Agency & Victimhood

“People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” -- Foucault


What is agency? Foucault's diatribes about power and agency leave me questioning whether he even leaves room for free will. People act, but we're constrained by the system of force relations, i.e. the power structure. What does he mean by that? Is he talking cognition, like a strong view of hegemony? Can we even imagine acting in ways that aren't sort-of programmed into us by this mysterious power structure? He really doesn't seem to leave the door open for agency to begin with, so how can we attribute agency to women who are placed in even more heavily constrained situations than we find ourselves in? Or maybe that's the trick -- maybe under the bio-politics system of power, we're more self-constraining because we operate via a system of norms rather than regulations. Maybe these women actually have more freedom (of mind?) because they can contradict their social orders (e.g. by becoming pasinja meris and ruining their families' chances at recovering bridewealth) without sacrificing their own feelings of self-worth. Maybe by being "dividuals" or having "relational personhood", people have different perspectives on agency and victimhood -- maybe agency and passivity are less clearly distinguished for them, because they interpret acts in terms of relationships (e.g. codependent arising); thus what I define as an instance of victimhood -- being raped, for example -- is not as exclusively passive for a typical Tuli woman because there are social repercussions, i.e. her male kin will exact a restitution from the rapist (or force him to marry her); perhaps it only becomes locally contextualized as victimhood when the male kin fail to react as expected, and it thus becomes a "trigger" toward the path of a pasinja meri. This act, likewise, I would define as highly agentive, especially given the women's own "triumphalist narratives" and the "seemingly self-authoring, autonomous 'I'" that they use to describe their agency in their life histories (157). However, for the same reason, perhaps this act is less exclusively agentive and shares some passive qualities b/c the women's agency is "negative agency," i.e. their actions are calculated to have deleterious effects on their kin; they are merely negating their "proper" roles as reproducers. Also, the triggers seem like social formulas: women become pasinja meris when their male kin fail to provide a stable environment.
This kind of makes sense, but perhaps only because I'm projecting my own fundamental understandings of agency and identity, i.e. codependent arising.
Argh.