Gender, Agency, and Coercion

S. Madhok, A. Phillips, K. Wilson, S. Madhok, A. Phillips, K. Wilson, Kenneth A. Loparo, Clare Hemmings

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230300323
• eBook ISBN: 9781137295613
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.

1

Introduction

Sumi Madhok, Anne Phillips, and Kalpana Wilson

For obvious enough reasons, much feminist energy has been devoted to establishing women’s capacity for agency. From at least Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, feminists have challenged perceptions of women as less capable of rationality, reflection, and responsible action than men; as requiring the guidance and protection of their betters; and as best suited for a passively domestic role. The feminist critique has often combined with arguments about women helping to sustain perceptions of their alleged lesser capacity by the poor use they make of their faculties. In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft attacked the presumption that men were rational agents while women were not.¹ But she was also scathing in her criticism of the parasitical women of the upper middle classes, whom she saw as almost priding themselves on weaknesses of mind and body and as abandoning responsibility for their lives to luxuriate in dependence on men. Many years later, Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the ways women could compound their own impotence by refusing to recognise or accept responsibility for themselves.

A free individual blames only himself for his failures, he assumes responsibility for them; but everything happens to woman through the agency of others, and therefore these others are responsible for her woes. Her mad despair spurns all remedies; it does not help to propose solutions to a woman bent on complaining: she finds none acceptable. She insists on living in her situation precisely as she does – that is, in a state of impotent rage.²

For these writers, it was not only the denial of agency but also women’s frequent collusion in this that so effectively kept women in the position of the ‘second sex’.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the denial of agency was made particularly vivid in the doctrine of coverture, which extinguished upon marriage any powers a woman previously had to own property or make contracts and dissolved them into the agency of her husband. The marriage was also thought to extinguish any capacity for independent action, to the point where a married woman could hardly be held responsible for crimes committed in her husband’s presence. As the entry for ‘Women’ in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica put it, ‘where a married woman commits a crime in company with her husband, she is generally presumed to have acted by his coercion, and so to be entitled to acquittal.’ She could not quite get away with murder – the presumption only applied to less serious crimes – but her lack of agency enabled her to escape punishment for lesser offences.

The gendering of agency no longer takes such stark form: indeed one of the themes in nearly all the essays that follow is that agency is never simply gendered but that it is always so in ways that intersect with hierarchies of class, sexuality, and race. While the lesser capacity of the ‘second sex’ remains a significant feature in some legal systems, few would now consider women per se as incapable of responsible action. Fewer still would represent them as the weak and acquiescent victims of male coercion, the unwilling accomplices of the agentic male. There is now widespread resistance to the kind of generalisation that depicts all women as followers and all men as leaders or presumes without further investigation that women are less accountable for their behaviour than men. That feminists resist this generalisation is evidenced in virtually all the essays in this collection. In one of the more absurd twists of political debate, anti-feminists also devote enormous energy to challenging simplistic generalisations about ‘women’ and ‘men’, fondly imagining that in doing so they are repudiating feminist views. In truth, few people think that we behave as we do simply because of our gender. In everyday life, we mostly acknowledge the effects of what sociologists term the relationship between structure and agency: we see that gender makes a difference to the ways people behave, without thinking that something called ‘gender’ determines what any of us will do.

In popular understanding as well as in the academic literature, it is now recognised that women as well as men can be agents and that women are rarely the passive victims of circumstance. Both recognitions are welcome, yet the precise relationship between gender, agency, and coercion remains under-theorised. Agency is now widely invoked in ways that sometimes make it synonymous with individual choice, coercion is barely addressed, and the ways in which agency continues to be gendered and racialised are insufficiently appreciated. In this collection, we bring together contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to address this complex terrain.

Two premises of the collection

We start from two important premises: first, that experiences of agency and coercion cannot be understood in a binary relationship of presence/absence, where the one is present only by virtue of the other’s absence; second, that they do not map onto a dichotomy between global North and global South, as if the North is the privileged location of agency and progress, and the South a space characterised by coercion, violence, oppression, and subjugation. It is a mistake to see agency as the antithesis of coercion, as if the measure of how much agency we have is how little coercion has been exercised. Setting it up in this way encourages us to think that people are, as in Kimberley Hutchings’ terminology, either ‘choosers’ or ‘losers’: that we are either the free agents of liberal fantasy or the oppressed victims of coercion.

When the two are presented as exclusive alternatives, identifying coercion can only mean identifying a lack of agency (thereby equating, as Kalpana Wilson notes, oppression with victimhood), while demonstrating agency can only mean showing that there is no coercion. If we can have only one or the other, then repudiating patronising images of the oppressed and powerless – a concern in most contemporary feminist writing – requires us to deny, or at least obscure, the extent to which social relations of inequality and domination continue to structure our lives. The conditions within which we exercise agency certainly matter – some circumstances are more empowering while others are more constraining – and naïve celebrations of agency hardly advance our understanding of this. Part, however, of what promotes the naïve celebrations is the presumption that one must be either an agent or oppressed. We seek here to shift the focus away from simpler oppositions of agent or victim, and towards the complex ways in which agency and coercion are entwined, often in a non-antithetical relationship. We want to think of these, not as separately constituted, or existing only in a relation of achieving/overcoming, but as connected in a dynamic continuum of simultaneity.

