2 results
1 - Sexuality and Capitalism
- Edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Mathew Kuefler, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge World History of Sexualities
- Published online:
- 26 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2024, pp 1-26
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- Chapter
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Summary
The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.
On Butler’s Theory of Agency
- Edited by Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek, Roel van den Oever
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- Book:
- Bodies That Still Matter
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 27 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 12 May 2021, pp 21-30
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Summary
Abstract
This essay addresses the notion of agency in Judith Butler's work. Its central claim is that her political philosophy revolves around a specific understanding of agency, even a theory of agency, which has not as yet received due attention. The first part of the essay examines two main thought traditions in which agency became an operational notion, through the lenses of intentionality and constraints, voluntarism and determinism. The second part elaborates on the centrality of the body, the social, and the power in Butler's understanding of agency, conjoining agency with performativity. The essay argues that agency in Butler exceeds freedom, autonomy, and liberation, and has a potent political meaning of its own.
Keywords: agency, body, the social, the political
Jerome Schneewind ascribes the first philosophical use of the term “agency” to Samuel Clarke's theorization of the “Power of Agency,” that the latter used identically to the meaning of “free choice.” In 1731, he described the word as “generally including the power of beginning Thought as well as Motion” (Schneewind 1998, 313). From its philosophical debut, agency bore a certain ambiguity. Is it a power and if so, of what kind? Is it the property of the action or of the actor? Is there mastery involved in possessing such a power, or are we to speak of a power relation which is more intricate and less masterful? In this essay, I will address the notion of agency in Judith Butler's work, which is, I argue, one of the key notions in her overall philosophical architectonics. What exactly does agency refer to and what does it mean to offer a “theory of agency,” as she professes to have done?
The concept of agency in itself defies its being fixed. As a notion, it leans on and intersects with action/doing, act/deed, and actor/doer. It is difficult to say whether it refers to a who or a what; to something static and circumscribed, or to a dynamic process, always in potentia. It is equally hard to determine its conceptual autonomy from action, or draw clear boundaries between agency and the (free-willing) agent or the (intentional) subject.