# Agency

**URL:** https://ps.zoethical.org/t/agency/2250
**Category:** 3TS Reader
**Tags:** concept
**Created:** [March 6, 2019, 1:06pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/agency/2250 "2019-03-06T13:06:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![system](https://ps.zoethical.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9eb088232ae3ace61d2d35e92896da8d59b6f2b3.png) [@system](https://ps.zoethical.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2019, 1:06pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/agency/2250/1 "2019-03-06T13:06:22Z")

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## title: Agency subtitle: Cyberfeminism

## About the Concept

{: #concept .intro }

Agency is the capacity to act in a given context, it is a fundamental and  
ambiguous concept in feminism thought, it has been very much debated from its  
acception as an individual concept or as a collective one.

## Sources

{: #sources .intro }

- [_Meeting the Universe Halfway_][1]_: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of  
Matter and Meaning_, Durham: Duke University Press. (Karen Barad, 2007)
- [_Interview with Karen Barad_][2] (2011)

[1]: /library/Karen BARAD - Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007).pdf  
[2]: /library/Karen BARAD - Interview (Corfou 2011).pdf

### Common Knowledge and Political Love

> an individual’s (or group’s) ability to make effective choices and to  
> transform those choices into desired outcomes

The difficulty to qualify agency for feminists is that this essential notion  
happens in a patriarchal environment that feminists want to detach from;  
therefore it becomes difficult to define agency by the same time bringing in  
view and not refering to the patriarchal rules of of society.

Agency is intertwined with different realities, contexts, and personas  
characterising from there on the capacity to act upon something differentiating  
itself from Power and often poses itself in a relation of resistance to it.  
Karen Barad stresses the non-human aspect of agency; insisting that agency is  
understood as ‘an enactment.’ “Agential intra-actions are causal enactments.”  
(2007, p. 176)

Everyone accesses different type of agencies, while one’s capacity to understand  
its own agency is always in transformation, agencies work well when combined in  
a perspective of solidarity.  
Distributed and shared technologies value differential sets of agency and set  
grounds for a capacity to characterise different set of agency in different  
communities.

“Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of  
iterative changes to particular practices – interative reconfigurings of  
topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations ­- through the dynamics of  
intra-activity.” (p. 178). Like Braidotti, Barad’s position also argues that in  
and through the entanglements of matter, agency also refers us to the  
“possibilities for worldly re-configurings” (Barad, 2012, p. 55).

Agency being both a political and a relational concept it can be activated in  
political terms if all its constituent are in a moving relational scheme of  
discreet materials.

Ingold argues: “things are active not because they are imbued with agency but  
because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the  
lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter  
but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling  
their stories.” (Ingold, 2007, p. 1)

Agential Memory, uses narrative procedures to help us to understand the  
complexity of our constructed memory and situate back into them a form of  
agential realism.relational nature of the matter, or things under discussion.

## Tree of Significance

{: #tree-of-significance }

SYNONYM  
: power, instrumentality, entanglement, matter, actant

ANTONYM  
: impotence, oppression, causality

HYPERNYM  
: ethics, politics, new materialism, assemblage, information

HYPONYM  
: matter, object, thing, body, infrastructure, informatics