This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 40, Winter 1999/2000.
Has something got right up your nose recently? Have you a bone to pick or an issue you want to chew over? This is a space in T&S where women (under an assumed name if necessary) are invited to bark back at the annoyances which dog radical feminists. This can be a brief yap or an extended growl, on any subject of concern to radical feminists. Here Jane Bond makes mincemeat out of academic feminists who drool about ‘women’s agency’.
Recently I heard it said that students are interested in lesbian S/M because it demonstrates women’s ‘agency’. Quite apart from other, more prurient, sources of students’ fascination, statements like this suggest a rather peculiar view of agency — and one which is becoming rather common in the rarefied world of academic feminism. Here agency is equated with ‘transgression’ — specifically sexual transgression — on the assumption that this is in some way radical or progressive. We are left to conclude that those with less extravagant sex lives have no agency, that, for example, a woman who sees her lesbianism as political but opposes S/M lacks agency (it goes without saying that heterosexual feminists, unless engaged in seriously exotic sexual practices, have so little agency they may as well be cabbages).
This odd view of agency comes from ‘sex radicals’ who want to defend practices like S/M, along with butch and femme lesbian roles, against those who question or criticise them. Those who criticise them, who dare to question where the desire to play games of dominance and submission comes from, are accused of ‘denying women’s agency’, of assuming that those who engage in S/M are victims of false consciousness. Obviously it is a profound misunderstanding of feminist critics of S/M to say that we all regard it as ‘false consciousness’ and therefore something which cannot be freely chosen. What we’re trying to do is question how such choices become possible under particular social conditions and what this might say about the social world we live in. Moreover, there are double standards at work here. Those who oppose ‘sex radicals’ are easily and frequently dismissed as sexually repressed prudes — in other words, we are the ones who have failed to liberate ourselves from the ‘false consciousness’ of an anti-sex morality. Hence those who bleat loudest about radical feminists’ supposed inattention to agency are quite happy to imply that radical feminists themselves have no agency, that we are driven by our ‘repressed’ sexuality.
Self-styled proponents of women’s sexual agency frequently see pornography and ‘sex work’ as opportunities for women to ‘express’ their sexuality. When we expose the violence entailed in prostitution and pornography, we are told that we are reducing ‘sex workers’ to mindless victims of exploitation and so denying their agency. This is the old refrain about our reducing women to victims. How many times have we heard it said that radical feminists campaigning against sexual violence and exploitation are perpetuating a form of ‘victim feminism’? Here ‘agency’ is wheeled in as yet another conceptual stick to beat us with. Women who are raped, beaten or unwillingly trafficked for prostitution are, in a very real sense, being robbed of agency. But it is not we who deprive them of agency, but the men who abuse them. Men’s agency is here being used against women — but escapes scrutiny. Is it not absurd that activists who have devoted their attention to remedying such violence, who fight for women’s self-determination, are the ones accused of denying them agency. Why is it, for example, that a woman who claims to enjoy working in the sex industries is seen as expressing her agency, while women who have been abused in these industries and work to support other women trying to escape are not? Why is it that individual acts of ‘transgression’ come under the heading of ‘agency’ while collective action and resistance do not?
A club only ‘bad girls’ can join
The idea that sexual transgression exemplifies agency comes from those who see themselves as challenging a feminist orthodoxy. This was one motive for those lesbians who embraced queer politics — as was made evident in Cherry Smyth’s book Lesbians Talk Queer Notions. Here a new generation of lesbians are depicted as more adventurous than their prudish big sisters, playing around with S/M, butch and femme roles (and doing other ‘shocking’ things such as flouting established dress codes by wearing lipstick!). In many writings around sexuality, the ‘bad girl’ image is embraced as a new form of identity. More recently, this has been explicitly linked to agency. One example I found is an article by Laura Harris and Liz Cocker tellingly entitled ‘Bad Girls: Sex, Class and Feminist Agency’, which is published in their edited collection Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls. Here is an extended quotation from their conclusion:
It is not a coincidence that many femmes self-image as bad girls; rather the prostitute as independent sexual agent offers a role model or fantasy for femmes of feminist agency… The image of the prostitute is one of sexual aggression in the guise of seductive and passive female subservience; this image could enable the femme to script the sexual scene. The fantasy of a prostitute is a woman who consciously manipulates the economics of heterosexuality and, in doing so, establishes control over her status as a sexual object. In this way, femme bad girl role-modelling is a strong expression of a feminist consciousness that allows women to break down the virgin/whore dichotomy, among others, and produce female roles for their own transgressive and pleasurable use. (p101)
This quote has it all — bad girls, transgression and agency, all linked to the image of the prostitute and given a ‘right-on’ gloss in the body of the article by suggesting that this is a working class image that only stuck-up middle-class feminists are likely to object to! While the dangers prostitutes face in their work are mentioned, these are made to seem exciting, adventurous and glamorous. True, it is a ‘fantasy’ of prostitution that is being talked of here, but it has the effect of making all of its less appealing aspects disappear from view. The message seems to be: come on girls, let’s have fun by being as tarty as we can. This hardly seems to be likely to rock patriarchy’s boat.
The abuse of ‘agency’
The idea of agency is an important one in feminism since agency is what makes human action possible and is therefore a pre-condition for any form of resistance to patriarchal structures and practices. Some of the ways in which the word ‘agency’ is currently being played with, however, are decidedly idiosyncratic. Within debates on sexuality, the term is, at best, used in a very limited sense and, at worst, misused. There are two false assumptions evident here:
1. Agency is expressed only through ‘transgression’ (especially sexual transgression) which is then equated with being ‘progressive’. Hence anything sexually ‘naughty’, whatever its political consequences (indeed whether or not it has any) is a good thing because it breaks the rules and flouts social convention. Thus agency is seen as an act of defiance — yet it can sometimes be an empty gesture and at other times simply recycle male fantasies of available women — as in the ‘bad girls’ syndrome.
