Agency: Promiscuous and Protean

Abstract

In this essay, I propose that agency (1) is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; (2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal. Those claims are illustrated and confounded through an analysis of the text, created by a white woman twelve years after the event, of the speech allegedly delivered by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 woman's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.