings whenever I returned or in messages like the note I found tucked into my field notebook in 1987, written by one of Gateefa’s daughters just as I was about to leave after my second period of fieldwork, I have a sense that the attachment was mutual. This teenager had addressed the note to “My precious sister who is dear to my heart, Layla.” It continued: “I write you these simple words, simple but rich in meaning. I write to you so that you will remember me with these words. Remember me when you are alone and when there are distances between us, my dear sister… Remember me when you smile, remember me when you cry, and remember me when the breeze touches your skin.” She closed with an acknowledgment of who I personally was, even if the sentiments are clichéd. “With my very best to you and wishing you success in your academic life.”

Might my intrusion and presence in their lives, for those years, have enriched their experiences, their understandings of the world? Might it have introduced new feelings and attachments that stretched the meaning of being related by blood? Did my being there help deepen Gateefa’s marriage to the Haj, making these two life partners better able to appreciate one another? My intellectual debts are many, for sure. But do they begrudge me these? They could have kept so much from me. I know they took pride in what I had learned from them.

I was deeply changed by them. I learned life lessons about what was possible. I still find myself judging what I see around me through their values. Gateefa had introduced me to the phenomenon of co-wives and a different way of understanding what marriage could mean. She helped me accept the complex and contradictory nature of a gendered social world organized through bonds of family and patriline. Veiled Sentiments unpacked the logic of family and honor. But because of what Gateefa taught me about the ghinnawas, the book revealed surprising aspects of how this logic was lived. This led me to push later in my book Writing Women’s Worlds for “ethnography of the particular.” The intimacy of living so fully with this complicated family so different from mine in a social world so different from the one I came from and returned to made me see the violence of generalizing about cultural groups. Individuals dealt so differently with their circumstances. Individuals changed over time. Individuals were affected by their experiences, including having a sometimes anxious young woman trying to be an anthropologist live with them. This led me to want to “write against culture.” (Abu-Lughod, 1991).

But in terms of the question of feminism, the most lasting influence for me of these experiences was that I had listened and learned and appreciated the complexity of women’s lives in what could easily be described and denounced as a patriarchal culture. I saw how Gateefa and others were committed to the moral correctness of the gender separation and principles of gender inequality, not to mention patrilineal family organization. They certainly lived polygyny differently than I could have imagined, and it was different in each marriage I got to know. I could not but see how they led active agentic lives in circumstances that feminists would condemn. They defended their dignity, they made fun of men, they had a keen sense of justice. It’s just that they defined these differently. I never met anyone in that community who envied Western women or even urban Egyptian women.

Gateefa made me question the ethnocentrism of feminism in most of its varieties. Knowing her convinced me of its parochialism. I interrogated it in my later work when I widened my gaze and responded to the role I saw self-avowed feminists playing in geopolitics with regard to the Muslim world. I did this both in my book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and then in the more recent collaborative project I worked on around the geopolitics of feminism. This culminated in a book called The Cunning of Gender Violence that I edited with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2023). It was with Gateefa in mind that I found myself repelled by the patronizing feminist solidarity being offered to women like her. Who would want to be rescued from their communities and families, especially by foreign armies or platoons of experts on development or human rights? How dare feminists suggest that the military invasion of Afghanistan could be in the name of saving its women. Gayatri Spivak called it an alibi, this civilizing mission (Spivak, 2004). I worry too about the ways some feminists in France weaponize laïcite. If you save someone from something, you are also saving them to something. There is a violence in this.

But let me turn to the next set of stories of encounter, with two feminist theorists (not anthropologists) I admire. The next stage of life for me after fieldwork was when the academy became my primary home. Feminist communities in the academy opened up for me new ideas and modes of feminist thought that had not been part of my anthropological formation. These feminist communities were personally transformative. As intellectual communities they opened up intoxicating terrains of theorizing and scholarship. As supportive communities of women trying to make their way in academic institutions, they helped validate the truths of our existence in structures that, like other aspects of the societies in which we live, had not meant us to be equals, or even to be there. They offered guidance in navigating this world and the solidarity that gives us the strength to withstand slights, indignities, and self-doubt.

But there was always a problem in crossing these worlds of home and field. When I arrived at Williams College for my first teaching job in 1983, I was lucky to be part of a feminist theory reading group. It included philosophers, political theorists, and art historians. I was both exhilarated and bewildered by what we read together. I especially remember my reactions to Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay in Signs, titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” I was intrigued by this powerful essay by a radical American feminist theorist. Adrienne Rich and the other Euro-American feminist theorists we studied readily deployed terms like “patriarchy.” They named sexism as a social scourge. They collapsed multiple practices and gender arrangements into a universal institution of women’s oppression.

