In responding to Deva Woodly’s review, it would be helpful to first point out two main strands of arguments/contributions that Ingenious Citizenship aims to advance. First, it brings about a rethinking of citizenship that untethers it from the ethos of democratic agency that has been dominant in Western political thought by investigating how abject subjects who are marginalized by the liberal democratic script have improvised citizenship in subtle and roundabout ways in their everyday life. Second—and this is the larger significance or the “so what?” of the book—it illuminates and illustrates how such nonlinear and circuitous enactments of citizenship by these abject subjects actually offer surprising and creative lessons for critical scholars and activists to conduct social movement activism in more fluid and heterogeneous ways. I thank Woodly for ably and constructively identifying the first strand of argument, teasing out how the book demonstrates a more open-ended and nonlinear enactment of agency in the abject as they put “citizenship” to practice in often unexpected and even unthinkable ways.

However, Woodly’s review does not capture/address the second strand of argument—namely, the larger political implications of abject subjects’ ingenious improvisations of citizenship for social movements—even though this strand is also a core and constitutive part of the book and takes up a significant portion of space in it throughout. Missing this larger significance of the book, Woodly criticizes the project precisely and mainly for not providing the larger political implications of these ingenious acts, aside from recognizing their variability and “the murkiness of political reality.”

For the record, the book actually consistently addresses in detail why these acts of ingenious citizenship matter for critical scholars and social activists as they work to transform the larger polity through movement activism. Specifically, I suggest that abject subjects’ creative resistance at the individual level can help us reconceive and engender a more fluid and amorphous horizon of rights-based movements (pp. 28–30). The book’s introduction clearly outlines this broader agenda in its chapter plan: “each episode of ingenious citizenship also offers unconventional insights and lessons for generating fluid social justice strategies . . . . In each case, I point to some tentative directions in which rights-based movements may incorporate the lessons of the ingenious politics of hidden tactics, calculated abjection, and morphing technologies [enacted by abject subjects] . . . into their repertoire of intervention and activism strategies” (p. 32). Chapters 2–5 closely follow through with this plan by linking the subversive acts of migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers to the broader political lessons and strategic insights for social movements that are working to transform these respective subjects’ lived conditions (refer to pp. 87–100, 136–47, 178–89, and 236–44).

Thus, while I fully agree with Woodly that a cogent political analysis must go beyond simply “recognizing the complicated and contingent nature of agency,” she misses how the book precisely pursues and takes up this further step by drawing out the broader political implications of such agency in significant and systematic ways. I hope Woodly would revisit the pages/areas indicated here so she can be clearer on the broader aim and scope of the book’s argument. I suspect that doing so could lead to a more nuanced engagement and dynamic future conversation on how our respective arguments on social movements may intersect in interesting and even complementary ways.