Emily S. Lee
Professor
California State University, Fullerton
Cunning Tricksters, Sabotage, and Insurgent Agency
"This paper examines the role of figures such as the trickster coyote, the Tripmaster Monkey, or Annanse, to consider agency under oppression. Sarah Hoagland points out that the present dominance of Hegel’s theory of resistance defines how to recognize resistance. Unless acts of resistance successfully overthrow and reverse the positions of the oppressor and the oppressed, acts of resistance go unnoticed. Under such circumstances, Hoagland ponders acts of sabotage as means through which women self-affirm their existence, in defiance of the confines of expected roles and actions. The socially structured dualistic gender roles especially situate women in positions that dichotomously and hence hopelessly restrict acts of resistance. Under such circumstances, sabotage remains the only venue for some expression of resistance. But acts of sabotage go unnoticed under present understandings of resistance because they do not successfully overthrow the system. Ironically although they fail in the (perhaps masculine) prevailing understandings of resistance, acts of sabotage must go unnoticed to succeed. Acts of sabotage must occur in stealth. This paper argues that far from the question of whether the oppressed can exercise agency, the oppressed have always been exercising agency—in stealth, with humor, and in affirmation of one’s existence."