Rewriting the Past: Domination, Agency, and Subjectivity

• In Event: Gendered Policy in the Home and the State

Abstract

Recent feminist research has emphasized the agency of women as they negotiate power relations in their everyday lives, even within those relations that place them at a disadvantage. This move reflects the insights that interpellating women as victims can be both harmful and inaccurate, and that being a victim and being an agent are not mutually exclusive. But the agency at play in everyday heterosexual experiences is often deeply ambiguous. Acknowledging the presence of some degree of agency is no substitute for an analysis of the power relations at play. This paper explores the nature of the agency involved in women’s efforts to develop their own sexual subjectivity in contexts of heterosexual domination. It engages empirical literatures on heterosexual experiences as well as theoretical literatures on rape, domination, power, and subjectivity. These literatures highlight many examples of women interpreting their past experiences in ways that reflect agency in deeply ambiguous ways--for example, saying “it wasn’t rape because I didn’t say no.” With Linda Martín Alcoff, I see a key harm of sexual violation as its undermining the self-making capacities of the violated person, but I also argue for a more explicit distinction between agency and self-making. We cannot assume that the agency entailed in interpreting one’s past experience is a form of resistance to domination, or a form of self-making. Indeed, some forms of domination may recruit our agency (or demand our complicity) in ways that undermine our capacity for self-making.

Author

• Alexandra Kogl, University of Northern Iowa