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Gender, Agency, and Coercion . Edited by Sumi Madhok , Anne Phillips , and Kalpana Wilson . New York and London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013. 304 pp. $100 (hardcover).
Book Reviews
Gender, Agency, and Coercion tackles the theoretical and empirical interplay between agency and coercion by examining the successes and pitfalls of the promotion of contemporary gender equality. Women's capacity for agency has been at the core of feminist theory and feminist research. While there is general agreement in feminist studies that women have capacity for agency, the forms, boundaries, and dynamics of that agency still foster rich and necessary debates. As Sumi Madhok, Anne Phillips, and Kalpana Wilson emphasize in their introduction, "agency is now widely invoked in ways that sometimes make it synonymous with individual choice, coercion is barely addressed, and the way in which agency continues to be gendered and racialised are insufficiently appreciated" (2). The authors argue in favor of moving away from a simplistic assumption that the absence of coercion automatically indicates the presence of full capacity to exert agency, and the other way around. Individuals, namely women in this context, cannot simply be dichotomized into "choosers" or "losers," "agents" or "victims," which holds true for women and men in the global North and in the global South. While definitively shifting away from this simplistic dichotomization between agents and victims is salutary for feminist research, it raises lots of questions about how to comprehend the multifaceted relationship between gender, agency, autonomy, and coercion.
This edited volume of 13 chapters provides us...