Afterword

Abstract

Where does this leave us in relation to gender, agency, and coercion? One point that emerges forcibly from the essays is that we have not yet arrived at the stage where we can stop stressing the agency of those presumed to lack it. As Marsha Henry indicates in her study of the ways UN peacekeeping missions have viewed the ‘problem’ of sex workers, or Sadie Wearing in her analysis of media representations of young working-class women in Britain, or Emily Jackson in her warnings against paternalism, the capacity for agency is still very variously attributed; and those marginalised by virtue of their gender, class, race, or culture continue to be treated either as passive and desperate victims or as ‘excessively’ agentic in a hyper-sexualised way. We are still a long way from being able to think of the complexities of agency as affecting all of us in distinct but still comparable ways.