Fortunes of Feminism (29 page)

In my view, the multiculturalists have the stronger argument here. (This is
not
the case, incidentally, for those seeking recognition for what they call “female circumcision”—actually, genital mutilation, which clearly denies parity in sexual pleasure and in health to women and girls.) But that is not the point I wish to stress here. The point, rather, is that the argument is rightly cast in terms of parity of participation. This is precisely where the controversy should be joined. Participatory parity is the proper standard for warranting claims for recognition (and redistribution). It enables a non-identitarian feminist politics that can adjudicate conflicts between claims centered on gender and those focused on other, cross-cutting axes of subordination.
⁹

4. INTEGRATING REDISTRIBUTION AND

RECOGNITION IN FEMINIST POLITICS

Now let us turn to the broader implications for feminist politics. As we saw, a feminist politics for today must be two-dimensional, combining a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution. Only such a politics can avoid truncating the feminist agenda and colluding with neoliberalism.

Yet devising such a feminist politics is no easy matter. It is not sufficient to proceed additively, as if one could simply add a politics of redistribution to a politics of recognition. That would be to treat the two dimensions as if they occupied two separate spheres. In fact, however, distribution and recognition are thoroughly imbricated with one another. And neither claims for redistribution nor claims for recognition can be insulated from each other. On the contrary, they impinge on one another in ways that can give rise to unintended—and unwanted—effects.

Consider, first, that feminist claims for redistribution impinge on recognition. Redistributive policies aimed at mitigating women's poverty, for instance, have status implications that can harm the intended beneficiaries. For example, public assistance programs aimed specifically at “female-headed families” often insinuate the lesser value of “childrearing” vis-à-vis “wage-earning” and of “welfare mothers” vis-à-vis “tax payers.”
¹⁰
At their worst, they mark single mothers as sexually irresponsible scroungers, thereby adding the insult of misrecognition to the injury of deprivation. In general, redistributive policies affect women's status and identities, as well as their economic position. These effects must be thematized and scrutinized, lest one end up fueling sexist misrecognition in the course of trying to remedy sexist maldistribution. Redistributive policies have sexist misrecognition effects when a culturally pervasive androcentric devaluation of caregiving inflects support for single-mother families as “getting something for nothing.”
¹¹
In this context, feminist struggles for redistribution cannot succeed unless they are joined with struggles for cultural change aimed at revaluing caregiving and the feminine associations that code it. In short:
no redistribution without recognition
.

The converse is equally true, however, as feminist claims for recognition impinge on distribution. Proposals to redress androcentric evaluative patterns have economic implications that can work to the detriment of some women. For example, top-down campaigns to suppress female genital mutilation may have negative effects on the economic position of the affected women, rendering them “unmarriageable” while failing to ensure alternative means of support. Likewise, campaigns to suppress prostitution and pornography may have negative effects on the economic position of sex workers. Finally, no-fault divorce reforms in the United States have hurt some divorced women economically, even while enhancing women's legal status.
¹²
In such cases, reforms aimed at remedying sexist misrecognition have ended up fueling sexist maldistribution. Recognition claims, moreover, are liable to the charge of being “merely symbolic.” When pursued in contexts marked by gross disparities in economic position, reforms aimed at affirming distinctiveness tend to devolve into empty gestures; like the sort of recognition that would put women on a pedestal, they mock, rather than redress, serious harms. In such contexts, recognition reforms cannot succeed unless they are joined with struggles for redistribution. In short:
no recognition without redistribution.

The moral here is the need for bifocal vision in feminist politics. This means looking simultaneously through the two analytically distinct lenses of distribution and recognition. Failure to keep either one of those lenses in view can end up distorting what one sees through the other. Only a perspective that superimposes the two can avoid exacerbating one dimension of sexism in the course of trying to remedy another.

