From autonomy to agency: feminist perspectives on self-direction.

• Author: Abrams, Kathryn

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.

In Section Three, I consider what legal strategies might be used to highlight and facilitate these forms of agency, and what changes in traditional accounts of the legal subject may be required in order to accommodate this conception of agency.

1. AUTONOMY AND WOMEN'S LIVES

   Legal scholars often invoke a version of the liberal self when they seek to describe the paradigmatic legal subject. This self is formed prior to social interaction, is not fundamentally shaped by group membership or affiliation, and is capable of autonomous choice.(3) This account may be understood as a shorthand that serves to distinguish the liberal legal self from the subject in other forms of legal and political theory; it also mutes the differences in power or social circumstances, from which liberal legal theory tends to abstract. In the work of liberal theorists who have sought to describe the self, matters are more complicated. These theorists acknowledge that the individual has a history, is subject to the influence of various others, and is subject to obligations and commitments that can constrain his choices.(4) These entanglements, however, are not central to whom liberal theorists understand the individual to be.(5) Moreover, the empirical question whether individuals can and dc successfully extricate themselves from such influences does not appear to have been central in arriving at a conception of autonomy.(6)

   In this section, I examine descriptions of the self, capable of autonomy, that appear in works by Joel Feinberg and Gerald Dworkin. Though these accounts differ in the way they describe the effects that influences such as relational commitments or socialization have on the lives of individuals, their treatment ultimately assigns such influences a peripheral rather than a constitutive role in shaping a conception of autonomy.

   1. The Autonomous Self and Autonomous Decisionmaking

      Joel Feinberg has advanced one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive accounts of the liberal self appropriately described as "autonomous."(7) This account is perhaps best known for its description of the qualities that inhere in one who is autonomous: qualities such as moral authenticity, integrity, and distinct self-identity.(8) These qualities also provide a kind of overview of the self in whom they inhere.

      The autonomous individual or self described by Feinberg strives to maintain his rational self-direction in a world populated by impinging judgments and entangling commitments, complicated by uncertain vision and weakness of the will.(9) He works to maintain and operate consistently a moral system that is his own, i.e., one that reflects careful adjustment and internalization of available norms, is true to itself without being inattentive to the needs of others, and resists moral pressure or control by others as well as moral weakness or abdication by oneself.(10) This self is not radically disconnected from social influence or free of relationships with or commitment to others.(11) In fact, Feinberg takes pains to recharacterize accounts that may have overstated the disconnectedness of the autonomous self.(12) In discussing the extent to which autonomous persons are self-created, Feinberg acknowledges both the social influences that help to form one's rudimentary character and the parental influences that help "implant" the potential for authenticity.(13) Similarly, Feinberg stresses that the "moral independence" that characterizes autonomy should not be read to require "an uncommitted person, maximally independent of the demands of others."(14) He continues, "we should conceive of de facto autonomy in such a way that it is not diminished by voluntary commitments, at least below a reasonable threshold."(15)

      In important ways, though, these provisos form the exceptions rather than the rule. They create the fine detailing on a portrait of the self that is marked by strong boundaries that are theoretically possible to maintain against the claims and incursion of others. Of the dozen or so characteristics that distinguish the autonomous individual, most highlight forms of self-directedness and distinguish them from the condition of being subject to the influence of, or confined within relationships to, others.(16) Of the characteristic of authenticity, for example, Feinberg explains that the autonomous person "is not merely the mouthpiece of other persons or forces. Rather, his tastes, opinions, ideals, goals, values, and preferences are all authentically his."(17) Of the characteristic of distinct self-identity, Feinberg writes that the autonomous person "is not exhaustively defined by his relations to any particular other. For example, he may protest that he is not content to be known and described merely as the former husband of some movie star...."(18) This self is, in its fullest manifestations, free of externally-imposed decisionmaking.(19) It also is able to impose judicious limits on the claims that are made on its self-directed decisionmaking by others.(20)

      Finally, this self is not systematically confined by differentials in power or circumstance that can shape internal processes of judgment.(21) In one passage, Feinberg explains how luck may play a role in the capacity for self-government: "I do not govern myself if you overpower me by brute force and wrongfully impose your will on mine, or if illness throws me into a febrile stupor, delirium, or coma, or if poverty reduces me to abject dependence on the assistance of others."(22) It is worth noting, however, that such luck confines more by limiting external opportunities than by shaping internal perceptions. It also seems closer to the random lot of individuals than to a predictable outcome of particular group membership. Perhaps more importantly, circumstantial "luck" affects few in a prohibitive way, and is less determinative in its impact than excellence of character...