Rhetoric and Logic

The older I get, the stayer I home.

putting "agency" on the high shelf of words banned from feminist literary analysis until we learn to use them correctly. right next to "male gaze"

there is a massive and crucial difference between a woman character having narrative agency as a character versus having literal physical agency within the story world. the former is important for a work to be considered "feminist" (though what qualifies as feminist literature is a source of endless debate, and there is no real criteria, and it is an endlessly nebulous term that im only using here for simplicity and not because its even that meaningful in practice). the latter is not because there are stories that will be told where the women in them simply do not have agency in that setting. when we talk about women characters lacking narrative agency as a character in their story we are talking about characters like the classic early 2000's action movie love interest. she lacks narrative agency in the sense that she does not exert influence on the narrative. she may exert influence on the world around her, she could easily be a #girlboss with lots of money and power and maybe she even steps on some guys throat and shoots guns and drives cool cars like an expert, but she does not exert influence on the narrative. it's not her choices that shape it, or her internal experience that is explored by the story. she is pushed along by the plot rather than doing the pushing. the leading man is often the one doing the pushing, and she is along for the ride. these are your manic pixie dreamgirls and bond girls. she has physical agency but lacks narrative agency. the narrative is not concerned with her experience and thus her experience does not influence the narrative. there are, however, women characters who lack physical agency in their setting but have narrative agency. if physical agency was a prerequisite for all feminist literature, we would have very few stories to tell, because for much of history, the experience of womanhood has been synonymous with lacking agency. the narrator of the yellow wallpaper has absolutely no physical agency because she is quite literally locked in a room for the entirety of the story. she cannot exert any influence on the world around her because her husband thinks she is hysterical and has locked her literally inside of a room. but to imply that as a result, the yellow wallpaper is misogynistic because it has stripped it's main character of all agency would be absurd. she has narrative agency because the story is concerned entirely with her experience of lacking physical agency, and her experience creates and forms the narrative. the same could be said about offred in the handmaid's tale. she has literally been stripped of all political and physical agency, and lacks agency over her own body. when offred does (perhaps) escape, she only is able to do so because a man in gilead that still has physical agency helps her do so. still, you would not say that the handmaids tale is a work of misogyny because it stripped offred of all agency and had her be rescued by a man. because offred has narrative agency. the narrative revolves around her experience. her experience shapes and forms the narrative. these are just two examples that im using because they are some of the most well known and widely acclaimed works of feminist literature that are centered around the experience of women without physical agency, but i could keep going literally forever. we have to be able to differentiate between narrative and physical agency in our analysis of a story's treatment of its women characters. if we cannot tell stories about women who have been stripped of agency because they are supposedly inherently misogynistic, we will have very few realistic and resonant stories about women to tell.

this is like dusting off an ancient relic

Oh easy mistake. Yearning actually rises from the floor and longing hangs from the ceiling