Rich’s acknowledgment in the latter part of her article of the close bonds that form among women, in part because of shared suffering, was compelling. I’d seen the bonds in Egypt. Wasn’t my very first published article written for a conference on “Communities of Women” sponsored by feminist scholars at the journal Signs? This was the same journal where Marilyn Strathern would two years later publish her article on the awkward relationship between Anthropology and Feminism? I had titled it “A Community of Secrets.” (Abu-Lughod, 1985). It was about what it meant for women like those I had lived with in the Bedouin community in Egypt to live in deliberately gender-segregated worlds. But I couldn’t have seen this community of women more differently from the way Rich did. She lumped together the arranged marriages, virginity expectations, and division of labor that I had witnessed with foot-binding in China, sati or widow burning in India, female genital mutilation in Africa, and witch-burning in colonial New England. She approved of the radical feminist theologian Mary Daly who denounced all these practices as patriarchal torture. I kept muttering to myself as I read Rich in the early 1980s, “Well, you could see it that way, but the women themselves don’t.” I bristled at the way her interpretations obscured the most important dimensions of gender and sociality in the community I knew. Yes, I saw close bonds in everyday life among women who spent most of their time together and shared with each other their suffering. But they protected their world from intrusion by men and the bonds were rife with hierarchies. More importantly the women’s ties were cross-cut by the powerfully affective and political bonds of kinship, which meant the men in their lives. Why was cousin marriage the ideal? Hadn’t Gateefa said, “Of course, we are first cousins”? These were crucial for women’s social identities, respect, rights, and affections. Kin curtailed the power of husbands over wives. And I’d seen that if familial bonds involved pressures and even coercion, this was as true for men as it was for women; they too were enmeshed in, and you could say, subordinated by, their kin. No one was independent though they all respected the value of a fierce personal dignity, even independence, that was integral to their moral ideals of honor. Women had shown me through their poetry and songs just how much “heterosexual” love mattered to them, even as it entangled longing and desire with betrayal and disappointment, as maybe all love does.

I had worked so hard to try to understand this one community up close and to see it through women’s eyes and words. As an anthropologist I was committed to respecting what women said and attending to the contextual and specific meanings of what they did. What was I to do with the fierceness of their commitment to certain ways of being as moral when someone like Rich would view them as victims of a patriarchal society? A powerful thinker and amazing poet and essayist who later in her career became impressively attentive to white privilege, her judgmental presumption in this early piece of the global and universal suffering for women in patriarchal systems was, as Strathern put it, ethnocentric (Rich, 1980, p. 644).

Thirty some years later, after more than a decade of being in another wonderful interdisciplinary feminist reading group with colleagues at Columbia University--even more satisfying because our remit was to read and comment on each other’s work in progress-- some graduate students involved in our Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender invited me to reflect on what it meant to live a feminist life. They motivated a belated engagement with the work of another and more contemporary visionary feminist theorist, Sara Ahmed. As exhilarating and ambitious as Adrienne Rich, and certainly more of this moment in terms of thinking race, gender, and sexuality together, she has offered feminists two compelling visions: the value of willfulness and the embrace of the feminist as killjoy. She opens her book, Living a Feminist Life, with a Grimm’s fairytale about a willful child who would not do as her mother wished. As the story went, God was not pleased and let her fall ill. She died. But as Ahmed quotes, “when she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upward, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again.” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 67). Her mother had to beat the arm with a rod until it finally settled. Ahmed interprets the rod as that which polices those who are defiant and refuse to go along with the existing historically created systems of domination and exclusion. These are, she explains, systems that don’t recognize themselves as systems or structures. Ahmed is talking both about the academic institutions in which we work and the broader heteronormative social worlds in which we live. Ahmed celebrates the killjoy, too, turning what she calls an insulting diagnosis into an affirmative act of self-description. She observes that people get angry at feminist killjoys because they are discomfited by the way they point out that structures or walls that have become taken for granted. At the end of her book she offers a Killjoy Manifesto. “When we refuse to be women in the heteropatriarchal sense of beings for men, we become trouble, we get into trouble. A killjoy is willing to get into trouble.” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 225).

This is heady stuff. It rings so true for those of us who have tried to make our way through the academy or have had commitments to diversifying it, as she did. The idea of refusal to go along is also appealing. Sara Ahmed paid a price for this refusal. But I was ambivalent. I was not as perturbed as by Adrienne Rich since Ahmed does not pretend to judge other cultures and communities. But there is something in Ahmed that was hard to carry into the other half of my life as an anthropologist, one who moves between the world I shared with these theorists and the worlds and women in rural Egypt to whom I was so attached.

