From the mid-twentieth century, the concept of autonomy saw a resurgence in moral and political philosophy. In contrast to Kant's impersonal moral account of autonomy (Taylor 2005) which was about rationally self-legislating moral laws, philosophers began debating about personal or individual autonomy, which has to do with living in accordance with one's own self-determined preferences (whatever that may mean).
→ This reminds me of Sartre's and Beauvoir's theory on existentialism: existence precedes essence. Everyone is born with freewill to construct their life in whichever way they want. This is in contrary to Judeo-Christian traditions, which taught that humans are born with preordained purposes. Beauvoir also highlighted that "A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied." This definition tightens the concept of individual autonomy, which rules out concepts such as colonization and imperialism.
Relational views take for granted the plausible presumption that the Self is related to others in various ways; who we are and how we identify ourselves is never a practice that is achieved alone. As such, they reject the kind of individualism associated with "...some liberal and especially libertarian concepts of autonomy" *Mackenzie, 2013, p. 42) and recognize, instead, that individual identities are shaped by agents' social relationships and social determinants like gender, class, and race. (Mackenzie, 2013, p. 43)
→ Reading this, I recall the sociocultural approach to human psychology alongside the biological and cognitive approaches, especially Hofstede's cultural dimensions. One of the dimensions used to rank different countries are individualism/collectivism. It's worth noting that this is a spectrum rather than a binary value. Social determinants can combine together to create intersectionality, where an individual may experience compounded discrimination due to their gender, class, and race (i.e. underprivileged black woman), where multiple factors act together to create a special form of disadvantage.
She claimed in one of her earlier accounts of autonomy that agents must thus exercise normative competence - a skill which enables one to identify and exclude oppressive norms from one's decision-making process - to count as autonomous. In her later work, Stoljar elaborates that oppressive 'social scripts' which call for the adaptation, anticipation, adjustment, accommodation, and evaluation on part of the targeted group undermines the kind of psychological freedom that would be necessary for autonomy (Stoljar, 2014, p. 118).
→ Stoljar's normative competence can be explored in Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7, where the protagonist, Cléo, changed her self-perception in the course of a fateful afternoon, liberating herself from the male gaze. While waiting for an autopsy for terminal cancer, a conversation with an Algerian helped her change her mind. In the face of mortality, the so-called social scripts have less of an effect on how one views the course of one's life, which transform her existential dread into a peaceful acceptance of fate.