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

1 Conceiving Agency: Autonomy, Freedom, and the Creation of the Embodied Subject

Agency is often used interchangeably with autonomy and freedom, so that debates about the meaning and possibility of autonomy or freedom get shifted to agency as well. Although I agree that these are deeply interconnected ideas, I argue here that agency is in fact distinct from and broader than autonomy or freedom considered alone. Autonomy is self-governance, even if governing through a relational sense of self. Agency is autonomy plus options; thus, agency includes not only the personal but also the political.1 Rather than bifurcating self and society, an adequate theory of agency foregrounds the way in which the subject is developed by powers that transcend it. These powers that exceed the person are, as philosopher Axel Honneth writes, the “constitutive conditions for the individualization of subjects” (1998, 198). A theory of agency then helps to make sense of the socially determined subject’s ability to act in the world because it emphasizes the social embeddedness of the individual choice maker and the way in which she is understood through salient, politically produced group identities, while also collecting within it the individually specific modes of taking up these external forces (see Bevir 1999, 67). Thus, I center this discussion on agency, as opposed to freedom or autonomy, because agency encompasses both doing and being, suturing 1 c h a p t e r 1 34# Conceiving Agency Autonomy, Freedom, and the Creation of the Embodied Subject 2 Conceiving Agency together critical aspects of both freedom and autonomy that we might miss if we looked at either alone. Agency, like freedom, is deployed in specific contexts and is manifest to varying degrees in specific choices and actions. But, like autonomy, agency is dispositional and needs to be considered over the span of a person’s life, because the development of agency is a lifelong process.2 Agency is buttressed by an ability to choose from an array of viable options to improve the quality of one’s life by allowing one to fulfill a range of needs and desires and to influence the contexts in which those desires take shape. Additionally, the conditions producing preferences must be as fully open as possible. It is important to examine not only what a person wants but how and why she comes to want those things. Self-interest does not have to entail atomism or crass liberal individualism ; rather, it here points toward active reflection on the conditions of our lives and care for making them better. Women all have the potential for agency; the point of politics is to create a world that maximizes women’s ability to exercise the full range of this potential to make both possible and desirable a life plan that is open to new experiences and possibilities, rather than closed to the exploration of various ways of being in the world. The notion of feminist agency additionally contains a self-reflective, critical consciousness about the productive workings of power.3 Under conditions of constraint or oppression, agency may manifest itself in resistance to hegemonic power structures. Feminist discussions of agency often assume that agency “resist[s] those structures, practices, or images that contribute to gender-based oppression” (Abrams 1995, 306n11).Thus feminist agency as resistance has a critical, political element of reflective, systemic analysis. Critically conscious feminist agents recognize the way in which their options, identities, and ethical sensibilities develop intersubjectively , and through the interplay of juridical and nonjuridical laws, norms, and customs (i.e., hegemonic power structures). In this chapter, I situate agency as both a capacity that one has and a process of development at the intersection of freedom and autonomy. Conceiving Agency 3 I do this to see how external forces shape internal development and how, in turn, personal development leads one to order and focus on certain overlapping aspects of one’s external situation differently at various times and places. After looking at how agency encompasses elements of freedom and autonomy, I turn to the modes of expression of agency: embodied identities. I explain how the body and identities structure one’s understanding of one’s agency and the political possibilities these offer. I highlight these aspects of agency because they are essential to my effort in the following chapters to balance the undeniable evidence that women are systematically subordinated in various ways—which clearly compromises their ability to...