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5 Resisting Inequality
- NYU Press
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121 l l 5 Resisting Inequality How did battered immigrants and ORA staff negotiate intersecting gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class structural forces? How can the paradoxes of the system and the pervasiveness of inequality be resisted and overcome? As opposed to the previous two chapters, which focused on the power of immigration laws over nonprofit organizations and their workers over immigrants’ actions, this chapter focuses on the capacity of battered women and advocates to cope with, legitimize, or defy these constraints. While battered immigrants seemed to be at the mercy of gatekeepers, and ORA staff seemed to be co-opted, they still had a say in these processes. These encounters between structural and individual wills and actions embody the theoretical debate around the issue of human agency versus structural forces, that is, between order and change. In this last chapter I will address the structure/agency theoretical debate, analyze immigrants’ agency by bringing in the cases of immigrants presented in previous chapters,1 share ORA staff’s thoughts about their role as gatekeepers, and propose alternative actions toward change. Structure/Agency Debate Ever since sociology was founded as a discipline, and continuing with a long-standing philosophical dilemma, theorists and researchers have been dealing with a fundamental threefold puzzle: Do individuals have power to act independently of constraining social structures? How are these structures constituted? How can they be changed? Answers to these questions have spanned a continuum at whose extremes authors have emphasized either the oppressive character of social structures over individuals2 or the capable nature of people to overcome oppression individually and/or collectively.3 In the middle, one finds theories that propose that structures are not only constraining but also enabling 122 x Resisting Inequality of human agency,4 and that structural power not only oppresses but also generates individuals’ power.5 To better understand the structure/agency conundrum with social equality as the end goal, feminists of color suggest questioning abstract notions of agency and social structures by emphasizing their sociohistorical, multifaceted, and often contradictory character .6 One should “think of agency not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.”7 Interlocking structures of domination like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class allow for various kinds and degrees of individual and collective action, which must be disentangled to further comprehend the dynamics and effects of power relations.8 Most authors, at both extremes and in the middle of the structure/agency debate, have developed universal theories (applicable to a fictitious uniform “all”) from above (without incorporating or getting involved with the research subjects) based on a binary system of thought (powerful/powerless, black/white, male/female, rich/poor, etc.). This standpoint ignored the multiplicity of experiences and the actual views of the oppressed and, in turn, reproduced the social hierarchies being studied. Feminists of color make an effort to break this perverse cycle by developing knowledge from below based on incorporating the views and voices of the subjects about whom the research is being developed, because “without them, the myriad individual and collective histories that simultaneously run parallel to official accounts of historic events and are their sequel, almost inevitably get submerged”9 and become invisible.10 Accordingly, the manner in which these voices are brought into the analysis is central: their mere inclusion is not enough and does not automatically provoke a change in the understanding of otherness. It is not only about including but also about how to include; it is not only about voicing but also about listening: the question “may not be whether the subaltern can speak so much as whether she can be heard to be speaking in a given set of materials and what, indeed, has been made of her voice by colonial and postcolonial historiography.”11 By uncovering the ways in which Latina battered immigrants and ORA staff are affected by and negotiate specific intersecting structural forces, I propose that agency is nuanced.12 Initially, agency does not occur in a vacuum but is always structurally limited and relative to others’ agency. These relative limitations should be considered in order to fully understand the degrees of agency possible and how agency is expressed as individuals interact with one another within structural constraints. Accord- [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:00 GMT) Resisting Inequality x 123 ingly, agency does not always equal resistance (i.e., expressed by...