Sustaining Life: Rethinking Modes of Agency in Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ambivalence in the meaning and attribution of agency, and the role it plays in understanding vulnerability as a concept and condition that is specific to individual bodies. This involves examining agency as an embodied resource that vulnerability might draw upon when bodies endure conditions of uncertainty, detention and exile. The documenting of a partial narrative of an individual who set his body on fire provides an analytic lens through which to investigate the complexity and contextual specificities of vulnerability. The article argues that working with a single modality of agency resulting from a certain slippage between meanings of agency, political agency and resistance, might result in foreclosing alternative forms of living and sustaining lives. Agency is considered more expansively as a capacity for action that is necessarily mediated through situated capabilities, struggles and desires. The article argues for the need to analyse concepts held within a ‘grammar of vulnerability’ in order to discuss modalities of agency that capture both activities of resistance, but also other, often unseen, investments in sensory, affective and physical labours required for everyday activities in which individuals sustain their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• agency
• endurance
• migration
• resistance
• self-immolation

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge Leorsin Seemanpillai, his family, and those close to them. My thanks to Yasmin Gunaratnam and Carolyn Pedwell for their support during my doctoral research, on which this article draws. I’m also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tiffany Page is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Tiffany's interdisciplinary research explores vulnerability, gender inequalities and institutional violence. Tiffany Page completed this article while a participant in the AFS Mentoring Programme for New Academic Writers.

Notes

1 The case of Leorsin Seemanpillai was one of two accounts of individuals who set fire to their own bodies that was included in my PhD research.

2 The source of these statistics on the number of asylum seekers and the lack of processing of claims, see Balogh (2014).

3 Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection Fact Sheet on Safe Haven Enterprise Visas, July 2015. Accessed February 6, 2018. http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Fact-Sheet-Safe-Haven-Enterprise-visas.pdf

4 Biggs explains his rationale, that “Refugees who kill themselves after being refused asylum, for example, usually act on an individual—albeit political—grievance, without any declared intent to advance a collective cause. Therefore, these cases are excluded” (2005, 176).

5 Feminist and postcolonial scholars discussing other gendered and so-called ‘harmful cultural practices’ have made a similar point, for example, on female genital mutilation (FGM) in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Critical work on ‘dowry deaths’ in India (often by burning) has also been addressed by authors such as Uma Narayan (1997).

6 See Shoshana Felman’s (2003) work on radical negativity where Felman contends that the negative suggests a productive scandal in proposing the non-opposition of terms and as such is irreducible to the ‘symmetrical … contrary of the “positive,”’ within a normative system (101). For Felman negativity is without positive reference, and escapes the assumption of a ‘negative/positive alternative’ (104).