My experiences with Gateefa and her daughters in my formative 20s and 30s made me hesitate in the face of this defiant celebration of willfulness. On the one hand, girls in that community were indeed sometimes scolded for being willful. The word for such a girl would be gawya. But gawya comes from to the root to be strong. The epithet carried the tint of admiration. Women knew that this trait would make for a strong adult woman with a personality. People pitied the opposite, a woman they described as ghalbana. This could refer to being poor, but most often it suggested a person who was compliant and unprotesting. Ghalbana comes from the root to be defeated. No one admired this lack of will or capacity.

As for the killjoy, it was hard to translate this aspiration too. If Gateefa and others lived in a patriarchal society, where kin groups were defined by the male line, women as sisters and daughters belonged fully to those groups and identified with them. Husbands were supposed to be respected and listened to by their wives but they had responsibilities to provide for them and to treat them well. Kin would enforce that. Given that there weren’t any structures outside of family and kinship (since these were virtually unquestioned); given that there was no ideology of gender equality; and given that everyone I knew expressed an unwavering commitment to both tribal and religious morality, condemning breaches by others unless they had been treated unjustly or with force, this was a social world utterly different from the institutional and social world of late capitalism that Sara Ahmed calls out. In a society that professes ideals of equality, challenging inequalities does make others uncomfortable. It makes the feminist a killjoy. But in this other world I also know well, moral conformity and family loyalty are the measures by which both men and women judge themselves and are judged. These are the means for assuring secure places in a meaningful community. One might, as Deniz Kandiyoti famously put it, think of women as there making a patriarchal bargain, trading autonomy and respect for belonging (Kandiyoti, 1988). But what I saw was that the rewards of belonging in family and community were too rich to imagine nonparticipation, even while specific injustices were actively resisted and attempts at male dominance often mocked. I explored those resistances in my article “The Romance of Resistance” and my other writings (Abu-Lughod, 1990).

At “home” in my own social worlds and institutions, of course Ahmed’s critiques resonated. I thrilled to the defiance of a killjoy who revealed the ongoing structures of domination. But in this other world of women that as an anthropologist and longtime friend I had come to understand and empathize with, the key liberal feminist terms of freedom, equality, and individual autonomy were alien. Or at least differently interpreted. As Saba Mahmood taught us, the idea of agency as transgressive of norms, a concept so fundamental to western feminism, and even many types of transnational or non-white feminism, needs to be parochialized. Conformity too, she argues, is a form of agency (Mahmood, 2001).

My experiences with Gateefa and other women friends in rural Egypt in later fieldwork also made me suspicious of the successes of what could be characterized as international Governance Feminism in criminalizing gender-based violence. For five years I worked with a group of feminist colleagues, most but not all anthropologists, to uncover the ways these feminist successes in the international legal arena working from within foreign policy to the UN to the Security Council came at the price of alignments with deadly forms of securitization, selective impunity for state violence, and humanitarian rescue that did nothing to alter the political forces producing the catastrophes. The latter was shown brilliantly by Rema Hammami in her chapter on Gaza (Hammani, 2023), written tragically before October 7 when that world and those people were not being slaughtered as they have been for the past two and a half years. So many of these forms of feminism and “global” advocacy of women’s rights, we show in The Cunning of Gender Violence (Abu Lughod, Hammami and Shalboub-Kevorkian, 2023), are underwritten by an often disavowed Islamophobia. And a presumption of what is needed rather than a listening. The book, makes a case for the ways hitching their feminism to these forms of power and domination ends up producing what Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Taher label epistemological imperialism (Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, a Tahir 2020). What we argue is the political bedrock and defining feature of this kind of feminist activism is that it emerges from particular global power differentials between the locus of feminism, still fundamentally western even if developed transnationally within certain class fractions, and “other” communities that are not just different but actually subject to the violence of what we can gloss as western or elite projects.1

Even more than my previous book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? this one is a long way from Veiled Sentiments, with its co-wives, kinship and moral compulsion. But what I learned from Gateefa and her daughters, co-wives, and sisters-in-law, and even from her husband, motivated my suspicion and my critical questioning of some feminisms’ deafness to difference. They remain touchstones for my ambivalence about feminism and my conviction that the relationship between anthropology and feminism remains awkward. Strathern used the singular for each of these internally contested and complex fields. We might do better to speak in the plural since there are multiple genealogies of feminisms just as there are different schools of anthropology. But I have taken up her binary opposition to make a point. Anthropology can perhaps be a killjoy for feminism and feminism a killjoy for an anthropology that fails to take gender seriously. But what Strathern left out of the equation, not so surprising for the 1980s, is what we now recognize about both anthropology and feminism: the global contexts in which they are carried out. Both need to be decolonized so that we can reckon with the different ways they might be deployed as part of power dynamics within empire.