Non-Ideal Agency
My projects on Audre Lorde and sexual agency each feed into a more expansive research program to theorize agency under unjustly constrained social conditions. Philosophers often struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency for those targeted by oppression, in part because prevalent accounts of moral, epistemic, political, and personal agency tend to be abstract and incompatible with one another. My research seeks to disambiguate these forms of agency and examine them as they actually appear in the lives of people targeted by oppression. My hypothesis is that effective political resistance depends on the cultivation of a variety of forms of oppositional agency—among people facing oppression as well as their allies.
Photo © Frank Ward, used by permission.
Publications on Non-Ideal Agency
“Theorizing Non-Ideal Agency”
for Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, ed. Hilkje C. Hänel and Johanna Müller (Routledge, forthcoming 2024)
This chapter untangles a dilemma for theorists of agency under oppression. On the one hand, emphasizing constraints an oppressive society enforces on agency can produce paternalistic theories that “deny agency” for oppressed subjects. On the other, underestimating the effects of oppression on agency can obscure important harms oppression causes, such as ways it unjustly limits a person's possibilities. This chapter traces this dilemma to a preoccupation with ascribing agency, which produces problematic descriptive and political effects for theorizing agency under oppression: an asymmetry problem and a disenfranchisement problem. Finally, the chapter proposes that the agency dilemma might be ameliorated if theorists scrutinize more closely how moral, epistemic, and political agency interact and overlap in life under oppression.
“Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics”
Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, no. 4 (2020): 463–482
This article describes Lorde’s “oppositional agency” as a capacity for action—personal and political—that follows from her sense of her multiple identities and the epistemic resources she develops for examining the hostility of the world around her. Lorde’s agential praxis pursues preservation of the many aspects of her identity (black, woman, mother, etc.), and it rests on her success in valorizing the information she gets from her feelings and elevating it to knowledge that can guide her actions. Her political efficacy depends on her ability to communicate that knowledge, a role she ascribes to poetry in her life.