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

INTRODUCTION

The theme of this book is women’s agency—how it is developed, how it is deployed, and how it can be increased. Having “agency” involves both deliberating on choices and having choices on which to deliberate . It is thus a product of both autonomy (the individual capacity to act) and freedom (the conditions that facilitate action). A full understanding of agency therefore requires consideration of both the subject who acts and the conditions within which she operates, particularly the conditions that produce her self-understanding. This book lays out a conception of agency as both a process and a capacity that is shaped by subjects’ temporal and relational circumstances. It begins with the theoretical underpinnings of what makes an agent and how she interprets the conditions of her agency. It then examines the development and deployment of agency in particular contexts in order to see how agency plays out in the messy living of imperfect lives. All of this work is done from the perspective of feminist commitment to honoring women’s ways of knowing and living in the world, and to improving the conditions within which that knowledge is cultivated and living takes place. When feminist theorists try to tease out the sources of and possibilities for agency, we often become entangled in the terms of the modernism/ postmodernism contest over the nature of subjectivity, which pits the ix Introduction x Introduction self-constituting Cartesian, transcendental subject against the socially constituted, contextually bound subject. Even though most feminist theory of the subject relies on social constructionism to some degree, that theory often reflects a need to retain a modernist core, the ideal of an essential self beyond construction. There is an inherent, seemingly irresolvable tension in feminist work on agency arising from the fear that without at least a semiessentialist notion of the subject, the agency that is fundamental to feminist struggles is lost. The vestiges of modernist conceptions of agency mean that at some point, even a constructed subject needs to be able to liberate herself. Yet any gesture toward essentialism is also viewed with skepticism because of the need to account for differences among women and the political nature of gender identity. So the problem of agency that arises from the tension over the nature of subjectification is that one is either a victim, a dupe of power unable to see her way clear of her situation, or a heroic individual, an agent who liberates herself, either individually or in conjunction with others.1 In this work, I contend instead that agency exists in the space between these two essentialized and impossible-to-realize categories; that agency is manifest in the mediation between structural determinism and selfdetermining autonomy. In locating agency in the interstices of discursive production and material determinism, I am not offering a way out of this hero–dupe impasse so much as I am suggesting a way to work within this tension.2 I do this not to save the possibility or impulse for liberation, which would require adopting a particularly modernist view of autonomy, but to balance a sedimented and constructed self with the potential for discursive and material challenge that animates politics, allowing for change that comes from both individuals and groups while also constituting them. In considering material constraints on agency, as well as the discursive possibilities for production and protest, I hope to highlight the way that being simultaneously subject and object of politics makes agency possible but means all choices are limited and often suboptimal . Economic, political, and social structures of exclusion and domination are all too real, yet our relationships to them are differentiated Introduction xi enough that subjectivity is not just an effect of power but a lived relationship to and within it. In the chapters that follow, I draw together feminist political and legal theory, as well as phenomenological and poststructuralist theory, to offer a more nuanced account of the status of women as political and social beings than any of these theories alone provides. The novelty of my approach is not in the individual components of agency I draw on but in my insistence that agency cannot be understood without relying on all of them. The interaction of these aspects of politics, psychology, and social life creates the conditions of—the possibilities for—agency. Agency is a form of resistance in that it opens up...