Serializing Author Agency

In reading Campbell's essay, I found that the most intriguing concept she discussed was this notion of "serialization" (a theory posited by Iris Young). Campbell summarizes it as this: "Individuals in a serial relationship have no set of attributes in common except their shared relationship to an external object, even or, in other cases, to a law, an institution, a norm, a stereotype and so on"(4). This concept helps do away with essentialism, not only as it relates to women but to many other groups and individuals as well. For example, if we were to try and understand gender during Shakespeare's time in order to analyze a play such as "The Twelfth Night", it would not be advantageous to compare the play's gender roles to a twentieth century drama like "Death of a Salesman". While there may or may not be underlying themes uniting the two works, we have to take into account the relationship between gender, cultural norms, and laws during a respective period.

Serialization has tremendous effect on the agency of authors as we try to understand them and categorize them. If we take each author on their own terms, we can no longer lump them into convenient categorizes that can sometimes ignore the characteristics that set apart authors from other authors. Campbell writes "subjectivity and agency can be understood as the ways in which individuals accept, negotiate, and resist the subject-positions available to them at given moments in a particular culture"(4). Thus, the author gains agency from their reaction to the positions offered to them by the culture they inhabit, and by our understanding of the serial relationship between the author and his or her contemporaries.