In both previously discussed descriptions of agency, however, the constraints on agentive subjects are only vaguely recognized. For Ahearn, one’s capacity to act is mitigated through “sociocultural mediation,” revealing the importance of the social and cultural world in how much capacity is afforded a subject seeking to exert agency through language. For Duranti, the focus remains not on the limitations surrounding agency, but rather on one’s control over action, which must exert some influence on the world around a subject while also recognizing the role of others’ interpretation of their actions. The focus for both scholars still remains on action, despite a broad acknowledgement of internal and external limitations that must be explored for agency to be fully understood.
Building upon both past and current theories of agency, this dissertation explores a dialectic between agents and constraints on agency through a concept that I term constrained agency and define as follows:
The agentive manipulation of and negotiation around constraints, whether self-imposed or external, that limit the capacity of a subject or group of subjects to act.
Constrained agency affords an analysis that, rather than focusing only on the agency or lack of agency of a particular individual or group of individuals, theorizes that the individual, social, and interactional constraints faced in everyday life are central to the negotiations that take place both socially and linguistically as social agents work to take action. It is important to recognize that agency is always subject to constraints, as agents are always acting within a social, cultural, and/or institutional structure that guides their capacity to act. Indeed, Ahearn’s original definition of agency as “socioculturally mediated” (Ahearn 2001:112) acknowledges that there are always social and cultural factors that influence one’s agentive capacity. With this in mind, however, I aim to focus primariy not on a particular actor or action, but instead on the constraints faced by that actor, and the often multi-faceted and complicated nature of both the constraints themselves and the manipulation and negotiation that individuals undertake in their employment of agency around such constraints. In doing so, the analysis presented in this dissertation seeks to construct a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of what agency is and how it can be theorized.
Constrained agency has been mentioned sporadically in other fields, though not as a particular type of agency to be used in constructing an analysis. Rather, it is used simply in titles as a passing description for various topics such as the geographies of labor (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011) or theological anthropology’s understandings of constraints on freedom and power within trauma theory and feminist theory (Beste 2007).
In the case of constraints on labour agency (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011), the analysis and the focus is vastly distinct from the understanding of constraints on agency investigated in this dissertation. Coe and Jordhus-Lier’s reference to constrained agency, which appears in the title of their article on geographies of agency, is never actually mentioned in the text of the article itself. The closest is an argument in which they state that “re-embedding the agency of labour does not necessarily lead us to a more constrained understanding of labour agency” (2011:226) in a broader discussion of geographies of labor, not about agency in ways typically employed in linguistic anthropology and related fields.
Beste, meanwhile, discusses constraints on agency in a chapter of her book God and the Victim entitled “The Fragmented Self and Constrained Agency” (Beste 2007:59-83), discussing philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler’s description and critique of agency wherein agency is not taken “for granted as an a priori guarantee or existential that is constitutive of human life” (2007:64). Beste, while using “constrained agency” as part of a chapter title which focuses on critiques of agency and its seeming a priori nature, never uses the term as a definition, and indeed throughout the chapter, also never repeats the phrase “constrained agency” at all. Instead, she focuses on theoretical views of agency as not being given inherently, creating a theological argument of the limitations of claiming an essentialized “self” as existing prior to a search for freedom.
Beste’s search for an understanding of agency and freedom among trauma victims parallels some of the theoretical claims made in this dissertation with a similar argument, namely that agency should not be seen as a priori but rather as constructed around various struggles faced by individuals within the structures of a system of politics, power, and other external constraints. At the same time, however, this dissertation’s focus on the discursive
constructions that arise as a result of particular social and individual constraints provides a more detailed focus on constraints, and the ability of agents to continue to act around and despite them, at times using them as a tool to construct and create levels of agency that are claimed for themselves in restrictive and sometimes hostile external environments.
The analysis presented in the chapters that follow aims to contribute to the theorization of agency by examining and focusing on the constraints on agency seen through the linguistic negotiation of identity and sexuality among two very different groups of men who live a heterosexual lifestyle while simultaneously acknowledging either an attraction toward or desires for other men. For these men, identity, attraction, desire, and sexual action do not neatly align with the ideological expectations made through a heteronormative assumption that having a male identity assumes a masculine presentation and a female object of interest. Instead, it reveals the ways in which a subject’s identity, desires, fantasies, and possible sexual actions can exist in separate spheres and how constraints on each of these are manipulated, negotiated, explored, and defined to construct levels of agency. These constructions are crucially subject to complex individual, social, cultural, and institutional barriers that often work together, leading to a nuanced and complicated sexuality and identity presentation, as demonstrated in my analysis of the individuals discussed in the chapters to follow.