Provoking Agents

Both the women’s liberation movement and those who have studied it characterize agency as the capacity to make change in individual consciousness, personal lives, and society. The seventeen contributors to Provoking Agents explore whether—and how—feminist theory, writing, and other social practices can help readers move beyond seeing women as a powerless group to effecting changes in their own lives and, ultimately, becoming social activists. Topics in this multi-disciplinary collection range from maternal surrogacy to writing, from consciousness-raising to AIDS activism, from pornography to local organizing. (Source: [University of Illinois Press](https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p064180))

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.