Unruly PracticesPower, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory by Nancy Fraser

Unruly PracticesPower, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory Reviews

• 
  Sry Puteri

  I was reading an article that cited a quote from Nancy Fraser and I was intrigued. After that, I decided to look for her book, then I wanted to start reading her first book. Here I am.
  
  As a non-native speaker of English, I would say that this book is pretty "heavy". If you're not from socio-political background, then there are numerous terms that you might want to learn first before really diving into this book. The term like post-modernism, egalitarianism, poststructuralism, pragmatism, Neoconservatives, and so on.
  
  I might not be able to recall all nor the majority of the content of this book. But there is some fascinating view in the Chapter 7 with the title of Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation. In this essay, she observed that women are subjects of and subject to the social-welfare system in their traditional capacity as unpaid caregivers. It is well known that the sexual division of labor assigns women primary responsibility for the care of those who cannot care for themselves (She leave aside women's traditional obligations to provide personal services to adult males - husbands, fathers, grown sons, lovers - who can very well care for themselves.) Such responsibility includes child care, of course, but also care for sick and/or elderly relatives, often parents. For example, a British study conducted in 1975 and cited by Hillary Land found that three times as many elderly people live with married daughters as with married sons and that those without a close female relative were more likely to be institutionalized, irrespective of degree of infirmity. Thus, as unpaid caregivers, women are more directly affected than men by the level and character of government social services for children, the sick and the elderly.
  
  Thus this analysis observed how women's role in social welfare system and somehow this expected division of labor is unfair from feminist perspective.
• 
  Sunrise

  I became interested in Nancy Fraser because of her writing about care work. She's written about how women's unpaid care work has existed separate from the formal, paid economy, but that economy depends on women's unpaid work. For example, it takes years of effort to produce an adult capable of entering the formal workforce.
  
  Unruly Practices (1989) isn't about that at all. I just thought I would read something by Nancy Fraser and picked up this book more or less at random. I was surprised by what the book turned out to be --- mostly Fraser's responses to the big intellectual trends of the 1980s. She has three essays on Foucault, one on Derrida, one on Rorty, and one on Habermas.
  
  The last section of the book includes the essay on Habermas, and also two essays not "on" anyone but seemingly emerging from her engagement with Habermas. I liked these three essays the best. They are all about how various segments of society function differently, and how we can understand their relationships better if we take that into account. In the Habermas essay, after a very clear and engaging summary of parts of his work, Fraser criticizes Habermas for taking the formal economy to be the world of work, ruled by money and calculation, and taking the home to be a warm and fuzzy place of human meanings. For, after all, power politics takes place at home too, and it is often money and calculation that keep women from leaving abusive spouses (for instance), or that otherwise affect domestic power struggles.
  
  Her two following essays on "the politics of needs interpretation" are very good, very rich, very thought provoking. They are basically about how "the economy" and "the home" function as places for needs to be depoliticized. For instance, when feminists tried to raise the issue of spousal violence, some people would say it's a domestic problem, not a political one. Likewise, many worker demands are dismissed as "politicizing" the economy, which is simply something to be managed.
  
  Fraser then addresses how needs can be politicized, reinterpreted, and acted on. (Does an abusive spouse "need" therapy, or does the abused spouse rather "need" to be provided with means of escape?) She paints a picture of a three-way tug of war between oppositional movements trying to politicize things, reprivatizing movements trying to "redepoliticize" those things, and experts and administrators trying to administer and meet the needs pointed out by oppositional movements, but in such a way that depoliticizes them too. To take up the example of spousal abuse again, when governments take up the administration of women's shelters, they acknowledge a need that the reprivatizers reject, namely that women can be victims of spousal abuse which requires their leaving "home". Yet these women's shelters were usually founded by feminists who used them as an organizing space. The feminist-run shelters emphasize the need to radically reorganize society to end the oppression of women, but the government-run shelters emphasize their "clients" (a telling word) as individual cases in need of individualized assistance, such as therapy.
  
  To move from the end of the book to the beginning, I found these essays to be breezy reading but a bit lightweight. They felt more like philosophical journalism to me than substantive philosophizing. Fraser's hot take about Foucault is that he is normatively confused; he relies on things like liberal views of rights even as he rails against them. I think she is right, but her approach seems to miss the appeal of Foucault entirely. It's telling that she seems utterly untempted to imitate Foucault's vocabulary, postures, or obsessions.
  
  The essay on Derrida --- actually on French Derrideans who, in the 1980s, tried to figure out how to apply their master's work to politics --- is the only one where Fraser seems unable to make what is difficult clear. She mostly relies on the Derridean vocabulary here; maybe because any change of vocabulary would be too hotly contested? Her subjects, including the somewhat famous Jean-Luc Nancy, come across as bumbling and sad, trying desperately to maintain the aloofness of deconstruction while also formulating a specific political position. Their group finally collapsed when it was taken over by neoliberals.
  
  The essay on Rorty was good, and helped me understand some of my own discomforts with his work. Rorty assumes the primacy of liberal discourses to such a degree that any oppositional discourse is necessarily a kind of Romantic individualism. Rorty is best-known for his emphasis on competing vocabularies, that no way of speaking about the world has absolute and final validity, yet he only ever conceptualizes the competition between vocabularies within a liberal framework.
  
  Although I found this book a little lightweight, as I said, I enjoyed reading it. A large part of it is just summaries of the work of other thinkers, but what thinkers! When I reflect that Fraser was reading and responding in real time to the work of Foucault (1984), Derrida (1980-1982), Rorty (1989), and Habermas (1981) in real time, that she got a hold of these books shortly after they were published and then came up with her own responses, I feel very jealous. Who are, who could be, the Foucault vs. Habermas of the 2020s? I don't hate the current intellectual milieu, I certainly find it more congenial than that of the 1980s, but some of the oxygen seems to have left the room. I'll surely be reading more of Nancy Fraser.
  
  Note: the dates I listed for the thinkers are for the books she mentions in the text:
  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol II and III (1984)
  Papers from the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political (1980, 1981, 1982)
  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)
  Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
• 
  C.

  This book reminded me how much I like socialist feminism, despite all its faults. I really should read more of it.
• 
  Morgan Björö

  Nancy Fraser tackles a wide variety of questions in her "Unruly Practices": from different poststructuralist thinkers to normative political and economic practices. Her socialist feminism is intriguing; although I would not dismiss postmodernism on basis of Foucault alone. However, she incorporates certain discursive thinking which takes power "at the margins" into account and delivers a precise & coherent book, with a clear socialist and feminist framework.