boundary 2 40:1 (2013) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2072909 © 2013 by Duke University Press The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency Sadia Abbas For it is against the grain of this responsibility of the national in the international that we feminist internationalists strain. I am thinking now of the worldwide group called Women Living under Islamic Law, extending all the way from North Africa to Indonesia with members from immigrant communities in the First World. These feminist inter- nationalists must keep up their precarious position within a divided loyalty: being a woman and being in the nation, without allowing the West to save them. Their project, menaced yet alive, takes me back to my beginning. It is in their example that I look at myself as a woman, at my history of womaning. Women can be ventriloquists, but they have an immense historical potential of not being (allowed to remain) nationalists; of knowing, in their gendering, that nation and identity are commodities in the strictest sense: something made for exchange. And that they are the medium of that exchange. When we mobilize that secret ontic intimate knowledge, we lose it, but I see no other way. We have never, to quote Glas, been vir- gin enough to be the Other . . . . Cultures are built violently on the