The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject's capacity to make sense of herself as an 'I' over time and in relation to other 'I's, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a conception of the communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation.

In this paper, I posit loneliness, as Hannah Arendt defines it in the final chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism as the conceptual opposite of agency. I give a brief overview of Arendt's phenomenology of loneliness, which is the total loss of the common world—the state in which one is incapable of being an interlocutor, through thought, speech, or action, with others and, ultimately, incapable of appearing as an individual to others. Though loneliness is realised in its most extreme form in the concentration camps, it is a problem that haunts all human interaction. It is often very difficult, especially for marginalised and traumatised subjects, to give an account of themselves, indeed, to make any sense of their lives at all. I argue that this difficulty is not insurmountable and make the claim that ontological agency, understood as the appearance as oneself to others in the world (the exercise of self‐disclosure), is an irreducible and constant capacity of every individual, no matter how deeply silenced or oppressed she may have been. I argue, further, that ontological agency is a precondition for meaningful political agency, understood as the public articulation of a well‐formed opinion or judgment.

Background: Flavour is a key driver of liking, purchase behaviour and consumption of food and beverages. Determining how individuals differ in their perception of flavour is important to fully understanding dietary choices and habitual diet-related health outcomes. Thermal tasting-the capacity to experience a phantom taste when small areas of the tongue are rapidly heated or cooled-associates with greater orosensory acuity for tastants in aqueous solutions. This study sought to extend this finding and establish whether thermal-taster status also associates with the perceived intensities of oral sensations elicited by sampled food. Twenty-five thermal tasters (TTs) and 19 thermal non-tasters (TnTs) scored liking (generalized degree of liking scale) and the intensity (generalized visual analogue scale) of the dominant orosensations elicited by 20 food and beverage items in duplicate using a randomized complete block design. Results: Multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that overall, TTs rated the intensity of orosensory food groups higher than did TnTs, although this was significant only for foods that were predominantly bitter-eliciting (ANOVA). Overall liking scores approached significance (MANOVA) but differed between TTs and TnTs only for the grainy orosensory food grouping (ANOVA).

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