The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

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      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 social motion and causal influence, that it be sensitive to the ways in which allegedly disappearing institutions and norms persist in structuring social reality. A third crucial requirement, and the last I shall mention here, is that this framework not be such as to posit the evil of welfare-state capitalism exclusively or primarily as the evil of reification. It must also be capable of foregrounding the evil of dominance and subordination.⁴⁴

      ^* I am grateful to John Brenkman, Thomas McCarthy, Carole Pateman and Martin Schwab for helpful comments and criticism; to Dee Marquez and Marina Rosiene for crackerjack word processing; and to the Stanford Humanities Center for research support.

      1 Karl Marx, “Letter to A. Ruge, September 1843,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, 209.

      2 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Hereafter, TCA I. Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. II: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981. Hereafter TCA II. I shall also draw on some other writings by Habermas, especially Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1975; “Introduction,” in Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age”: Contemporary German Perspectives, ed. Jürgen Habermas, trans. Andrew Buchwalter, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984; and “A Reply to my Critics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. David Held and John B. Thompson, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. I shall draw likewise on two helpful overviews of this material: Thomas McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Habermas, TCA I, v–xxxvii; and John B. Thompson, “Rationality and Social Rationalisation: An Assessment of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action,” Sociology 17:2, 1983, 278–94.

      3 TCA II, 214, 217, 348–9; Legitimation Crisis, 8–9; “A Reply to my Critics,” 268, 278–9. McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxv–xxvii; Thompson, “Rationality,” 285.

      4 TCA II, 208; “A Reply to my Critics,” 223–5; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxiv–xxv.

      5 I am indebted to Martin Schwab for the expression “dual-aspect activity.”

      6 It might be argued that Habermas’s categorial distinction between “social labor” and “socialization” helps overcome the androcentrism of orthodox Marxism. Orthodox Marxism allowed for only one kind of historically significant activity: “production,” or “social labor.” Moreover, it understood that category androcentrically and thereby excluded women’s unpaid childrearing from history. By contrast, Habermas allows for two kinds of historically significant activity: “social labor” and the “symbolic” activities that include, among other things, childrearing. Thus, he manages to include women’s unpaid activity in history. While this is an improvement, it does not suffice to remedy matters. At best, it leads to what has come to be known as “dual systems theory,” an approach which posits two distinct “systems” of human activity and, correspondingly, two distinct “systems” of oppression: capitalism and male dominance. But this is misleading. These are not, in fact, two distinct systems but, rather, two thoroughly interfused dimensions of a single social formation. In order to understand that social formation, a critical theory requires a single set of categories and concepts which integrate internally both gender and political economy (perhaps also race). For a classic statement of dual systems theory, see Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent, Boston: South End Press, 1981. For a critique of dual systems theory, see Iris Young, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory,” in Women and Revolution, ed. Sargent; and “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory,” Socialist Review 50–51, 1980, 169–80. In sections two and three of this essay, I develop arguments and lines of analysis that rely on concepts and categories that internally integrate gender and political economy (see note 30 below). This might be considered a “single system” approach. However, I find that label misleading because I do not consider my approach primarily or exclusively a “systems” approach in the first place. Rather, like Habermas, I am trying to link structural (in the sense of objectivating) and interpretive approaches to the study of societies. Unlike him, however, I do not do this by dividing society into two components, “system” and “lifeworld.” See this section below and especially note 14.

      7 TCA I, 85, 87–8, 101, 342, 357–60; TCA II, 179; Legitimation Crisis, 4–5; “A Reply to my Critics,” 234, 237, 264–5; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” ix, xvix–xxx. In presenting the distinction between system-integrated and socially-integrated action contexts, I am relying on the terminology of Legitimation Crisis and modifying the terminology of The Theory of Communicative Action. Or, rather, I am selecting one of the several various usages deployed in the latter work. There, Habermas often speaks of what I have called “socially integrated action” as “communicative СКАЧАТЬ