Mahmood sees a way out of theories such as Spivak’s and Butler’s claims that the subaltern cannot have access to discourse when she says that “the mosque women’s practices of modesty and femininity do not signify the abjectness of the feminine within Islamic discourse, but articulate a positive and immanent discourse of being in the world. This discourse requires that we carefully examine the work that bodily practices perform in creating a subject” (160). Considering this, one can read Ke$ha’s performances of sexual embodiment and urgings to “go insane” not merely as the privileged claims of a “white-girl rap” singer, but instead as bodily practices that reinforce her solidarity with collectivities often presented as outside the bounds of the rational. Critical ethnic studies scholar Chandan Reddy writes that “the state could exert its monopoly on force because they produced racial and sexual differences to designate the horizon of irrationalities against and through which state violence became identical to legitimate force,” and goes on to say that “race is the ‘Other’ of the nation-state, the limit of sovereignty, and hence also outside the boundaries of the rational” (39, 235). 

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