Choosers or Losers? Feminist Ethical and Political Agency in a Plural and Unequal World

Abstract

In this chapter, I will suggest that arguments that seek to establish a feminist concept of autonomy are driven by nostalgia for a feminist revolutionary subject. This nostalgia is manifested in both sides of recurrent feminist debates between procedural and substantive models of autonomy, in which the agency of the feminist subject is defined in terms of a ‘choosers’ or ‘losers’ paradigm. It can be traced in a range of arguments in feminist ethical, legal, and political theory over the moral significance of women’s consent in relation to practices such as surrogacy, egg donation, veil wearing, and so on. In my view, however, this nostalgia should be resisted. An attachment to the idea of revolutionary subjectivity involves a questionable set of philosophical assumptions about the ‘true self’, and it makes the perspective of the ‘genuine’ agent authoritative in a way that poses problems for feminist politics, regardless of how one sees feminist agency as distributed. Moreover, it entails a commitment to feminist futures that privilege agency as a value, and therefore, I will argue, it pre-empts and confuses substantive intra-feminist engagement about feminist ideals, whilst underestimating the pluralism and power dynamics of that engagement.