Youth cultures, activism and agency: revisiting feminist debates

Abstract

Following the invitation issued by the London Feminist Salon Collective in the pages of Gender and Education, this paper offers further theoretical suggestions for understanding agency. Based on an ethnographic study with young people engaged in activist politics, I offer a conception of agency that is at its core relational. I build this theoretical contribution upon a lineage of feminist theorising about the nature of agency, which began in debates about poststructuralism/postmodernism but have since moved to incorporate Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociological approach. I suggest that while previous theorising has been enormously important for yielding insights into the possibilities for agency, it has not adequately accounted for the everyday means by which agency takes place. My empirical work highlights one of the modalities through which young people come to take political action – that is, through relational processes. I suggest that such an understanding about agency can further illuminate the means by which progressive and feminist goals might be reached.

Keywords:

• relational agency
• feminism
• Bourdieu
• youth cultures
• activism
• ethnography

Notes

1. It is important to distinguish here between the concept of ‘relationality’ as I am using it here, and other ways in which the term ‘relational’ has been used in feminist theory. In this case, I am using the term to indicate the centrality of inter‐personal relationships (e.g. friendships, romantic involvements), rather than using it to indicate an opposition (e.g. the ways in which masculinity and femininity are constructed in relation to each other, see for example Rodríguez et al. 2006).

2. The role of class and ‘race’ in young people's experiences of Canadian activism became much more apparent through field work than the role played by gender. Thus, although this paper draws on a feminist theoretical framework, ironically the role of gender in the forms of relational agency described below remain under‐theorised. Given previous research documenting the differences between men and women in their forms of interpersonal relationships (e.g. Gilligan 1993), the gendered aspects of relational agency would be an important avenue for future research.

3. N = 33 in this case because the response to this question emerged through semi‐structured interviews, and thus in some cases we did not cover this topic in enough detail to give me a substantial sense of parental involvement in activist work.