From Autonomy to Agency: Feminist Perspectives on Self-Direction

In this Essay, I will consider the ways that the liberal norm of autonomy has been modified--or in the terms of this symposium, "reconstructed"--by its encounters with contemporary feminist theory. It remains an open question whether the feminist influences I describe will, in fact, "reconstruct" liberal autonomy, or transform it into something else altogether. The normative goals toward which I hope to turn this exploration, however, make the "reconstructive" label attractive. As a feminist legal scholar, I have become interested in the topic of women's agency: its persistence even under circumstances of oppression, the roles it plays in facilitating resistance to oppression, and the forms it takes at the current time or might take under less oppressive circumstances. My goal is to use law to highlight and foster women's agency as part of the larger task of using law to combat women's oppression. The legal tools I employ rely on a range of liberal assumptions, including assumptions about the effects of discrimination or oppression and-the nature and formation of the self or subject. Thus, whether the liberal autonomy I will discuss becomes altered incontrovertibly by its encounters with structuralist or poststructuralist feminism, it may be reconditioned by liberal norms through its insertion into the legal system, making the reconstitutive metaphor appropriate. Autonomy is both a characteristic of a human subject and a quality that inheres in particular acts or choices. In Section One, I describe the ways in which autonomy has been discussed, first by two leading liberal theorists, Joel Feinberg and Gerald Dworkin, and second, by Diana Meyers, a liberal feminist critic of traditional liberal accounts. I argue that liberal theorists have developed their conceptions of autonomy at some distance from those attributes of human subjects, such as emotional or relational interdependence and strong gender-related socialization, that bear heavily on the lives of women. Liberal feminists such as Meyers recognize the need for a closer relationship between the conceptual and the empirical in defining autonomy, and introduce an account of gender socialization that highlights the interrelatedness of most women's lives.(1) Meyers' work, however, also retains elements of the individualist orientation of liberalism: it neglects the pervasiveness, variousness, and potential coerciveness of gender and other forms of socialization and it understates the extent to which the development and exercise of autonomy is frequently a collective enterprise rather than an individual enterprise. In the last portion of this section, I turn to a group of feminist theories that help to articulate my own view. These theories reject individualist assumptions and describe a pervasive, plural social construction of the subject, in the context of intersecting power inequalities. These latter accounts, however, do not deny the possibility of self-definition or self-direction among women or others similarly constituted. They reinterpret and resituate these attributes in the context of a distinct understanding of the formation of the subject. In this essay, I acknowledge this reinterpretation by using the term "agency" rather than "autonomy." In Section Two, I examine the features of "agency" as they have emerged in feminist accounts of women's self-determination. Like many liberal theorists, I assert that agency manifests itself in various forms of self-definition and self-direction. Like Meyers, I highlight, as agency, conduct or competencies that may not have been recognized as agency in the past.(2) However, because I understand agency to emerge in a context of group-based oppressions, I focus on examples of agency that have been obscured by liberal analysis: those aimed at resistance to subordination or oppression. Moreover, in contrast to liberal accounts, I describe such agency as emerging through collective action as well as individual self-reflection, and being directed toward cultural and political, as well as individual targets. …