Construction Of Adulthood

3. Agency Agency, as a problematic, differs from the problematic of freedom. Whereas freedom is more concerned with lack of external constraints and freedom from oppressive laws or societal structures, agency relates to an individual’s ability to make decisions that are good for them and are likely to bring about positive results. Whether or not a person has agency changes the way we think about their freedom and about saving them. Humans can be denied agency from the outside, in that their ability to make their own decisions and have others respect them is not present, or actually lack agency from the inside, as in the case of young children who need guidance to understand how to act in their best self-interest. Schaffner’s piece “Capacity, Consent, and the Construction of Adulthood” touches on the problematic of agency in some interesting ways. Schaffner calls attention to the fact that an assertion of …show more content…
The phrase “free sex worker” should not be considered an oxymoron. Why does Kristof not simply stand up against all forms of abusive, unfair, and child labor as opposed to singling out “sex work” as a practice that is prohibitively dangerous? Even when stripped of all exploitative attributes, the idea of “selling sex” still seems to trouble Kristof as it does many others. Part of this could have do with the tendency of some to assert that sex without love is “harmful or abusive”, as mentioned in Kempadoo’s piece. We also need to be clear on the difference between futile attempts to merely treat the symptoms of unjust societal, cultural, or governmental structures and ignore the greater causes themselves. Parallels can drawn to domestic issues: is it more impactful for donors to buy food for malnourished American children or for wealth to be distributed more equally in the first place so children do not go