This document summarizes an article about exploring women's agency through a social and cultural lens. It discusses how agency can vary across contexts and situations. The author examines how women internalize beauty standards and participate in practices that seem against their interests, like cosmetic surgery. Anthropological views are presented that define agency as the ability to act within sociocultural norms through internalizing images. The findings section notes the importance of examining decisions in their historical and cultural context rather than focusing on individual traits. The conclusion explores the limits of agency and self-knowledge, and how humans are subjected to social forces beyond their control.

1. Agency
Summary of article written by – Katherine Frank
Paper 3
Social Culture Perspective for Development
Presented by:
Binesh Roy (Ph.D. Scholar)
27th May 2018

2. About the Author
• Katherine Frank is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D.
Duke University, 1999), sex researcher, and writer. She
has written books and articles on strip clubs,
sexuality, gender, marriage and monogamy,
feminism.
• Her most recent book are- Plays Well in Groups, G-
Strings & Sympathy and coeditor of Flesh for Fantasy
• Frank is an affiliate research faculty member of the
Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas, and faculty associate at The College of the
Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME.
• She spent six years working as a stripper while
researching a book about strip clubs.

3. Introduction - Why is this article written:
• How agency is emergent in particular situations, places, and times?
• How conceptions of agency may vary in different social and cultural contexts
along with notions of personhood and causality?
• How is it that women ‘choose’ surgical procedure that promises to deliver an
appearance closer to the cultural ideal of female beauty?
• How can one respect, validate and affirm women’s individual experiences,
choices, and differences while simultaneously challenging gendered inequalities
and systems of power that situate some groups of people as more in need of
surgical ‘fixes’ than others?
• Why do women willingly participate in systems that may appear to be against
their best interests?
• How another theorist approaches the question of women’s agency in a very
different ethnographic context and with regard to different bodily practices

4. Introduction - Why is this article written:
• How can women willingly participate in systems that appear to work against their
interests of self-realization and freedom?
• How power is exercised on women’s bodies even as they exercise it themselves?
• How and why women come to understand themselves as both subjects and
objects of the designing process, relies on an undertheorized process of
‘internalization’?
• How women come to discipline themselves in accordance with disciplinary
beauty norms?
• How the women’s relationships with husbands, children, and religious teachers
influence their interpretations of and deployment of traditional practices and
discourses?
• ……… …… ……….. ……………..

5. Agency – meaning
From - Wikipedia
• Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. The capacity to
act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the
choice to act, and moral agency is therefore a distinct concept.
• Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or
purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action).
• An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity
and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing.
• In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance
over their own behavior.

6. Anthropologist Views
• Within feminist theory, the question of women’s agency in the context of ‘patriarchy’,
‘male domination’, ‘power’, or ‘culture’ has long been one of the utmost importance
and continues to generate debate
• Anthropologist Laura Ahearn provides a provisional definition of the concept of agency
as ‘the socio culturally mediated capacity to act’,
• Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky notes that ‘agents or subjects that can act
freely’ moral agents or moral subjects – ‘a moral agent is someone whose actions can
be evaluated according to moral criteria, that is, whose deeds can be vicious or
virtuous, praiseworthy or blame worthy’.
• Gagne and McGaughey conceptualize agency as something which individuals exercise
within cultural confines through a process of internalizing cultural norms and images.

7. Findings
• (1st para - page 287 ) – a concern that has driven feminist explorations of the
cultural, social, and structural factors involved not just in decisions to undergo
cosmetic surgery but in the multiple practices that seem to bolster networks of
male power and the ideologies and discourses that support these networks
rather than challenging, resisting, revising, or subverting them.
• A focus on the cultural and historical context in which such decisions occur, and
on the discursive production of the desire for bodily alteration, is thus an
important challenge to work that focuses on individual personality traits as
determining factors for seeking surgical options.

8. Conclusion
• To explore the limits to agency and to self-knowledge (that is, to avoid a simple
conflation of agency and ‘free will’); to explore the ways that humans are indeed
‘subjected’ to preexisting understandings and social positionings that are effects of
power and knowledge.
• Agency remained mostly unquestioned until the nineteenth century, when philosophers
began arguing that the choices humans make are dictated by forces beyond their
control. For example, Karl Marx argued that in modern society, people were controlled
by the ideologies of the bourgeoisie.
• How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another
issue and still under discussion.
• Individual agency is when a person acts on his/her own behalf, whereas proxy agency
is when an individual acts on behalf of someone else (such as an employer). Collective
agency occurs when people act together, such as a social movement (Hewson’s M.
2010)

9. Thank you