Introduced by Janet Jakobsen, Saba Mahmood delivered the

lecture, "The Politics of Freedom: Geopolitics, Minority Rights and

Gender" on October 5, 2009 at Barnard College. Originally titled "Should

Feminist Ethics Matter to Religious Politics?" Mahmood's talk marked the

sixth annual Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture. Associate Professor of

Anthropology at the University of California, Mahmood is an expert on

issues of secularism, gender, and modernity within the context of

Islamist movements in the Middle East and South Asia. In this lecture,

she reflects on why ethical practice and forms of embodiment matter to

questions of feminist politics and analysis. By engaging some common

misreadings of her 2005 book Politics of Piety, Mahmood urges

feminist scholars to critically re-think the normative status accorded

to secular conceptions of the self and body in contemporary debates

about religion.