Victim and Agency

The class readings and film-screening throughout this semester have introduced me to the ways in which different groups of Asian American women immigrants were exploited and victimized by the intersectional oppressions of racism, classism and sexism. While at the same time, what's empowering about Asian American women's experiences is women's ability to mobilize their own agencies in resisting the status quo and make change for the community - through forming women's clubs, waging campaigns for Daycare Centers, participating in or refusing to participate in beauty contests, among many other expressions of women's agencies. However, recently after reading some articles on the global sex trade and after watching the documentary "Eating Welfare", I came to a revision of my previous optimism and start to recognize the limitation to women's agency, especially women of the unprivileged groups. To be clear, I neither deny women's capability in transforming the fates of their own and the outlook of their communities, nor am I blind to the real progress achieved by women's organizing. When we situate female cheap labor and women of color within the global economic system, where increasingly larger numbers of people are being pushed into marginality and informal sector work, both due to the lack of economic alternatives in their home countries and to the corporations' demand for cheap labor in the United States, it seems that the problem lies in the structural global inequalities of wealth and power, and to address that problem, there has to be an organized pressure on the government and transnational corporations to recognize the need of the majority of the population. Then my question would be, to what extent can the feminist project mobilize women's agencies in challenging the global power structure? How can we combine the daily struggles of individuals and the organizing efforts of different oppressed groups into a collective challenge?