Fortunes of Feminism. From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis by Nancy Fraser

Fortunes of Feminism. From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis Reviews

• 
  Steffi

  Nancy Fraser is without a doubt one of the most original and exciting critical theorists of our time.
  Premise: the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism is altering the landscape of feminist theory, i.e., feminist theorists cannot avoid the question of capitalist society (I wish!).
  In her ten essays in three parts (all great reads) which span 25 years of her writing, she traces the radical origins of second wave feminism which sought to enrich rather than supplant Marxism/materialist paradigms before feminism was drawn in the orbit of 'identity politics' ending up with today's degenerated neoliberal 'feminism' and 'gender studies' as a ridiculous branch of cultural theory which has lost its historic links with Marxism/ political economy (e.g. from redistribution to recognition).
  Fraser then goes on to outline a two-dimensional conceptions of gender and justice: class-like within the political economy (distribution) and as status subordination (misrecognition), the latter not being merely superatructural to the former (breaks my Marxist heart). As such, redressing gender injustice requires changing both the economic structure and the status order of contemporary society (dialectics, surprise, surprise). Something along the lines of Gramscianizing Foucault and Foucauldianizing Gramsci :)
  Finally, Fraser brings in Polanyi's account of capitalist crisis as a starting point for feminist theorizing on the 21st century capitalist society.
• 
  Emily

  don't feel like i can really offer a rating on this because a lot of it went straight over my head. i was expecting it to be a little more aimed at laypersons, and it really, really isn't - incredibly dense text that i struggled to parse, no doubt because i have basically no education in sociology. so i struggled with the technical terms, i guess. on the few moments that i could grasp the gist, it seemed comprehensive, literate, powerful. but for the most part i had trouble keeping up.
• 
  Anna

  This is a good collection if you don't understand what feminism and neoliberalism have to do with each other. However, it is very strange that Fraser co-wrote an entire essay on the rhetoric surrounding welfare "dependency" and did not examine or even refer to the similar rhetoric about disability payments and/or SSDI. Feminist theory seems to CONSISTENTLY leave out disability and disabled people, which is a shame--but the absence is even clearer in this collection. Given that there are many feminist economic and disability-related economic issues that intersect, I wish Fraser had at the very least acknowledged those connections.
• 
  Christianne

  Amazing, though not for those with low comfort with or little patience for "academic writing", as I can see from previous reviews.
  
  I was disappointed at first to realize that this was a collection of essays written over the last 25 years, rather than a cohesive piece analyzing the development of feminism. You're often thrown into the middle of a debate about a specific topic, for example Lacanian symbolicism, with little context. However, what emerges from this collection of detailed analyses is a consistent eye for the core questions that enable an evolving yet comprehensive vision for what justice should be and how we might get there. Fraser is tenacious in rejecting simple paradigms to ask the difficult questions, and forces the reader to accept that justice and feminism require the simultaneous pursuit of sometimes conflicting goals. To simplify would be to lose a critical facet. She writes with precision and clarity, laying out her planned arguments and then fully delivering. Somehow she manages to gently eviscerate counterarguments.
  
  I particularly liked her articulation of justice as "parity of participation," which requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers. Having three mutually irreducible dimensions enables a revival of focus on political economy through (mal)distribution, while fully recognizing the real harms through culture with (mis)recognition without regressing to identity politics. Finally, she recognizes that in our globalized world, Westphalian borders have little relation to justice claims, and includes (mis)representation. These three dimension might be understood as economy (class), culture (status), and meta-politics. As the chapters are written over time, the reader is able to follow along in her development of this argument, and see how it can be applied.
  
  I also love her focus on discourse as a critical site for feminist struggle, recognizing that language and rhetoric play a critical role in shaping our reality. The last chapter was a little limp, but otherwise a very solid book. It is clear why Nancy Fraser is such an influential social philosopher.
  
  PS - The "prologue" is highly informative, contextualizing the articles and tracing the arc of second wave feminism - which also enables you to easily pick which chapters would be of interest, if you don't want to read it all.
• 
  Daniel

  Some writers circle gently around an argument, inviting the reader to figure it out well before it's spelled out explicitly. Nancy Fraser does not do that. This is an impressive collection of essays which leaps for the throat, tearing through philosophers and generally coming out on top. She does a superb job of challenging the work of both Judith Butler and the Lacanians. I agree with most of Fraser's conclusions: the chapter on dependency (co-authored with a historian, which shows) is excellent, and her arguments for a 'universal caregiver' model are well-made. Her central argument - that feminism has been resignified in a dangerous liaison with neoliberalism, simultaneously a movement for emancipation and increasingly an 'empty signifier of the good' - is, I think, correct and worth making. Perhaps above all, Fraser emphasises the importance of 'process' in a way which chimes with my own thoughts - and, unsurprisingly, I appreciated her several references to Raymond Williams...
  