The need, in all cases, is to think integratively, as in campaigns for “comparable worth.” Here a claim to redistribute income between men and women was expressly integrated with a claim to change gender-coded patterns of cultural value. The underlying premise was that gender injustices of distribution and recognition are so complexly intertwined that neither can be redressed entirely independently of the other. Thus, efforts to reduce the gender wage gap cannot fully succeed if, remaining wholly “economic,” they fail to challenge the gender meanings that code low-paying service occupations as “women's work,” largely devoid of intelligence and skill. Likewise, efforts to revalue female-coded traits such as interpersonal sensitivity and nurturance cannot succeed if, remaining wholly “cultural,” they fail to challenge the structural economic conditions that connect those traits with dependency and powerlessness. Only an approach that redresses the cultural devaluation of the “feminine” precisely
within
the economy (and elsewhere) can deliver serious redistribution and genuine recognition.

Elsewhere I have discussed other strategies for integrating a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition.
¹³
Here I have argued in general terms that gender justice today requires both redistribution and recognition, that neither alone is sufficient. Thus, I have rebutted arguments that cast the concerns of socialist-feminism as incompatible with those of newer paradigms centered on discourse and culture. Putting aside the usual sectarian blinders, I have proposed conceptions of gender, justice, and recognition that are broad enough to encompass the concerns of both camps. These conceptions are two-dimensional. Spanning both distribution and recognition, they are able to comprehend both the class-like aspects and status aspects of women's subordination.

The concepts proposed here are informed as well by a broader diagnosis of the present conjuncture. On the one hand, I have assumed that gender intersects other axes of subordination in ways that complicate the feminist project. And I have suggested ways of resolving some of the resulting dilemmas—especially for cases in which claims to redress cultural and religious misrecognition seem to threaten to exacerbate sexism. On the other hand, I have situated my approach to feminist politics in relation to the larger shift in the grammar of claims-making “from redistribution to recognition.” Where that shift threatens to abet neoliberalism by repressing the problematic of distributive justice, I have proposed a two-dimensional political orientation. This approach keeps alive the insights of Marxism, while also learning from the cultural turn.

In general, then, the approach proposed here provides some conceptual resources for answering what I take to be the key political question of our day: How can feminists develop a coherent programmatic perspective that integrates redistribution and recognition? How can we develop a framework that integrates what remains cogent and unsurpassable in the socialist vision with what is defensible and compelling in the apparently “postsocialist” vision of multiculturalism? If we fail to ask this question, if we cling instead to false antitheses and misleading either/or dichotomies, we will miss the chance to envision social arrangements that can redress both the class-like and status aspects of women's subordination. Only by looking to integrative approaches that unite redistribution and recognition can we meet the requirements of justice for all.

1
For elaboration of this claim, see Chapters 9 (“Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”) and 10 (“Between Marketization and Social Protection”) in this volume.

2
For a fuller discussion, see Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist' Age,”
New Left Review
212, 1995, 68–93; reprinted in Fraser,
Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition
, New York: Routledge, 1997. See also Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth,
Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange
, London: Verso Books, 2003.

3
Gender, moreover, is not unusual in this regard. “Race,” too, is a two-dimensional category, a compound of status and class. Class, also, may well best be understood two-dimensionally, contra orthodox economistic theories. And even sexuality, which looks at first sight like the paradigm case of pure recognition, has an undeniable economic dimension. Thus, it may well turn out that virtually all real-world axes of injustice are two-dimensional. Virtually all perpetrate both maldistribution and misrecognition in forms where neither of those injustices can be redressed entirely indirectly but where each requires some practical attention. As a practical matter, therefore, overcoming injustice in virtually every case requires both redistribution and recognition. For a fuller discussion, see Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.”

4
For a fuller argument, see Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.”

5
Thus, I reject the essentialist accounts of sexual difference, invoked by some French feminist philosophers to justify
parité
.

6
There is also a fifth difference, which concerns modality. The French law mandates
parité
of actual participation. For me, in contrast, the moral requirement is that members of society be ensured the
possibility
of parity, if and when they choose to participate in a given activity or interaction. There is no requirement that everyone actually participate in any such activity. To take an example from the United States: separatist groups such as the Amish are perfectly entitled to withdraw from participation in the larger society. What they cannot do, however, is deprive their children of the chance to acquire the social competences they would need to participate as peers in case they should later choose to exit the Amish community and join the social mainstream.

