Agency?

I love avoiding conversations around agency because I find myself heading straight for an existential crisis every time I do it. Agency implies choice free of coercion which (we can probably all agree on) does not truly exist. Regardless of what one might think they are doing out of their own agency, their actions are manipulated and moulded by societal ideologies and norms. So now that action is not a choice, but made to seem as though it was an act of agency. Agency is nothing more than an illusion. Or at least this is what I used to believe agency to be. Small-scale agency could not exist because if someone is faced with limited options, then there really is not any agency for them in the fort place.

After reading the Gavey piece the talking about agency a little more inside and outside of class, I am beginning to consider agency in a different light. I think agency is fluid in that what can be considered an act of agency can be retrospectively not agency at all, or visa versa. This makes pin-pointing agency difficult because it is always changing. I think it is important to acknowledge individual available choices as well as the limitations around those choices and understand that agency is not an all or nothing concept.

This ties into the spectrum of agency we talked about on Wednesday’s class. I think to recognize one’s own agency is important at any location across the spectrum, and I think that perhaps that location can change from situation to situation. By recognizing agency in all of its magnitudes, I think we can begin to recognize how political actions can be manifested in even the smallest acts of agency. I have been playing with the idea that any act of agency is a political act in that it has the potential to be resistant, and I think resistance in inherently political. Perhaps this is a too simplistic view of agency, but I feel like it provides all people with the ability to be empowered.