Laura Martin

What is the nature of agency under oppressive social conditions? Oppressive structures inhibit our agency in ways to which we are often blind, yet social movements show that as agents we can enact emancipatory change. My dissertation articulates a social ontology to account for this conflict between structure and agency. I analyze structures in terms of practices built around implicit values, which require agents to occupy valued or denigrated statuses. Agents can participate in practices without being aware of their oppressive frames, thereby unwittingly perpetuating oppression. Making these frameworks explicit can lead to social change but, as oppressive practices shape agents’ senses of value and status, practices themselves must also change.

Feminists debate whether women can autonomously embrace their own subordination. Some argue that it is the process of identifying with desires and values that matters; others, that it is the content of the desires and values that matters. In this paper, I introduce a novel class of cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, and draw on these cases to develop an expressivist view of women’s autonomy. On this view, agents must embody desires and values in the social world if they are to achieve self-understanding, such that the social world mediates the relation-to-self. Oppressive meanings and norms can channel this expressive activity in ways that violate women’s physical integrity and involve self-abnegation that is incompatible with autonomy.