  At the same time, there was also quite a bit that I took exception to. I was initially uncomfortable about her recourse to a Weberian distinction between 'class', 'status' and 'party' (and especially the narrow economistic view of class which this can leave unchallenged), although I was somewhat persuaded by her argument that this is a historically specific phenomenon. Still, I'm not sure she does enough to show that this holds - it certainly feels like the opposite, that claims about 'class' and 'status' in the contemporary situation are usually rolled together, inseparable. It isn't quite like the distinction between 'the economic' and 'the political' or the other distinctions which Fraser discusses - it isn't a distinction which feels like the common sense of capitalism.
  
  Another problem emerges in Fraser's description of three kinds of injustice: maldistribution, misrecognition, and misframing. I think this is useful analytically, although per Fraser's quasi-Weberianism these are ideal-typical distinctions rather than in any sense distinctions which emerge out of the logic of capitalism - it wouldn't make sense to talk about maldistribution and misrecognition diverging, etc. Still, the notion of 'misframing' is particularly useful and Fraser is right to try and understand the significance of globalisation for notions of justice. Fraser spends a lot of time making clear that none of these forms of injustice is primary, but I fear that was time wasted - although it's fraught with danger, it's useful to try and establish what's determining 'in the last instance' as opposed to surrendering to a messy totality. More significantly, perhaps, I think there's a severe limitation in the way that Fraser discusses 'maldistribution' - something which she pushes up against when discussing the 'universal caregiver'. Fraser, for all her discussion of need, still tends to conceive of justice in terms of work rewarded - taken a few steps further, her argument could have been more forcefully made into an attack on capitalism and production-for-profit. I don't see how there can be any just distribution based on rewarding work (whether that's productive in the Marxist sense or otherwise) in a world dominated by markets: how could you possibly avoid inequality between families headed by two-workers and those headed by one? I suspect that's Fraser's point, but I'm not sure this comes through with much clarity - the answer isn't just a 'universal caregiver' model in which everyone is potentially a care-worker and where care-work is rewarded as productive work, but a society in which production is for need and not profit and where distribution is according to need and not ability. Ultimately that means shifting from Fraser's notion of 'maldistribution' towards a sense of production-injustice; away from the sphere of distribution, towards the sphere of production.
  
  Relatedly, I found the final chapter engaging with Karl Polanyi to be - at least by comparison - very poor. Although I agree with the criticisms that she makes, there's still too much which Fraser accepts needlessly - we can agree that Polanyi poses a useful challenge to mainstream economic thinking without having to start adopting his terms and methods. She describes Polanyi as detailing a capitalist crisis which stretched from the industrial revolution to the Second World War - it's a sense of crisis which can be rhetorically useful (i.e. capitalism is crisis) but analytically a bit weak, losing the specificity of crisis events like 1929 or 2007. More significantly, I do not think there are adequate grounds for Fraser's wholesale acceptance of Polanyi's marketization/protection distinction. Marketization is relatively coherent as a phenomenon arising from the logic of capitalist accumulation, but 'protection' is such a messy idea that it really defies attempts to make use of it. It is futile to try and discuss the protectionism of some parts of the capitalist class, and the 'protections' sought by e.g. peasants resisting enclosure, as if they are part of the same movement. They are not. Fraser's articulation of 'emancipation' poses a useful challenge to Polanyi, but the idea that marketization/protection/emancipation are three different forces pulling in three different directions (and sometimes the same ones) is next to worthless. By focusing on these forces - described largely in policy terms - Fraser (and Polanyi) avoid talking in terms of class (or race or gender). Rather than a transnational capitalist class competing (through marketization *and* particular protectionisms) with a nationally-restricted capitalist class (which again relies on particular combinations of marketization and protection), and both against a proletariat which can form alliances of convenience with either of them, there are advocates of 'protection' and advocates of 'marketization'. Rather than an internally differentiated proletariat struggling continuously against itself over gender, race, etc - there are advocates of 'emancipation' and its opponents. Even a two-dimensional approach (in which marketization/protection form one axis, domination/emancipation another) would be more coherent than what Fraser offers - but I still don't think there is a need to resort to focusing on 'forces' in this manner. Fraser's use of Karl Polanyi comes across as the work of someone afraid to refer to Karl Marx except in a footnote.
  
