The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser
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they are also waged over the meanings and norms embedded and enacted in government and corporate policy. Second, this process occurs in a phenomenon not thematized by Habermas: in the struggles between opposing social movements with conflicting interpretations of social needs. Both kinds of struggles involve confrontations between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action. Both involve contestation for hegemony over the socio-cultural “means of interpretation and communication.” For example, in many late-capitalist societies, women’s contradictory, self-dividing experience of trying to be both workers and mothers, clients and citizens, has given rise to not one but two women’s movements, a feminist one and an anti-feminist one. These movements, along with their respective allies, are engaged in struggles with one another and with state and corporate institutions over the social meanings of “woman” and “man,” “femininity” and “masculinity,” over the interpretation of women’s needs, over the interpretation and social construction of women’s bodies, and over the gender norms that shape the major institution-mediating social roles. Of course, the means of interpretation and communication in terms of which the social meanings of these things are elaborated have always been controlled by men. Thus feminist women are struggling in effect to redistribute and democratize access to and control over the means of interpretation and communication. We are, therefore, struggling for women’s autonomy in the following special sense: a measure of collective control over the means of interpretation and communication sufficient to permit us to participate on a par with men in all types of social interaction, including political deliberation and decision-making.43
The foregoing suggests that a caution is in order concerning the use of the terms “particularism” and “universalism.” Recall that Habermas’s sixth thesis emphasized feminism’s links to historic liberation movements and its roots in universalist morality. Recall that he was critical of those tendencies within feminism, and in resistance movements in general, which try to resolve the identity problematic by recourse to particularism, that is, by retreating from arenas of political struggle into alternative communities delimited on the basis of natural categories like biological sex. I want to suggest that there are really three issues here and that they need to be disaggregated from one another. One is the issue of political engagement vs. apolitical countercultural activity. Insofar as Habermas’s point is a criticism of cultural feminism, it is well taken in principle, although it needs the following qualifications: cultural separatism, while inadequate as long-term political strategy, is in many cases a shorter-term necessity for women’s physical, psychological, and moral survival; and separatist communities have been the source of numerous reinterpretations of women’s experience which have proved politically fruitful in contestation over the means of interpretation and communication. The second issue is the status of women’s biology in the elaboration of new social identities. Insofar as Habermas’s point is a criticism of reductive biologism, it is well taken. But this does not mean that one can ignore the fact that women’s biology has nearly always been interpreted by men, and that women’s struggle for autonomy necessarily and properly involves, among other things, the reinterpretation of the social meanings of our bodies. The third issue is the difficult and complex one of universalism vs. particularism. Insofar as Habermas’s endorsement of universalism pertains to the meta-level of access to and control over the means of interpretation and communication, it is well taken. At this level, women’s struggle for autonomy can be understood in terms of a universalist conception of distributive justice. But it does not follow that the substantive content which is the fruit of this struggle, namely, the new social meanings we give our needs and our bodies, our new social identities and conceptions of femininity, can be dismissed as particularistic lapses from universalism. For these are no more particular than the sexist and androcentric meanings and norms they are meant to replace. More generally, at the level of substantive content, as opposed to dialogical form, the contrast between universalism and particularism is out of place. Substantive social meanings and norms are always necessarily culturally and historically specific; they always express distinctive shared, but non-universal, forms of life. Feminist meanings and norms will be no exception. But they will not, on that account, be particularistic in any pejorative sense. Let us simply say that they will be different.
I have been arguing that struggles of social movements over the means of interpretation and communication are central to an emancipatory resolution of crisis tendencies in welfare-state capitalism. Now let me clarify their relation to institutional change. Such struggles, I claim, implicitly and explicitly raise the following sorts of questions. Should the roles of worker, childrearer, citizen, and client be fully degendered? Can they be? Or do we, rather, require arrangements that permit women to be workers and citizens as women, just as men have always been workers and citizens as men? And what might that mean? In any case, does not an emancipatory outcome require a profound transformation of the current gender roles at the base of contemporary social organization? And does not this, in turn, require a fundamental transformation of the content, character, boundaries, and relations of the spheres of life which these roles mediate? How should the character and position of paid work, childrearing, and citizenship be defined vis-à-vis one another? Should democratic-socialist-feminist, self-managed, paid work encompass childrearing? Or should childrearing, rather, replace soldiering as a component of transformed, democratic-socialist-feminist, participatory citizenship? What other possibilities are conceivable?
Let me conclude this discussion of the six theses by restating the most important critical points. First, Habermas’s account fails to theorize the patriarchal, norm-mediated character of late-capitalist official-economic and administrative systems. Likewise, it fails to theorize the systemic, money- and power-mediated character of male dominance in the domestic sphere of the late-capitalist lifeworld. Consequently, his colonization thesis fails to grasp that the channels of influence between system and lifeworld institutions are multidirectional. And it tends to replicate, rather than to problematize, a major institutional support of women’s subordination in late capitalism, namely, the gender-based separation of the state-regulated economy of sex-segmented paid work and social welfare, and the male-dominated public sphere, from privatized female childrearing. Thus, while Habermas wants to be critical of male dominance, his diagnostic categories deflect attention elsewhere, to the allegedly overriding problem of gender-neutral reification. As a result, his programmatic conception of decolonization bypasses key feminist questions; it fails to address the issue of how to restructure the relation of childrearing to paid work and citizenship. Finally, Habermas’s categories tend to misrepresent the causes and underestimate the scope of the feminist challenge to welfare-state capitalism. In short, the struggles and wishes of contemporary women are not adequately clarified by a theory that draws the basic battle line between system and lifeworld institutions. From a feminist perspective, there is a more basic battle line between the forms of male dominance linking “system” to “lifeworld” and us.
CONCLUSION
In general, then, the principal blind spots of Habermas’s theory with respect to gender are traceable to his categorial opposition between system and lifeworld institutions, and to the two more elementary oppositions from which it is compounded: the one concerning reproduction functions and the one concerning types of action integration. Or, rather, the blind spots are traceable to the way in which these oppositions, ideologically and androcentrically interpreted, tend to override and eclipse other, potentially more critical elements of Habermas’s framework—elements like the distinction between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action contexts, and like the four-term model of public-private relations.
Habermas’s blind spots are instructive, I think. They permit us to conclude something about what the categorial framework of a socialist-feminist critical theory of welfare-state capitalism should look like. One crucial requirement is that this framework not be such as to put the male-headed, nuclear family and the state-regulated official economy on two opposite sides of the major categorial divide. We require, rather, a framework sensitive to the similarities between them, one which puts them on the same side of the line as institutions which, albeit in different ways, enforce women’s subordination, since both family and official economy appropriate our labor, short-circuit our participation in the interpretation of our needs, and shield normatively secured need interpretations from political contestation. A second crucial requirement is that this framework contain no a priori assumptions about the unidirectionality of