The collection also refuses dichotomous representations of the western subject as agentival and the non-western one as devoid of agency. This is not a move unique to this collection, for at this moment in time, simple oppositions between global North and global South are almost universally repudiated, most notably perhaps in the feminist literature, but elsewhere too. Yet more often than not, the very act of counterclaiming has the effect of invoking and reinforcing rather than disrupting that binary. In particular, when the challenge to racial, national, and cultural hierarchies takes the form of ‘discovering’ agency in unlikely locations, the very surprise attached to the discovery exposes a continued expectation of difference. When, as is often the case, the delighted gaze rests primarily on ethnic minority or non-western women, this cannot but suggest the expectation that their agency might otherwise be missing. The identification of agency then seems to perform the very hierarchy and stereotype it claims to subvert.

This is not something easy to avoid. Discourses on agency are heavily saturated with associations linking them to racialised as well as gendered hierarchies and a long history of attachment to only certain kinds of persons and actions. It is hard not to fall into similarly structured binary registers. Any analysis of agency faces these difficulties, and we do not anticipate escaping the full weight of this in all its historical and political associations. We hope, however, to be able to engineer a shift in the discourse by tying analytical and empirical discussions of agency more firmly to the architecture of actually existing inequality.

The turn to agency

Within academic, activist, and policy circles alike, attention has shifted to persons as agents rather than victims, and the search for agency has reached almost epidemic proportions. We have no quarrel with the desire to bury discourses of victimhood, and a number of essays in the collection – most notably that by Marsha Henry – continue the important work of dislodging (mis)representations of women as passive recipients of institutional power, challenging the way agency is withheld from those deemed, by virtue of their class, race, or culture, as less capable of exercising it. Attention has been rightly directed at the creative ways in which the seemingly powerless nonetheless exercise their agency and the possibilities for resistance and subversion that exist in the most unfavourable circumstances. To the extent, however, that contemporary work focuses on attributions of this agency, demonstrating that women do, after all, have it, or identifying its exercise in unexpected places and ways, it works within the very parameters it seeks to displace. As Clare Hemmings and Amal Treacher Kabesh argue, we need to ask not so much who has agency but what work agency does. How might our uses of the concept ‘extend the very oppositions and exclusions (victim/agent; margin/centre; self/other; active/passive; recognised/unrecognised) that they purport to ameliorate’? (p. 29). Instead of re-articulating a variant of the freedom/choice framework so as to claim recognition as agent for those previously denied, Hemmings and Kabesh advocate ‘an account of feminist agency as a mode of reflection’, a ‘way of taking responsibility for one’s location in the world, a location that is not only or fully knowable by the subject’.

So why this ‘turn towards agency’? A number of the contributors track the development to the rise of neoliberal projects and visions and the accompanying discourses of economic and personal re-constitution. Kalpana Wilson, for example, points to the increasingly individualist and market-oriented prescriptions in the development literature and explores the troubling resonance with feminist reclaimings of women’s agency. In neoliberal discourses and practices of development, the turn to agency has resulted in discernible shifts in the way poor women are represented in gender and development strategies: accompanying the now familiar descriptions of their poverty, needs, and problems is a shift in who is responsible for these. Reports of women exercising their agential capacities and engaging in the ‘successful management’ of the debilitating conditions of their poverty-stricken lives now fill the institutional columns of development agencies.³ The ‘third world woman’, removed, it seems, from structural inequalities, detached from any politics of collective struggle, engaged in only individualised strategies of self-improvement, transformation, and empowerment, then emerges as the perverse counter to feminist critiques that had focused on the colonising moves that had previously denied her a hearing.

Mary Evans, Rosalind Gill and Ngaire Donaghue, and Sadie Wearing pursue related arguments in their analyses of contemporary political pronouncements and developments in popular culture, noting what Gill and Donaghue call the ‘striking parallels’ between neoliberal and post-feminist sensibility in parts of the ‘developed’ West. We live our lives in a period marked by economic, political, and cultural inequalities; are ever more intimately touched by these; and are implicated, willingly or not, in a range of coercive practices. Yet at this very moment, we are told that we enjoy unprecedented levels of freedom, are offered a disorienting array of choices, and assured protection by a list of individual rights that is longer than ever before. We are constantly interpellated, that is, as choosing subjects. The elevation of this ‘choosing individual’, and the pursuit of personal empowerment through practices of consumption and accumulation, has different implications in different parts of the world and in the context of complex relationships of structural inequality between them. But wherever we are, it is arguably the logic of neoliberal governmentality – with its commitment to reshaping subjectivities, governance, and politics – that undergirds these different outcomes.

