The agenda for the October Duke on Gender panel, “Social Movements and Women’s Agency in the 20th Century,” got formulated by graduate students who, over the past few years, have brought up the problem of human agency in history with noteworthy regularity and growing urgency. The crisis we are facing today in the U. S. and the world and, what the students have called, the apparent indispensability of “struggle” to make a difference in this crisis undoubtedly fueled the interest in what social sciences and humanities have to say on the subject of agency today.
At the core of the matter is the notion of the socially and culturally constructed and gendered subject and, consequently, the notably curbed capacity of social actors to structurally impact systems of signification and domination that bound them, make them who they are, and demarcate realms of resistance, struggle, subversion. Duke historian Nicole Barnes began her talk, “When Patriarchy Unsettles Itself: Women in China’s War of Resistance against Japan, 1937-1945,” by warning academics against being “too eager” to superimpose the “liberal shadow” of self-determination onto historical protagonists operating outside the liberal discursive tradition. In her presentation, she foregrounded the everyday level of history-living which she examined through the role that chaos and upheaval played in expanding women's opportunities to enter the medical profession and to resist patriarchy during the war with Japan. She argued for the situational as a principal site for the study of women’s agency.
Duke on Gender guest speaker, Keisha N. Blain (History Department, University of Pittsburgh) too made the situational level of history-living a key site for the study of women’s agency in her presentation, “’Friends of Japan’: African American Women’s Visions of Afro-Asian Solidarity.” Her presentation zeroed in on a cohort of African American women who, in the early twentieth century, envisioned and enacted grassroots political collaborations with Japanese people as a strategy to combat racism and global white supremacy. In particular, Blain traced how available hegemonic discourses got appropriated and repurposed by her historical protagonists. During the question-and-answer period, the presenters and the audience critically reflected on present-day interpretive languages that allow scholars to assert women’s agency in everyday, situational scenarios and, at the same time, circumscribe historical protagonists’ capacity to enact structural changes within narratives of resistance and appropriation but not dismantlement of hegemonic systems of signification and domination.