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Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alisa Bierria
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Abstract

How can black feminist and women of color feminist theoretical interventions help create frameworks for discerning agentic action in the context of power, oppression, and violence? In this paper, I explore the social dimension of agency and argue that intention is not just authored by the agent as a function of practical reasoning, but is also socially authored through others' discernment and translation of her action. Further, when facilitated by reasoning designed to reinforce and rationalize systems of domination, social authoring systematically distorts the intentions of some agents. Although some theorists have argued that those agents whose intentions are not recognized by others are forced to exercise a diminished agency, I contend that this account obscures agency that is practiced despite or through conditions of oppression. As an alternative, I propose that feminist of color theory that examines the structural and existential erasures of women of color maps a conceptual space to help us better discern agentic action that is practiced by those subjects whose acts are defined away from them.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2014 , pp. 129 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the participants at the October 2010 gathering at the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race; my advisors, Helen Longino and Debra Satz; the Hypatia anonymous reviewers; and my colleagues and friends, Jakeya Caruthers, Christoph Hanssmann, Xandra Ibarra, Mimi Kim, Nick Mitchell, and Emily Thuma, who provided generous encouragement and helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

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