• Sooraj Mohan Saksena

My primary concern in this paper pertains to the issue of self-determination or autonomy. In particular, I will be focusing on Meyers’ (2002) agentic skills account situated in feminist voice theory tradition to reconceptualize self-determination. On her view, self-determination ‘is an ongoing process of exercising a repertoire of agentic skills – skills that enable individuals to construct their own self-portraits and self-narratives and that thereby enable them to take charge of their lives.’ (Meyers 2002: p.4) The agentic skills, Meyers contends, enables her to address ‘the problem of voice authentication’ (Meyers 2002, p.16). It furnishes an epistemic device that enables me to know that one’s voice is authentic and distinguishes it from an imposed patriarch’s voice. In my paper, I propose to examine the adequacy of her resolution. Given the procedural account of autonomy that Meyers proposes, a common criticism is that such accounts fail to explain why cases of internalized oppression render an agent nonautonomous. False stereotypes, perpetuated by patriarchal cultures, are internalized to an extent that it appears natural for a woman to reaffirm them in her choices and actions. The contention is that in the absence of a substantive account of autonomy, one can only have an illusion of authenticity – a woman’s apparently own voice is inevitably structured by patriarchal norms. To address the problem of false stereotypes, one would need at least a weakly substantive account that proposes some objective values, an affirmation of which implies an absence of the patriarch’s voice.

An Examination of the Efficacy of the Meyersian Agentic- Skills Account of Autonomy

"An Examination of the Efficacy of the Meyersian Agentic- Skills Account of Autonomy", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 1, page no.e144-e167, January-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2201422.pdf

"An Examination of the Efficacy of the Meyersian Agentic- Skills Account of Autonomy", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 1, page no. ppe144-e167, January-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2201422.pdf