By now Saba Mahmood’s claims in 'The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject' (Princeton University Press, 2005) have become a permanent fixture of the way women subjects are understood in Middle Eastern studies across disciplines, including not only Mahmood’s original field of anthropology but also in sociology and literary studies. As the reader will recall, among Mahmood’s primary theoretical projects is to disentangle agency from resistance, working against dominant Western feminism, so that practicing docility is interpreted as an expression of agency; docility in turn is restored to its Aristotelian definition to signify preparing the self for teaching (see especially 29). Recent feminist scholarship inside and outside Middle Eastern studies has critiqued the idea of agency altogether. Sadia Abbas has shown in “The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency” (boundary 2: 2013), later adapted into a book chapter, how discourses of agency serve to erase real Muslim women’s suffering, occluding their imbrications in networks of power. Similarly, Anne Anlin Cheng, both in her celebrated book 'Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface' (Oxford University Press, 2011) and in her recent theorization of “Ornamentalism” (in an eponymous article in Critical Inquiry and book from Oxford UP, both 2018), alternately locates agency in violence (SS 20-1), opposes it to spectacle (SS 38-9), and ultimately unseats subjectivity from agency (“O” 429-30). One is left to ask: Whence the feminist preoccupation with agency? Is agency a precondition of subjecthood? Moreover, given that gendering is a fundamental process of subject formation, is agency gendered? To approach such inquiries, I engage three works of contemporary Persian literature: Mahshid Amirshahi’s 1971 short story, “N?m… shuhrat… shum?rih shin?sn?mih…” (Name, Surname, Birth Certificate Number…); Goli Taraghi’s 1991-2 short story, “Du?st-i ku?chak” (The Little Friend); and Mahsa Mohebali’s 2008 novel, Negar?n nab?sh (Don’t Worry). I suggest that agency is masculinized in modern Iranian feminisms (categorizing Taraghi’s work as such despite the author) but that masculinity is simultaneously disaggregated from the male body. Thus the subject, and in particular, the female feminist subject, comes into being partly through masculinity, or precisely that which she antagonizes (and which antagonizes her). The study ultimately opens up to a crucial question: simply put, is agency power? Alternatively, is power agency?