A Focus on the "I" in the "I→We": Considering the Lived Experience of Self-in-Coalition in Active Subjectivity

The question above is one Lugones considers in her attempt to "put into words" and "participate in" the sense of agency that works against oppression in its various forms (IP 7). This sense of agency or uactive subjectivity" defined by Lugones rejects a modern understanding of self as unitary and of intentionality "as residing in and emanating from the individual or from monolithic collectives" (TSC 210). lnstead, intentionalities of the resistant-oppressed are enacted "between rather than in subjects," as well as "between worlds of sense," in "a long•winded intersubjective project" (208-9). My main goal in this chapter is to highlight the significance of and links between Lugones's longstanding theory of active subjectivity and her later work on complex communication in relationship to feminist phenomenological conceptions of selfhood. 1 This discussion illuminates the role of what I call a lived sense of "self-in-coaltion" in work across differences.