NANCY FRASER
FEMINISM, CAPITALISM AND THE CUNNING OF HISTORY
I would like here to take a broad look at second-wave feminism. Not at this or that activist current, nor this or that strand of feminist theorizing; not this or that geographical slice of the movement, nor this or that sociological stratum of women. I want, rather, to try to see second-wave feminism whole, as an epochal social phenomenon. Looking back at nearly forty years of feminist activism, I want to venture an assessment of the movement’s overall trajectory and historical significance. In looking back, however, I hope also to help us look forward. By reconstructing the path we have travelled, I hope to shed light on the challenges we face today—in a time of massive economic crisis, social uncertainty and political realignment.
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Notes for a Feminist Manifesto
Opposed to ‘lean in’ liberal iterations, three activist-scholars premise a militant feminism for the many, inspired by La huelga feminista of 8 March. The politics of social reproduction and the imperative of wider solidarities: the women’s struggle retooled for the multiple crises of late capitalism.
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A New Form of Capitalism?
Does an expanding circuit of commodities whose value is indexed to their rarity and antiquity suggest that capitalism is secreting a novel ‘economy of enrichment’? Replying to Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in NLR 98, Nancy Fraser argues that Marx’s Holy Trinity of profit, interest and rent remains key to a taxonomy of contemporary commodification.
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Contradictions of Capital and Care
Nancy Fraser tracks the reconfiguration of the relations of social reproduction under successive regimes of accumulation—‘separate spheres’, male breadwinner, dual-income household. Are the exactions of financialized capitalism now serving to undermine its lifeworld?
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Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode
Behind exchange there lurks production, but what is more hidden still? The disavowed conditions of capital’s possibility—in reproduction, politics and nature—as sites for expanded anti-capitalist struggle.
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A Triple Movement?
Why has the global economic crisis yet to produce programmatic alternatives for social transformation? Nancy Fraser argues that present struggles fall within an ambiguous triangle formed by the forces of commodification, social protection and emancipation.
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On Justice
Conceptions of justice drawn from Plato to Rawls, explored through analysis of a powerful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Who counts as a subject, and what strategies could enable those debarred from the sphere of justice to overturn their status?
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Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World
Theorists of political justice have long taken the nation-state to be the relevant unit for their proposals. Nancy Fraser argues that the time for this is past. The necessary interconnection between struggles for economic redistribution and social recognition now requires that issues of political representation be re-tabled at a global rather than national level—where decisions affecting the fate of all are increasingly taken, or not taken.
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Rethinking Recognition
Has the liberating charge of struggles for recognition dissolved into pure identity politics? Do these have to sidestep inequalities of wealth and power? Not, Nancy Fraser contends, if recognition is understood as a question of social status rather than existential address.
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Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler
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A Rejoinder to Iris Young
