The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser
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social movements in breaking through the confines of welfare-state politics as usual. Expanding the political meant exposing neglected axes of domination other than class—above all, but not only, gender. Equally important, it meant exposing illegitimate power beyond the usual precincts of the state and economy—in sexuality and subjectivity, in domesticity and social services, in academia and commodified leisure, in the social practices of everyday life.
No one better captured these “post-Marxian” impulses than Jürgen Habermas, the subject of Chapter 1. A radical critic of postwar social democracy, Habermas sought to scrutinize aspects of the Keynesian welfare state that escaped standard liberal analyses. Eschewing the “labor monism” of his Frankfurt School predecessors, while seeking to continue the critique of reification by other means, he proposed a “communications-theoretic” reconstruction of Critical Theory. The upshot was a new diagnosis of late-capitalist ills: the “internal colonization of the lifeworld by systems.” Endemic to postwar social democracy, colonization occurred when “systems rationality” was illegitimately extended beyond its proper purview (the market economy and state administration) to the “core domains of the lifeworld” (the family and political public sphere). In that case, as administrative coordination replaced communicative interaction in domains that required the latter, the welfare state spawned “social pathologies.” Equally important, this development sparked new forms of social conflict, centered less on distribution than on the “grammar of forms of life.”2 Resonating with New Left antipathy to bureaucratic paternalism, Habermas’s diagnosis validated the “post-materialist” concerns of the new social movements. Exceeding liberal criticisms of distributive injustice, it promised to broaden our sense of what could be subject to political challenge—and emancipatory change.
Nevertheless, as I argue in “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?” (1985), Habermas failed to actualize the full radical potential of his own critique. Substantializing analytical distinctions between public and private, symbolic reproduction and material reproduction, system integration and social integration, he missed their gender subtext and naturalized androcentic features of the social order. Lacking the resources to adequately conceptualize male domination, he ended up suggesting that “juridification” in familial matters led necessarily to colonization—hence that feminist struggles to expand women’s and children’s rights were problematic. The effect was to jeopardize the analytical insights and practical gains of second-wave feminism.
In general, then, this volume’s first chapter develops a critique of an important left-wing critic of social democracy. Chapter 2, in contrast, marks a shift to constructive feminist theorizing. Aiming to put to work the lessons of the previous chapter, I sketch a gender-sensitive critique of the structural dynamics and conflict tendencies of late-capitalist societies. “Struggle over Needs” (1989) reconceptualizes the welfare state by resituating distribution within discourse. Building on Habermas’s insights, it employs a version of the linguistic turn to underwrite the expanded understanding of politics associated with second-wave feminism. The key move here is a shift from the usual social-democratic focus on conflicts over need satisfaction to a new, democratic-feminist focus on the “politics of need interpretation.” The effect is to replace the distributive paradigm, which posits a monological objectivism of basic needs, with a gender-sensitive communicative paradigm, which construes the interpretation of needs as a political stake. This approach differs from Habermas’s in a crucial respect. Instead of naturalizing hegemonic notions of public and private, I treat those categories, too, as discursively constructed, gender- and power-saturated objects of political struggle; and I link the politicization of needs to feminist struggles over where and how to draw the boundaries between “the political,” “the economic,” and “the domestic.” The aim is to repoliticize a range of gender issues that Habermas unwittingly took off the table.
“Struggle over Needs” also borrows from, and revises, another great New Left–inspired critic of the democratic welfare state: Michel Foucault. Like Foucault, I maintain that needs politics is implicated in the constitution of subject positions, on the one hand, and of new bodies of disciplinary expertise, on the other. But unlike him, I do not assume that welfare professionals monopolize the interpretation of needs. Rather, situating “expert discourses” alongside both the “oppositional discourses” of democratizing movements and the “reprivatization discourses” of neoconservatives, I map conflicts among these three types of “needs-talk.” Thus, where Foucault assumed a single, disciplinary logic, my approach discerns a plurality of competing logics—including some with emancipatory potential, capable of challenging male domination. Drawing not only on empirical insights but also on normative distinctions, it aims to guide a feminist activism that would transform social reality.
If “Struggle over Needs” maps the contours of welfare-state discourse in the 1980s, the next chapter examines a term that became central in the 1990s. Coauthored with the feminist historian Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’” (1994) reads the changing vicissitudes of that “keyword of the welfare state” as a barometer of shifting political winds. Written at the height of the “welfare reform” frenzy in the US, when attacks on “welfare dependency” dominated policy debates, this essay charts the process by which that characteristic neoliberal preoccupation came to supplant the longstanding social-democratic focus on combating poverty.
“A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’ ” excavates buried layers of discursive history that continue to weigh on the present. Mapping changing configurations of political economy and gender dynamics, this chapter analyzes two epochal historical shifts in the meanings of “dependency”: first, the shift from a preindustrial patriarchal usage, in which “dependency” was a non-stigmatized majority condition, to a modern industrial male-supremacist usage, which constructed a specifically feminine and highly stigmatized sense of “dependency”; and second, the subsequent shift to a postindustrial usage, in which growing numbers of relatively prosperous women claim the same kind of “independence” that men do, while a more stigmatized but still feminized sense of “dependency” attaches to “deviant” groups who are considered “superfluous.” Along the way, Gordon and I demonstrate that racializing practices play a major role in historical reconstructions of “dependency,” as do changes in the organization and meaning of labor. Questioning current assumptions about the meaning and desirability of “independence,” we conclude by sketching a “transvaluative” feminist critique aimed at overcoming the dependence/independence dichotomy.
If the dependency essay provides a feminist critique of postwar welfare states, the following chapter seeks to envision a feminist alternative. The key, I claim in “After the Family Wage” (1994), is to modernize the obsolete underpinnings of current arrangements—especially the presupposition of long-lasting, male-headed nuclear families, in which well-paid, securely employed husbands support non-employed or low-earning wives. This assumption, which descends from industrial capitalism and still undergirds social policy, is wildly askew of postindustrial realities: the coexistence of diverse family forms, increased divorce and non-marriage, widespread female participation in waged work, and more precarious employment for all. It must give way, in the welfare states of the future, to arrangements that can institutionalize gender justice.
What, accordingly, should a postindustrial welfare state look like? “After the Family Wage” evaluates two alternative scenarios, each of which qualifies as feminist. In the first, the age of the family wage would give way to the age of the “Universal Breadwinner.” Presupposed by liberals and “equality feminists,” this approach would guarantee social security chiefly by facilitating women’s wage-earning—above all, by reforming labor markets and providing employment-enabling services such as day care and elder care. In a second vision of postindustrial society, the era of the family wage would give way to the era of “Caregiver Parity.” Favored by conservatives and “difference feminists,” this approach would support informal carework in families—especially through caregiver allowances. These approaches assume divergent conceptions of gender justice: whereas the first aims to conform women’s lives to the way men’s lives are supposed to be now, the second would elevate caregiving to parity with breadwinning in order to “make difference costless.” Yet neither approach, I argue here, is wholly satisfactory. Whereas the Universal Breadwinner model penalizes women for not being like men, the Caregiver