Theories of personal autonomy identify the conditions that must be met in order for a person's life, identity, desires, motivations, values, and actions truly to count as her own. To make one's life one's own, in the senses relevant to personal autonomy, however, is not to escape relation---autonomy is intricately dependent on relations. Failed Relations articulates significant ways in which oppressive social circumstances constrain the autonomy of marginalized agents by failing to provide and sustain the relations required for autonomy.

While much has been done to articulate the causally relational connections between oppression and autonomy, Failed Relations elaborates on the undertheorized ways in which oppressive social circumstances are constitutively relevant to autonomy. Rebekah Johnston moves away from a focus on socialization and the internalization of oppressive norms. Instead, she centers in her analysis the implications for autonomy of living with those empowered to harass and engage in racial profiling, of experiences of epistemic injustice, of the political distribution of negative affect, and of practices of displacing the first personal, experiential perspectives of marginalized agents from the public sphere.

These alternative considerations bring into focus the constitutively relational relevance of oppression to autonomy. They also provide an interpretive lens that can accommodate the claim that an agent may not internalize oppressive norms and values in ways that damage her, yet may nevertheless find her autonomy constrained by oppressive social relations.