The problem of agency: Foucault, feminism and the socially constructed subject

Some genres of contemporary political philosophy have come to rely on the language of social construction to account for what it is to be a subject. To this end, feminist scholars have engaged in a fruitful critical appropriation of Michel Foucault's work. Scholars have also repeatedly complained that Foucault offers no way to appreciate the power of oppressed subjects to freely and critically challenge hegemonic social norms. Strikingly, scholars on both sides of debates about postmodernism have been intent on demonstrating how it is possible for women to effect social transformation. The problem of agency compels them to ask: how is political agency possible for a subject who is socially constructed?; Instead of responding to the dilemma that this problem poses, this dissertation puts the question itself in question. Why, and for whom, do scholars feel that the very possibility of critical political action is in jeopardy? Where does the problem of agency come from and why is it so difficult to resolve? Treating the problem as an event within critical theory, I analyze how the dilemma implicitly posed between construction and freedom gains and retains its force.; I argue that feminist discourse creates the paradoxical figure of political agency by the way it practices construction theory. When schematized as an ontological process, "construction" appears as not as the contingent and hard-won effects of specific truth games. Instead it designates a total or single mechanism. On this latter understanding of construction what is collapsed is the freedom to be otherwise. In Foucault's genealogical inquiry, by comparison, agency is not problematic. Historical explanations spell out the contingency of the events that have made us who we are; there is no reason to suppose a priori that capacities for social transformation are jeopardized by cultural norms. After Foucault, it is a historical (and hence geo-political) question to ask in what does a subject's freedom to effect social and political transformation consist.; The problem of agency is not an inevitable quandary. Since it trains us to think a certain way about political action, it is worth considering how it may be preventing us from thinking, and doing, otherwise.