Agency is something that comes up frequently in feminist studies and women’s studies. Agency is sometimes thought of as the will and self determination within the construction of the “I”, or the collective will and self determination of the many “I’s”, as in a coalition. Butler[i] notes that “the enabling conditions for an assertion of “I” are provided by the structure of signification. The rules that regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun can circulate” (p. 196).
With the establishment of the “I” or “I’s”, the “Other” or “Other’s” is/are established. “The language of appropriation, instrumentality, and distanciation… pits the “I” against the “Other” and, once that separation is effected creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of that Other” (Butler, p. 197).
In feminist practices these “I’s” at times attempt to formulate universalistic claims about “Woman”, “Women”, and even coalitions. Butler suggests “the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of “Women” are constructed” (p. 19). Additionally, although Butler claims that coalitional politics “is not to be underestimated…the very form of coalition, of an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions, cannot be figured in advance” (p. 20). Dialogic practices that work towards these universalistic claims about women, or even coalitions, do “risk relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity”” (Butler, p. 20). Mani[ii] (1990), adds “the example of women’s agency is a particularly good instance of the dilemmas confronted in simultaneously attempting to speak within different historical moments and to discrepant audiences” (p. 402).
Thus, “the shift from an epistemological account of identity to one which locates the problematic within practices of signification permits an analysis that takes the epistemological mode itself as one possible and contingent signifying practice. Further, the question of agency is reformulated as a question of how signification and resignification work. In other words, what is signified as an identity is not signified at a given point in time after which it is simply there as an inert piece of entitative language” (Butler, p. 198).
Further, “indeed to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life” (Butler, p. 198).
““Agency”, then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on …repetition If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e. new possibilities of gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchal binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (Butler, p. 199).
As such, “the critical task is…to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them” (Butler, p. 201).
Finally, “the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms though which identity is articulated. This kind of critique brings into question the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated” (Butler, p. 203).
[i] Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge.
Reception, pp. 390- 403. From McCann, C. R., & Kim, S-k. (Eds). (2010). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.
