Abstract
This paper details the ways that gender structures our senses of agency on an enactive framework. While it is common to discuss how gender influences higher, narrative levels of cognition, as with the formulation of goals and in considerations about our identities, it is less clear how gender structures our more immediate, embodied processes, such as the minimal sense of agency. While enactivists often acknowledge that gender and other aspects of our socio-cultural situatedness shape our cognitive processes, there is little work on how this shaping takes place. In order to provide such an account, I will first look at the minimal and narrative senses of agency (Gallagher in New Ideas in Psychology, 30(1), 15–31, 2012), a distinction that draws from work on minimal and narrative selves (Zahavi 2010). Next I will explain the influence of the narrative sense of agency on the minimal sense of agency through work on intention-formation (Pacherie in Psyche, 13(1), 1–30, 2007). After a discussion of the role of gender in the narrative sense of agency, I’ll expand on work by Haslanger (2012) and Young (1990) to offer three ways in which gender influences the minimal sense of agency, showing the effect that gender has on how we perceive our possibilities for interaction in a phenomenologically immediate, pre-reflective manner.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It seems prudent to note that this is not always the case. There is plenty of work on pathologies and traumas related to agency, selfhood, and a sense of ownership (for example, see Ataria 2015; Gallagher 2015; Gallagher & Trigg 2016). Still, most cases involve interruptions in agency and ownership, not a complete lack. Therefore, much of what will be developed later about the influence of gender will still be applicable.
Pacherie (2007) describes this in a similar fashion, noting that, in her parlance, the long-term sense of agency “may be thought to include both a sense of oneself as an agent apart from any particular action, i.e. a sense of one’s capacity for action over time, and a form of self-narrative where one’s past actions and projected future actions are given a general coherence and unified through a set of overarching goals, motivations, projects and general lines of conduct” (p. 6).
I thank [Patrick McGivern] and [Rebecca Harrison] for insight on linking M-intentions and attention.
Again, it should be stressed that there is not a particular way in which these constraints affect women. Some, for example, may be due to compulsory gender maintenance, while others may be due to the kinds of dangers experienced in maintaining gender, especially for trans women, as discussed by Overall (2012) (note that her use of ‘constraint’ differs from that used here). There are also lived constraints that are more specific to interactions with other persons due to race (Fanon 1991), orientation, class, and other aspects of a person’s social identity or situation.
References
Alcoff, L. M. (2006). Visible identities: Race, gender, and the self. New York: Oxford University Press.
Antony, L. M. (2016). Bias: Friend or foe? In M. Brownstein & J. Saul (Eds.), Implicit Bias and philosophy (Vol. 1, pp. 157–190). New York: Oxford University Press.
Ataria, Y. (2015). Sense of ownership and sense of agency during trauma. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14(1), 199–212.
Bratman, M. (1987). Intention, plans, and practical reason. Center for the Study of Language and Information. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company.
Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X. (2017). Sensorimotor Life: An enactive proposal. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fanon, F. (1991). Black skin, white masks. Translated by C. Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Farrer, C., & Frith, C. D. (2002). Experiencing oneself vs another person as being the cause of an action: The neural correlates of the experience of agency. NeuroImage, 15, 596–603.
Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 14–21.
Gallagher, S. (2012). Multiple aspects in the sense of agency. New Ideas in Psychology, 30(1), 15–31.
Gallagher, S. (2015). Relations between agency and ownership in the case of schizophrenic thought insertion and delusions of control. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6(4), 865–879.
Gallagher, S., & Trigg, D. (2016). Agency and anxiety: Delusions of control and loss of control in schizophrenia and agoraphobia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10(459). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00459.
Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2012). The phenomenological mind. New York: Routledge.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Goldman, A. I. (1970). A theory of human action. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutto, D. D. (2008). Folk psychological narratives: The sociocultural basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2012). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kiverstein, J., & Rietveld, E. (2015). The primacy of skilled intentionality: On Hutto & Satne’s the natural origins of content. Philosophia, 43(3), 701–721.
Marcel, A. J. (2003). The sense of agency: Awareness and ownership of action. In J. Roessler & N. Eilan (Eds.), Agency and self-awareness: Issues in philosophy and psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Translated by D. A. Landes. New York: Routledge.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Overall, C. (2012). Trans persons, cisgender persons, and gender identities. In N. Power, R. Halwani, & A. Soble (Eds.), Philosophy of sex: Contemporary readings (6th ed.). New York: Rowan & Littlefield.
Pacherie, E. (2007). The sense of control and the sense of agency. Psyche, 13(1), 1–30.
Pacherie, E. (2008). The phenomenology of action: A conceptual framework. Cognition, 107(1), 179–217.
Ramstead, M. J. D., Veissière, S. P. L., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2016). Cultural affordances: Scaffolding local worlds through shared intentionality and regimes of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1090). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090.
Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2014). A rich landscape of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 26(4), 325–352.
Schechtman, M. (1996). The constitution of selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Stephens, G. L., & Graham, G. (1994). Self-consciousness, mental agency, and the clinical psychopathology of thought-insertion. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 1(1), 1–10.
van Dijk, L., & Rietveld, E. (2017). Foregrounding Sociomaterial practice in our understanding of affordances: The skilled intentionality framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1969). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01969.
Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Velleman, D. (1989). Practical reflection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Weiss, G. (2017). The perils and pleasures of the “I can” body. Symposium, 21(2), 63–80.
Witt, C. (2011). The metaphysics of gender. New York: Oxford University Press.
Young, I. M. (1990). On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Zahavi, D. (2010). Minimal self and narrative self. A distinction in need of refinement. In T. Fuchs, H. Sattel, & P. Heningnsen (Eds.), The embodied self: Dimensions, coherence, and disorders (pp. 3–11). Schattauer: Stuttgart.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible by UPA and IPTA awards from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Many thanks go to Patrick McGivern, Sarah Sorial, Shaun Gallagher, Jarrah Aubourg, Rebecca Harrison, Inês Hipólito, Thomas Mann, Russell Meyer, Anco Peeters, Tailer Ransom, John Reynolds, and Miguel Segundo Ortin for helpful draft comments at various stages, as well as audiences at the Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting in Adelaide, 2017, and at the University of California Riverside Graduate Conference, 2017, for insightful discussions. The author also thanks two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brancazio, N. Gender and the senses of agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 425–440 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9581-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9581-z