ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the three markers of agency: choice, rationality, and recognition. Stephan Fuchs advocates a constructivist rather than a realist approach to agency, which would simply assume in advance that not everyone has agency. In approaching the issue of gendered and raced agency within a social context, the first cue can be taken from the work of white feminists who have deliberately historicized and gendered their treatments of agency. Like their white feminist counterparts, black feminists are also apprehensive about the displacement of the postmodern subject, and like de Lauretis, people's apprehensions are linked to the importance they give to agency. Phillis Wheatley's experience when trying to get her first book of poetry published provides yet another instance of the dichotomy that exists between white male and black female bodily and representational agency. Like all forms of agency, black male agency is complex.