7
For a fuller critique of the identity model, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Displacement and Reification in Cultural Politics,”
New Left Review
3, May/June 2000, 107–20.

8
For a fuller account of the status model, see Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.”

9
This standard cannot be applied monologically, however, in the manner of a decision procedure. It must be applied dialogically, through democratic processes of public debate. In such debates, participants argue about whether existing institutionalized patterns of cultural value impede parity of participation and about whether proposed alternatives would foster it. Thus, participatory parity serves as an idiom of public contestation and deliberation about questions of justice. More strongly, it represents
the principal idiom of public reason
, the preferred language for conducting democratic political argumentation on issues of both distribution and recognition. I discuss this issue in “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.”

10
See Nancy Fraser, “Clintonism, Welfare, and the Antisocial Wage: The Emergence of a Neoliberal Political Imaginary,”
Rethinking Marxism
6:1, 1993, 9–23.

11
This was the case with Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was the major means-tested welfare program in the United States. Claimed overwhelmingly by solo-mother families living below the poverty line, AFDC became a lightening rod for racist and sexist anti-welfare sentiments in the 1990s. In 1997, it was “reformed” (aka abolished) in such a way as to eliminate the federal entitlement that had guaranteed (some, inadequate) income support to the poor.

12
Lenore Weitzman,
The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social Consequences for Women and Children in America
, New York: Free Press, 1985. The extent of the income losses claimed by Weitzman has been disputed. But there is little doubt that some losses have resulted.

13
See especially Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.”

7

Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler
^*

Judith Butler's essay “Merely Cultural” is welcome on several counts.
¹
It returns us to deep and important questions in social theory that have gone undiscussed for far too long. And it links a reflection on such questions to a diagnosis of the troubled state of the Left in the current political conjuncture. Most important, however, is Butler's commitment in this essay to identifying, and retrieving, the genuinely valuable aspects of Marxism and the socialist-feminism of the 1970s, which current intellectual and political fashions conspire to repress. Also exemplary is her interest in integrating the best insights of those paradigms with defensible strands of more recent paradigms—including discourse analysis, cultural studies, and poststructuralism—in order to understand contemporary capitalism. These are commitments I wholeheartedly share.

Nevertheless, Butler and I disagree. Our most important disagreements, and the most fruitful for discussion, turn on how precisely to realize this shared project of reclamation and integration. We hold divergent views of what precisely constitutes the enduring legacy of Marxism and the still-relevant insights of socialist-feminism. We also diverge in our respective assessments of the merits of various poststructuralist currents and in our respective views of how these can best inform social theorizing that retains a materialist dimension. Finally, we disagree about the nature of contemporary capitalism.

In order to clear the way for a fruitful discussion of these issues, I want to begin by disposing quickly of what I take to be the red herrings. Butler conjoins her discussion of my book
Justice Interruptus
to a critique of a group of unnamed interlocutors whom she calls “neoconservative Marxists.”
²
Whatever the merits of her critique of this group—a question I shall return to later—her strategy of using it to frame a discussion of my work is unfortunate. Despite her disclaimers to the contrary, readers could draw the erroneous conclusion that I share the “neoconservative Marxist” dismissal of the oppression of gays and lesbians as “merely” cultural, hence as secondary, derivative, or even trivial. They might assume that I see sexual oppression as less fundamental, material, and real than class oppression and that I wish to subordinate struggles against heterosexism to struggles against workers' exploitation. Finding me thus lumped together with “sexually conservative orthodox” Marxists, readers could even conclude that I view gay and lesbian movements as unjustified particularisms that have split the Left and on whom I wish forcibly to impose Left unity.

I, of course, believe nothing of the sort. On the contrary, in
Justice Interruptus
I have analyzed the current decoupling of so-called identity politics from class politics—the cultural Left from the social Left—as a constitutive feature of the “postsocialist” condition.
³
Seeking to overcome these splits and to articulate the basis for a united front of the Left, I have proposed a theoretical framework that eschews orthodox distinctions between “base” and “superstructure,” “primary” and “secondary” oppressions, and that challenges the primacy of the economic. In the process, I have posited both the conceptual irreducibility of heterosexist oppression and the moral legitimacy of gay and lesbian claims.

