“Speaking as a woman” : agency in intersubjective communication

There is a tension in social-constructionist psychological accounts of the subject. On the one hand, the notion of the originary, substantive “I” is critiqued through an emphasis on the intersubjective constitution of subjects. On the other, the agency of this socially constituted subject is taken as a given. I analyse this tension as it is played out in attempts to understand the often-fraught position of “speaking as a woman”. In order to understand the difficulties entailed in any specific attempt to exercise agency, we need to avoid accounts of speaking positions that inadvertently split subjects into effective agents or communicators and failed agents or communicators. Drawing on Butler's antifoundationalist approach to the question of identity, I argue that the capacity to effect change can be better approached as emerging from the instability of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and communication. That is, any agency entailed in speaking as a woman needs to be understood in terms of the instability of that speaking position