Recent debates over dance bars in Mumbai and lap dance clubs in the UK have marked out a contested terrain over women’s ‘choices’ in sexual, economic, religious, legal and cultural terms.  These contentious debates provide an opportunity to consider afresh the concept of agency – as some kind of capacity to act – and its role in contemporary feminist thinking.  If all choices are always situated, how do we acknowledge the significance of struggles to earn, to desire and to support freely, without denying that some choices are more possible and privileged than others?  There is a need to complicate and think beyond the oppositional binaries between coercion and freedom, choice and commodification, culture and economy that have polarised our analytical frameworks and limited our ability to find new critical approaches. Along with agency, the ways in which we construct sexuality, desire and pleasure also need to be problematised. The women’s movement has been divided, at the level of both conceptualisation and strategy, in its response to beauty pageants, media ‘commodification’ of women’s bodies, sex work, pornography and moral policing. The relationship to the state and the stance on censorship has been a vexed issue.   Women’s movements, lesbian and gay activists and anti-globalisation campaigners of all kinds have also struggled collectively to carve out alternative spaces and modes of articulation.  How do we harness that urge to shift the terrain without under-estimating the impact of institutional systems on people’s lives?  Thinking about these specific individual and collective efforts is also implicitly connected and related to the more general political and intellectual crisis over the impossibility of affecting current global economic, cultural and militarised trends.  There is a need to critically reflect on how our own situated normative frameworks begin to shape the ways in which we engage with these issues. This workshop seeks to provide a space for reflection on and investigating how culture, religion, media, kinship, economies, legalities and polities frustrate, mediate or enable the possibility of acting as sexual subjects at this moment in global history. Questions to be probed through various papers ·        In what ways are women or gendered persons – bar girls, veil wearers etc. – currently being constructed and constructing themselves as bearers of culture?

• Do new credit or consumer practices provide an opportunity to harness collective financial agency on sexual and gendered terrain? 
• How are kinship norms and reproductive practices being constituted through globalising processes? and having an impact on freedom?
• In what ways are morals, markets and conflicts currently setting agendas for public expression and censoring practices? and influencing the relationship between religion, culture, class and sexuality as possible constituents of agency? 
• How is access to urban spaces gendered and sexualised? And how is such access affected by changes in migration and mobility patterns?
• What kinds of sexual and reproductive choices are becoming more or less publicly acceptable and what does this say about changes in public/private relations? 
• How are globalising processes influencing women’s participation in the labour market and how are they negotiating gendered work practices?
• What do practices of resistance and utopia have to offer our thinking about agency?
• How do we engage with the state and civil society and their tendency to delegitimise and disenfranchise those with differing normative frameworks?
• How is an understanding of gendered agency reflected in the law and legal practices?