2. In these contexts, agency is seen always as an individual phenomenon, not a collective one. Even more sophisticated theorists can fall into this trap. The well-known feminist theorist, Judith Butler, has a great deal to say about agency played out through ‘queer’ transgressive and subversive acts. In her book Bodies that Matter, for example, she suggests that ‘queerness might be understood … as a specific reworking of abjection into political agency’ (p21). It is not clear here whether she means individual or collective agency; most of her examples here and in her earlier book, Gender Trouble, are of individual ‘subversive’ acts. Even when she steps outside the realm of sexuality, or sexual politics more generally, she still seems to privilege individual rebellion. In Excitable Speech, she uses the case of Rosa Parks to demonstrate the ways in which conventions can be overturned by claiming an authority which has been denied to the oppressed. She criticises the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu for being too deterministic, for holding an overly static view of the social and linguistic order, for failing to recognise the ‘possibility of social transformation’. Here she is talking about large scale change, but chooses an individual act to exemplify the possibility:
When Rosa Parks sat in front of the bus she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy. (p147)
There is no doubt that Rosa Parks’ courageous act did demonstrate agency and that it had real political effects. The reasons why Butler’s account disturbs me is that she cites this as one isolated example in a general theoretical argument, ignoring the fact that the ‘insurrectionary process’ she refers to (the Civil Rights Movement), involved collective action and was effective for precisely that reason. Had this collective action not occurred, Rosa Parks’ bravery would have had little lasting effect. Moreover, collective action also entails agency — and many other involved in the struggle against institutionalised racism in the US South also displayed exemplary courage. It follows from what I have said that agency is not only about transgression, nor is it only evident in individual acts. Moreover, it is not to be confused with mere ‘choice’ nor is it the same thing as ‘free will’. So what does it mean?
What is agency?
The term ‘agency’ has been around a long time in the social sciences. Agency is the human capacity to act autonomously and it is based on the assumption that we are reflexive creatures (we reflect on ourselves and on the world around us), that we thus endow the world with meaning. Importantly, it is because we can do this that we can act collectively — we can figure out where we fit into a social scenario and how to act within it, we can imagine how things look from others’ points of view and therefore take them into account — as people we can do things with or people who we wish to oppose or challenge. Agency makes social life possible; without it we would be unable to co-operate with others (unless we imagine human beings as programmed robots). It also makes collective and political action possible.
Agency is not the exercise of individualistic free will, because we are always taking others into account in some way and because the meanings we mobilise when making sense of the world come from that social world itself. Also we act within the constraints of a world which exists outside us (what social scientists refer to as the agency-structure tension). As feminists we recognise that social structures — patriarchal, capitalist, racist, etc. — limit us in a variety of ways, but we also envisage the possibility of agency, of taking action within and against those structures. It is important to note that agency is expressed not only in resisting but also in conforming. A woman who accepts her lot because it looks better than the alternatives may lack choices, but she is not totally without agency. Collectively agency is expressed not only in challenging the status quo, but also in preserving it. For example, men who act in defence of patriarchal interests are expressing agency just as women are in resisting.
This brings me to the question of men’s agency, so often hidden in feminist discussions of the concept. Men’s agency is taken for granted, which may be why so many of those who identify agency in sexual transgression identify it as women behaving like men — for example, being sexually ‘assertive’. Yet there is a long tradition of feminists, and especially radical feminists, taking men’s agency seriously. We have demonstrated for example how, historically, men have acted collectively to defend their privileges against women — for instance through campaigning for and defending a ‘family wage’ and keeping women confined to low-skilled, low-wage jobs. We have demonstrated how men express agency in domestic life through keeping women dependent, demanding their right to women’s labour and sexual services and resorting to violence to keep women ‘in their place’. Yet even in some unlikely places, men’s agency is now being ignored. Often, for example, violence against women is spoken of without the male perpetrators of that violence being identified as such. It is as if the violence just happens without anyone actually doing anything, thus rendering men’s actions (and agency) invisible.
From sexual transgression to feminist political agency
The equation of agency with individual sexual transgression has something to do with the reliance on psychoanalysis in some variants of academic feminism. Psychoanalysis is supposed to offer a radical account of human subjectivity because it suggests that our gendered and sexual identities are always precarious, never entirely determined by the society and culture in which we live. But the reason for this is the unpredictable effects of the unconscious. Hence agency is confined to those unruly aspects of the unconscious which have escaped the forces of repression. It can therefore only ever be an individual phenomenon, never under conscious control. This is why agency is so often equated with transgression — yet this version of agency hardly seems to me to be agency at all.
If agency has to do with our ability to reflect upon our social world and act on the basis of that reflection, it is, above all, the outcome of consciousness. Our subjectivity and our opportunities for agency are constrained by the realities of the social world, our position within an unequal society, but this does not mean we have no agency. Agency can be expressed in deciding that it is in our immediate interests to conform as much as in deciding to kick against the traces. Often, it is true, people go about their lives doing things out of habit and without questioning much — without there being much scope for agency. But potentially, at least, the capacity to reflect is there and comes into play whenever we face something unfamiliar which shakes our taken-for-granted daily routines. And whenever we decide we have ‘had enough’ and fight back, a form of political agency comes into play. Hence a woman who decides to walk out on a violent husband or take action against sexual harassment at work is expressing at least as much agency as the lesbian sado-masochists we started with (and with more chance of ‘destabilising’ the status quo). It is precisely because we can take action on the basis of what we think of a situation that we can act collectively, and express political agency in a form which counts — in the pursuit of real changes that might make a difference to women’s lives.