Central to my framework is a normative distinction between injustices of distribution and injustices of recognition. Far from derogating the latter as “merely cultural,” the point is to conceptualize two equally primary, serious, and real kinds of harm that any morally defensible social order must eradicate. To be misrecognized, in my view, is not simply to be thought ill of, looked down on, or devalued in others' conscious attitudes or mental beliefs. It is rather to be denied the status of a
full partner
in social interaction and prevented from
participating as a peer
in social life—not as a consequence of a distributive inequity (such as failing to receive one's fair share of resources or “primary goods”) but rather as a consequence of
institutionalized
patterns of interpretation and evaluation that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem. When such patterns of disrespect and disesteem are institutionalized—for example, in law, social welfare, medicine, and/or popular culture—they impede parity of participation, just as surely as do distributive inequities. The resulting harm is in either case all too real.

In my conception, therefore, misrecognition is an institutionalized social relation, not a psychological state. In essence a status injury, it is analytically distinct from, and conceptually irreducible to, the injustice of maldistribution, although it
may
be accompanied by the latter. Whether misrecognition converts into maldistribution, and vice versa, depends on the nature of the social formation in question. In precapitalist, pre-state societies, for example, where status simply
is
the overarching principle of distribution, and where the status order and the class hierarchy are therefore fused, misrecognition simply entails maldistribution. In capitalist societies, in contrast, where the institutionalization of specialized economic relations permits the relative uncoupling of economic distribution from structures of prestige, and where status and class can therefore diverge, misrecognition and maldistribution are not fully mutually convertible. Whether and to what extent they coincide today is a question I shall consider below.

Normatively, however, the key point is this: misrecognition constitutes a fundamental injustice, whether accompanied by maldistribution or not. And the point has political consequences. It is not necessary to show that a given instance of misrecognition brings with it maldistribution in order to certify the claim to redress it as a genuine claim for social justice. The point holds for heterosexist misrecognition, which involves the institutionalization of sexual norms and interpretations that deny participatory parity to gays and lesbians. Opponents of heterosexism need not labor to translate claims of sexual status injury into claims of class deprivation in order to vindicate the former. Nor need they show that their struggles threaten capitalism in order to prove they are just.

In my account, then, injustices of misrecognition are as serious as distributive injustices. And they cannot be reduced to the latter. Thus, far from claiming that cultural harms are superstructural reflections of economic harms, I have proposed an analysis in which the two sorts of harms are co-fundamental and conceptually irreducible. From my perspective, therefore, it makes no sense to say that heterosexist misrecognition is “merely” cultural. That locution presupposes the very sort of base-superstructure model, the very sort of economistic monism, that my framework aims to displace.

Butler, in sum, has mistaken what is actually a quasi-Weberian dualism of status and class for an orthodox Marxian economistic monism. Erroneously assuming that to distinguish redistribution from recognition is necessarily to devalue recognition, she treats my normative distinction as a “tactic” aimed at derogating gay and lesbian struggles and imposing a new “orthodoxy.” Contra Butler, I mean to defend the distinction while disclaiming the tactic. To get at the real issues between us, therefore, requires decoupling two questions that are too closely identified in her discussion. The first is a political question concerning the depth and seriousness of heterosexist oppression; on this, I have argued, we do not disagree. The second is a theoretical question concerning the conceptual status of what Butler misleadingly calls “the material/cultural distinction” as it relates to the analysis of heterosexism and the nature of capitalist society; here lie our real disagreements.
⁴

Let me begin unpacking these real disagreements by schematically recapping Butler's critique. As I read it, she offers three principal theoretical arguments against my redistribution/recognition framework. First, she contends that because gays and lesbians suffer material, economic harms, their oppression is not properly categorized as misrecognition. Second, invoking the important 1970s socialist-feminist insight that the family is part of the mode of production, she contends that the heteronormative regulation of sexuality is “central to the functioning of the political economy” and that contemporary struggles against that regulation “threaten the workability” of the capitalist system. Third, after revisiting anthropological accounts of precapitalist exchange, she contends that the distinction between the material and the cultural is “unstable,” a “theoretical anachronism” to be eschewed in social theory. None of these arguments is persuasive, in my view, largely because none affords an adequately differentiated and historically situated view of modern capitalist society. Let me consider the three arguments in turn.

