Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work

NOTES

Introduction 1. Both Kathi Weeks and Susan Hekman have described the impasse in feminist work on agency and subjectivity similarly to my assessment here as they, too, search for a way out of it. We want, in Weeks’s words, “to endorse the critiques of humanism, functionalism, determinism, and essentialism without denying the possibility for agency” (1998, 1). Hekman’s response of emphasizing the discursive subject is similar to mine. The discursively constituted subject has an “I” that is the basis of her creative engagement in the world, but that “I” is social, not presocial. The discursive subject is thus “always both constituted and constituting ” (1995, 198). Hence, identity—the “I”—is deeply connected to agency as one’s creative engagement in the world, a point I develop in chapter 1. There are also affinities between my account of subject formation and agency and Weeks’s theory . But Weeks relies on standpoint theory—particularly labor, standpoint, and totality—as well as Nietzsche’s eternal return, Kathy Ferguson’s irony as feminist practice, and Antonio Negri’s concept of self-valorization to bolster modernist ideals of autonomy. I turn instead to Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and Judith Butler, among others, taking my account of the subject and her potential in slightly different directions. Ultimately, Weeks and I have similar ends—seeing the nonessential subject who is socially constituted yet has a clearly delineated self from which to act—achieved through different means (see Weeks 1998, 135–37). 2. I am thus aligned with Lois McNay and many feminist Foucauldians who flesh out the later work of Foucault by coping directly with both resistance and domination. 221 notes 222 Notes to Chapter 1 3. I see these case studies as intersectional in the third of the three types of intersectional analyses outlined by Leslie McCall; they are examples of an intercategorical intersectional approach. When examining intercategorical complexity , one “provisionally adopt[s] existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions” (2005, 1773). Adopting this approach makes strategic use of identity categories even though one knows that accepting the socially produced contours of the group for descriptive purposes can flatten some of the complexity within them. 4. I draw this distinction and this language of understanding these distinct moments of subjectification from Lois McNay (2000). Note that moments of capitulation are different from resistance that is more individualized through its mere failure to conform to expectations or the standard definition of gendered citizenship. And in neither case does one lack or enact agency in toto. “Agent” is not a descriptive characteristic like “blue eyes.” It is a process engaged in different ways and in different times throughout the course of one’s life, erupting or forcibly wrought in some situations and not in others. 1. Conceiving Agency 1. See Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000, 4). This distinction mirrors the divide within types of agency described by Abrams (1999). Friedman (1997) explains the ways in which autonomy as “self-determination” has been discussed within mainstream philosophy and the major feminist critiques of autonomy theory, specifically the “substantive neutrality” requirements and the insufficient attention to the social and relational development of the capacity for autonomy. 2. See Hirschmann (2003, 36–39). We can see here one way in which agency and identity are linked, both procedurally and substantively. As Seyla Benhabib has argued, the self—identity—is not a “substrate that remains self-same over time” (1999, 353). She proposes a narrative model of identity to make sense of the continuity of self (“character”) despite the changes in one’s commitments. She argues that the attitude toward commitments is the identity that is “stable” though the substantive commitments and parts of the self that are accentuated are different across time and place. Likewise, the agency that is tapped and developed across time and commitment varies as the context shifts, but this agency is emboldened by and embedded in the character of the actor. “The narrative model of identity is developed precisely to counteract this difficulty by proposing that identity does not mean ‘sameness in time’ but rather the capacity to generate meaning over time so as to hold past, present, and future together” (353), becoming the Notes to Chapter 1 223 “ungrounded ground” of Susan Hekman’s (2004) work...