Precarious everyday agency

Abstract

The concept of agency has been used to bridge the gap between micro- and macro-level analyses in social and feminist studies. Giddens proposed the pair of structure and agency; Bourdieu coined the concept of habitus as an interlocutor between the two. Feminist theorisation developed the concepts of social agency as always embodied, of power as subtly inculcated through the body, and of social action as generative. Agency as a productive tool has also been contested: as a tendency to reduce agency to individual sovereignty, as being androcentric, as losing the sight of everyday life events, and as reducing action to human action. This article contributes to the theoretical debates on agency by developing a notion of precarious everyday agency as a subjective interface in contemporary capitalism. It engages with theories of precarisation and modifies them to incorporate fragile, everyday life agency. The modification is achieved by analysing the role and logic of habits in precarisation. The article draws on empirical data comprising a series of group discussions with women who identify themselves as living in a precarious situation. The article shows that the logic of habit is complex and that a habit of habit-breaking can be identified as a crucial aspect of precarious everyday agency.