Center Theme for 2006-07:
Autonomy, Gender, and Performance

The 2006-07 Center research theme, Autonomy, Gender, and Performance, builds on the 2005-06 theme States of Autonomy. We will continue our conversations about the nature of autonomy, the conditions under which it is developed, and the terms that both express and constrain it.  Programs and Center fellows’ research in 2006-07 will be particularly concerned with the performative dimensions of autonomy and with the perspectives that concepts of gender bring to bear on autonomy in theory, in practice, and in performance.

The history of the modern self, arguably, is a history of autonomy or self-determination. But what sort of condition is autonomy? Why do we value it? What are the conditions under which autonomy is developed and expressed? Can there be autonomy in an extra-social state of nature, as imagined by self-styled rugged individualists? Or is some kind of social or even civil order necessary? What is the relationship between autonomy and individuality in education, religion, art, sexuality? How do our understandings of autonomy, as a concept, aspiration, or lived experience intersect with other notions of a performed or represented self as articulated by race, class or gender? More particularly, how does gender as a category for thinking through autonomy encourage inspections of tensions between the individual and the socially constructed self, or help in understanding such phenomena as freely chosen oppressive practices? How is individual agency connected through gender and other categories of difference to social norms and practices?

Clearly the term autonomy has political resonance. Historically, notions of autonomy have underwritten conceptions and authorizations of the state, and the state has been a crucial organ for legitimizing individual autonomy as a desired “state of being.” From its earliest use to designate the highest public power, moreover, the state has had significant conceptual and physical links to the human body. Autonomy is more than a matter of free choice—it is also a matter of bodily integrity for human beings and territorial integrity for political communities, which are the embodied agents of choice. But how has the relationship of individual autonomy to the modern state developed? Does civil society empower or impede it? How have contemporary theoretical interventions expanded, changed or complicated the political implications of autonomy?

The model of the sovereign state is inescapably linked to notions of the autonomous person capable of independent action. But other ways of theorizing the relationship between autonomy and citizenship, individuality, identity, culture, and community, are possible. As the problem of relating individuals to communities intersects with but is not identical to that of representing nations, projects might consider the relations between individuals, sovereign states, and non-sovereign national or culturally-defined communities, particularly through their symbolic embodiments in notions of territory, leadership, and the built environment. How do such communities employ autonomy in their self-definitions and their articulations of shared goals? How do claims to individual autonomy, whether personal, social, cultural, national, or supranational, modify or subvert the state as a grounding political principle?

Research and presentations also consider the broader philosophical and historical relationships that grow out of or change these dynamics. How do states or other collectivities choose to intervene in the lives of persons defined as not fully autonomous: children, slaves, the sick, the disabled, and others considered not fully rational—and with what consequences? How do conflicts over the legitimacy of sovereign states, and the assaults on human bodies that inevitably ensue from them, challenge autonomy both as concept and as political structure? In light of such conflicts, what alternative conceptions—whether appealing or dangerous or simply new—are being articulated, and with what implications?

Performance theory explores how creativity and innovation emerge in social life and potentially transform institutions. In this light, how are agency and autonomy related, as theoretical terms? What does the dramaturgical perspective on social life (agency, actor, audience, and performance) add to philosophical discourses on autonomy? How is autonomy performed in daily life or political ceremonies? How are such performances inflected by axes of difference? How can we employ interventions in feminist theory about the paradox of autonomy to understand the mutual relationship between gender normalization and gender self-functioning?

Finally, we consider cultural forms concerned with the condition of and limits on human freedom, notably including those considering performance and the impact of gender on states of autonomy. Center Fellows’ research and Center programming address these questions historically, theoretically, philosophically, and in the form of creative work.

Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director