CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This chapter explores therelationships between agency and authority by drawing on examples from LatinAmerica and Western Europe, from the early twentieth century to the earlytwentieth first century. In the subfield of the history of youth, the conceptof agency has been widely used in relation to young peoples choices, their capacityto act, and their resistance to adult-centered mandates and expectations. Assome historians have recently argued, the concept has flaws: it entails an a priori understanding regardingresistance to different forms of cultural and political authority; it supposes(at least implicitly) a binary model that opposes youth versus adults; and itis monolithic and ultimately ahistorical (Gleason, 2016; Alexander, 2015). Promptedby those discussions, this chapter focuses on public political andpolitico-cultural experiences (not accounting for other milieus, such as familyrelations) and understands agency as the willingness of autonomy in terms ofthe repertoires of demands and actions that young people deployed throughoutthe twentieth century. As the example above suggests, these dynamics neitherexcluded adults nor stood in stark opposition to authority. Moreover, in theprocess of becoming political and cultural actors, young people reproduced andcreated a wide range of intra-generational authority relations, based on class,gender, and regional differences.

enviar mensaje