Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work by Carisa R. Showden (review)

Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work by Carisa R. Showden is rooted in exploring questions of how we understand women’s agency, and the ways in which women exercise agency. Divided into five chapters—1. “Conceiving Agency: Autonomy, Freedom, and the Creation of the Embodied Subject”; 2. “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Intimate Partner Violence and the Agency in ‘Victim’”; 3. “Mum’s the Word: Assisted Reproduction and the Ideology of Motherhood”; 4. “Working It: Prostitution and the Social Construction of Sexual Desire”; 5. “Agency and Feminist Politics: The Role of Democratic Coalitions”—Showden, employing multiple theoretical frames, challenges dualistic perspectives on women’s agency and attempts to illustrate the ways in which agency can be used to positively enhance women’s abilities to increase and exercise political and personal options. She argues that in order to have agency, women need to be free from constraints that prevent or restrict the ability to act. Specifically, Showden posits “that one key in expanding women’s choices, without dictating one objectively correct way of making decisions, is to name the source and power of different constraining norms and practices and to see where, how, and why women are resisting or adopting the roles and opportunities presented to them” (xiii).

In chapter 1, Showden provides an in-depth analysis of agency. She centers her discussion on it rather than on freedom or autonomy because, she suggests, agency encompasses both doing and being. She defines agency as autonomy plus options and includes both the personal, as well as the political, in this definition. Chapter 2 explores the implications of why some women choose to stay in violent relationships and others choose to leave. Addressing this issue as it relates to agency, Snowden argues that:

1. 1.) not all women who stay with their abusers are dupes or lacking in agency;

2. 2.) to assess agency, one must see victims of violence as they are situated in socially and culturally specific contexts;

3. 3.) agency and victimization are coincident, rather than mutually discrete, categories; and

4. 4.) investment in an adherence to hegemonic gender norms and the heteronuclear family comprises the primary facets of normative competence that confounds resistant agency because it directly affects who stays and why.

Chapter 3 takes an in-depth look at the intersection of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the norms concerning the ideal mother, examining how pronatalist female-gender norms are both reproduced and contested through the particular ways in which these technologies are adopted. Showden argues that rather than seeing ARTs solely as exploitative of women’s bodies or primarily as fantastic tools opening up more choice for women, there is value in framing the discussion around the ways in which ARTs decrease agency for some women while enhancing it for others. In addition, she suggests that ARTs can inhibit autonomy by supporting patriarchal norms about the relationship between womanhood and motherhood, thus reinforcing the social construction of desire for biological motherhood.

In Chapter 4, Showden takes a more traditional approach in her discussion of victimization and agency, as well as the social construction of sex work, by examining three different feminist perspectives on sex work: “sex as violence,” “sex as work,” and “prostitution versus pornography.” Showden attempts to get the reader to think about what needs to change in order to enable a more open legal and economic discourse in which women’s sexual agency can fully develop. Thus, she makes a compelling argument for women needing to be regarded both legally and culturally as “fully human,” and their sexuality and life plans as fully their own. She argues that laws that limit sexual expression while failing to redress sexual violence and economic oppression do not contribute to the status of women as being fully human.

In her concluding chapter, Showden discusses coalition politics as both a site...