Seeking Agency in the Interstices of Power: Theory grounded in the Subject of Domestic Violence

How can subjects who are structurally considered as being disempowered exercise agency in the face of power? My focus theoretically and empirically is on the gendered subject – woman. Liberalism has had heated debates about what constitutes freedom, but there has been an overall consensus that the freedom of the liberal individual cannot be complete without a notion of agency attached to this individual. The meaning of the concept of agency has remained elusive. But a certain understanding of agency of individuals is conceptualized as something which is constrained by power exercised by individuals and structures. I investigate this question by first considering the compatibilism debate and the question of normative conceptualization of agency by looking at the work of philosophers like Bilgrami and Taylor to attempt to delineate how we can understand ourselves as agents performing actions which are free as different from actions which are coerced. Bilgrami drawing on Strawson’s work explains agency as constitutive of the reactive attitudes towards actions of individuals, while Taylor anchors agency in self evaluation by the individual. Both these arguments rest on an assumption of background values which I contend can be explained better by examining the structure-agency debate. I look at the debate between Althusser and Thompson as representative of the overall structure-agency debate. I use this as a theoretical entry point into the dialogue between liberal, existential, radical and poststructuralist feminists on the question of agency of the structurally disempowered gendered subject. Through an examination of these debates, I develop a practical theory of feminist agency by drawing mainly from Diana Tietjens Meyers’s concept of autonomy competency and Marilyn Friedman’s content-neutral theory of autonomy, to understand agency as a procedural issue. The development of the practical concept of feminist agency is also informed by responses of domestic violence survivors in India (based on primary field work) as case studies of the exercise of the agency by women subjected to situations of power which are overconsuming. I conclude by stating that agency can be understood as a procedure of reflection with a dual process of self and social evaluation which constitutes this faculty which actors possess. This understanding can be used further to examine the agency of actors in differential situations of power either latent or manifest.