Butler's first argument appeals to some indisputable facts about the harms currently suffered by gays and lesbians. Far from being “merely symbolic,” these harms include serious economic disadvantages with undeniable material effects. In the United States today, for example, gays and lesbians can be summarily dismissed from civilian employment and military service, are denied a broad range of family-based social-welfare benefits, are disproportionately burdened with medical costs, and are disadvantaged in tax and inheritance law. Equally material are the effects of the fact that homosexuals lack the full range of constitutional rights and protections enjoyed by heterosexuals. In many jurisdictions, they can be prosecuted for consensual sex; and in many more, they can be assaulted with impunity. It follows, claims Butler, from the economic and material character of these liabilities, that the “misrecognition” analysis of heterosexism is mistaken.

Butler's premise is true, of course, but her conclusion does not follow. She assumes that injustices of misrecognition must be immaterial and non-economic. Leaving aside for the moment her conflation of the material with the economic, the assumption is on both counts mistaken.

Consider first the issue of materiality. In my conception, injustices of misrecognition are just as material as injustices of maldistribution. To be sure, the first are rooted in social patterns of interpretation, evaluation, and communication, hence, if you like, in the symbolic order. But this does not mean they are “merely” symbolic. On the contrary, the norms, significations, and constructions of personhood that impede women, racialized peoples, and/or gays and lesbians from parity of participation in social life are materially instantiated—in institutions and social practices, in social action and embodied habitus, and in ideological state apparatuses. Far from occupying some wispy, ethereal realm, they are material in their existence and effects.

From my perspective, therefore, the material harms cited by Butler constitute paradigmatic cases of misrecognition. They reflect the institutionalization of heterosexist meanings, norms, and constructions of personhood in such arenas as constitutional law, medicine, immigration and naturalization policy, federal and state tax codes, social welfare and employment policy, equal opportunity legislation, and the like. What is institutionalized, moreover, as Butler herself notes, are cultural constructions of entitlement and personhood that produce homosexual subjects as abjects. This, to repeat, is the essence of misrecognition: the
material
construction, through the institutionalization of cultural norms, of a class of devalued persons who are impeded from participatory parity.

If the harms arising from misrecognition can thus be material, can they also be economic? It is true, as Butler notes, and as I myself expressly noted in
Justice Interruptus,
that some forms of heterosexism inflict economic harms on gays and lesbians. The question is how to interpret them.
⁵
One possibility is to see these economic harms as direct expressions of the economic structure of society, much like Marxists see the exploitation of workers. On this interpretation, which Butler appears to endorse, the economic liabilities of homosexuals would be hard-wired in the relations of production. To remedy them would require transforming those relations. Another possibility, favored by me, is to see the economic harms of heterosexism as indirect (mal)distributive consequences of the more fundamental injustice of misrecognition. On this interpretation, which I defended in
Justice Interruptus
, the roots of economic heterosexism would be the “relations of recognition”: an institutionalized pattern of interpretation and valuation that constructs heterosexuality as normative and homosexuality as deviant, thereby denying participatory parity to gays and lesbians. Change the relations of recognition and the maldistribution would disappear.

This conflict of interpretations raises deep and difficult questions. Is it necessary to transform the economic structure of contemporary capitalism in order to redress the economic liabilities of homosexuals? What precisely is meant by the “economic structure”? Should one conceive the heteronormative regulation of sexuality as belonging directly to the capitalist economy? Or is it better seen as belonging to a status order that is differentiated from, and complexly related to, the economic structure? More generally, do the relations of recognition in late-capitalist society coincide with economic relations? Or do the institutional differentiations of modern capitalism introduce gaps between status and class?

To pursue these questions, let us examine Butler's second argument. Here she invokes the 1970s socialist-feminist insight that the family is part of the mode of production in order to support the thesis that the heteronormative regulation of sexuality is “central to the functioning of the political economy.” It follows, claims Butler, that contemporary struggles against that regulation “threaten the workability” of the capitalist system.