Agency or autonomy?

Despite a number of shared premises and concerns, the essays in this collection vary both in theoretical frameworks and political conclusions. One exemplification of the diversity is that, in some of the essays, agency appears almost interchangeably with autonomy, while in others, the language of agency alone is employed. This difference in terminology is also evident in the broader literature and relates in part to disciplinary traditions and trajectories. Those writing within political theory and philosophy, for example, are more likely to engage with notions of autonomy, while those working within social or cultural theory are more likely to talk of agency. But there is also a widespread perception of ‘autonomy’ as the more normatively loaded term, carrying the heavier weight of positive ascription and more intimately linked than ‘agency’ to liberal (and neoliberal) ideals of self-government and self-direction. To say that someone is autonomous suggests that she enjoys a substantial degree of control over her life and desires. It seems, moreover, to present this as an undoubted good. To say she has agency – which, in its dictionary definition, is not much more than the capacity to act – sounds more normatively neutral and much less demanding in what it claims about the ability to perceive one’s life and life’s plans as one’s own.

Reservations about autonomy as an overly normative construct typically reflect worries about the ideal of personhood it encourages and upholds. When autonomous persons are conceived as self-legislating and self-authoring, this represents them as outside regimes of power and capable of removing themselves from power relations. This not only ignores the social contexts within which politics and ethical life assume meaning but also refuses to acknowledge the impact of global structures of power and the asymmetric relations they trigger. In promoting as a universal ideal the already constituted, self-reliant, hyper-individualist, notions of autonomy also mistake their own tethering to particular locations and epochs and fail to recognise the divide and rule history that has variously conferred or denied the status of autonomous subject to different groups of people.⁴ In these arguments, the autonomous subject is not only raced, classed, and gendered but is also conceptually ethnocentric. It has not travelled well and its deployment in the political and philosophical literature leads to serious misdescriptions and misrecognition of the gendered sociality of non-western contexts.

Agency looks, at first glance, less vulnerable to this critique, an emptier kind of notion that does not commit itself in such determined fashion to a specific ideal of selfhood. But the contrast is hard to sustain, for agency too is pretty heavily vested with positive qualities and has also been deployed to separate out those who enjoy it from those who cannot. As Saba Mahmood has argued, some of the feminist literature makes it almost co-terminous with liberation, as if people only evidence their capacity for agency when resisting, subverting, or in some way taking issue with patriarchal power.⁵ It then becomes difficult to separate out attributions of agency from comforting beliefs about the agents being en route to some desirable goal. Kimberley Hutchings argues that notions of both agency and autonomy betray a nostalgia for a feminist revolutionary subject. If this is so, it is less apparent that we can make hermetic distinctions between the heavily laden autonomy and the lighter notion of agency. If there is, moreover, what Sumi Madhok describes as an ‘action bias’ in both agency and autonomy, this problematically links both to negative freedom and a coercive politics of transformation. Given the overlaps, it seems likely that authors will continue to move relatively seamlessly between the two.

Whether framed as autonomy or as agency, we are still left with the relationship to individualism and choice. Feminist critiques of ‘Marlborough man’ ideals of the autonomous individual promised to detach autonomy/agency both from attributions of ultimate responsibility (‘it was your choice, so you are to blame’) and from uncritical celebrations of the individual against the rest of the world. But sustaining that critique has proved difficult, partly because of the ambivalent relationship between feminism, autonomy, and choice. It remains a primary preoccupation to urge women to strive for their independence, understood both as freedom from patriarchal oppression and freedom to realise one’s own capacities and goals. In many formulations, these aspirations still seem to privilege the hyper-individualist liberal subject. Even in explicitly criticizing liberal ideals of autonomy and models of selfhood, feminist philosophers often find these same ideals underpinning their own.

The important development in agency thinking here – signalled in a number of the es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Choosers or Losers? Feminist Ethical and Political Agency in a Plural and Unequal World
• 3. The Feminist Subject of Agency: Recognition and Affect in Encounters with ‘the Other’
• 4. The Meaning of Agency
• 5. The Unbearable Lightness of Theory: Political Ontology and Social Weightlessness in Mouffe’s Radical Democracy
• 6. Agency as ‘Smart Economics’: Neoliberalism, Gender and Development
• 7. Action, Agency, Coercion: Reformatting Agency for Oppressive Contexts
• 8. Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping Missions: Problematising Current Responses
• 9. Does the Body Make a Difference?
• 10. Rejecting the Choice Paradigm: Rethinking the Ethical Framework in Prostitution and Egg Sale Debates
• 11. Compensating Egg Donors
• 12. Reproblematising Relations of Agency and Coercion: Surrogacy
• 13. Representing Agency and Coercion: Feminist Readings and Postfeminist Media Fictions
• 14. As if Postfeminism Had Come True: The Turn to Agency in Cultural Studies of ‘Sexualisation’
• 15. Afterword
• Index