  For all Fraser's astute description of the turn in second-wave feminism, in combination with neoliberalism, away from 'social justice', it's a turn which she remains locked within. She is right to suggest that much of Western feminism has been bureaucratised, made to serve the interests of capital, divorced from the masses, etc. But her appeal remains sadly limited to the academics and GNO workers whose influence she has lamented - it winds up as less an appeal to the masses, more an appeal for better policy. Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva were right to rebuke Fraser for failing to cite feminist thinking emerging from the Third World (
  https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1438...). Fraser is right to place emphasis upon 'process' in her conception of justice, but she doesn't do enough to integrate and interpret the feminism emerging from real processes of struggle. If she did so, this book would be even more useful - a real work of feminist philosophy, and not merely a (very good, worthwhile, well-argued) dispute with feminist philosophers.
• 
  Paya

  3,5 Dobra, ale gęsta i teoretyczna książka. Dla mnie najlepszym i najciekawszym rozdziałem był ten o historii zależności, o tym jak kulturalnie postrzegamy zależność, o tym jak ewoluował obraz osób zależnych od państwa/pomocy socjalnej i jak wpisywało i wciąż wpisuje się w stereotypy związane z kobietami/kobiecością. Teksty traktujące o gospodarce/naukach społecznych czytało mi się dobrze, za to polemika z konstruktami psychologicznymi, przykładowo Kristevy, to było dla mnie wyzwanie, któremu nie do końca podołałam. Nie jest to łatwa lektura, na dodatek to zbiór esejów napisanych w przeciągu 25 lat, więc raczej skupiający się na klasie średniej i w przeważającej mierze za kontekst biorący Stany Zjednoczone, ale jak ktoś lubi sobie poczytać takie książki, to polecam. :)
• 
  Naty

  An interesting academic read, but -- cards on the table - this is a very heteronormative/eurocentric collection of essays on feminism, claims-making, solidarity and building political arguments around typically western middle-class feminist issues, like unpaid care work and the gender pay gap. Dr Fraser tackles contemporary political demands that arise from conflicts between gender norms and neoliberalism (again, gotta stress - this is traditional academics waxing about eurocentric/ethnocentric/ middle-class US focused) POV. While I didn't find any of the arguments particularly 'new' or refreshing. However, her style of building arguments and some of her takes on issues of inequality had potential and could be used to build future arguments using more recent work by feminists and activists. Is this for the lay person? Nah. Could she have simplified her writing? Totally. While I found the book *seriously lacking* in class-based, racial or queer arguments, she does sprinkle examples here and there on differences between white/black feminist groups in the 80s and dedicated a chapter to responding to a critique by Judith Butler. I found a few chapters very interesting and worth trekking through the deep political philosophical texts; particularly where she dives into her framework - without spoiling, I would say this chapter stood out as the one to read by lay persons and activists. But I think Nancy Fraser is very much a product of her time, and there's still a lot to work with and build from using more recent issues/events/intersectional feminist black/queer/religious theorists.
• 
  Stephanie

  Some of the ideas and essays in this book have so thoroughly restructured the way I think about gender and labor, especially reproductive labor, that I can't remember what it was like not to have read it. Amazing, incredible, work, especially the following essays:
  
  - "A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State" - a how-to manual for how Democrats and Republicans successfully dismantled a social safety network by twisting words and meaning
  - "After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment" - if you're ever frustrated with the leftist tendency to end stirring, teardown critiques with feeble handmotionining towards a "sketch" for the future, look no further than Nancy's thorough outline for a future society that is clear, cogent, and just may save us all
  - "Feminist Politics in the Age of Recognition" - swoon. for everyone sick of the schism between identity and class politics (it's yes AND, friends, yes AND)
  - "Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History"
  
• 
  Dan

  I'm always a little disappointed when a single-authored book turns out to be a collection of essays. But the articles collected here build beautifully on each other, constituting a sweeping analysis of the historically ambiguous relationship between feminism and capitalism over the past half-century – with a respectful but spectacularly devastating takedown of Judith Butler an added bonus.
• 
  Rafa

  Some essays in this collection are better than others (I personally skipped over most of the first chapter on Habermasian philosophy, while I found the chapters on "dependency", the family wage, and feminist politics "in the age of recognition" particularly useful). Overall an important read that shows how feminism, which once drew upon Marxist thinking, can and must be reconciled with political economy. Also great for anyone interested in the problem of "identity politics": Fraser asserts that we need identity politics (or rather, a re-worked politics of "recognition", as she would call it) but we need to go beyond neoliberal interpretations of identity to re-assert a "politics of redistribution" (as she would call it, maybe a bit reductively) if we want true social justice.
• 
  Emma Sea

  NTS: requested via library
• 
  Benjamin Eskola

  This book is actually a collection of essays, and so its quality is slightly variable; although there is an overarching theme with several of the essays building on those which came before, in places it can be repetitive and in others it feels disconnected. At times, also, it could be excessively philosophical: critiques of Habermas and Kristeva were mostly over my head, having read no Habermas and almost no Kristeva; and the language used in places is oddly linguistic (the author talks, for example, about the ‘grammar’ of social movements, as if social movements are nothing but discussion). However, the chapters that dealt with more concrete matters were interesting; she begins to flesh out a model which could be used to address both economic and social/cultural issues, avoiding the tendency to focus on either one to the exclusion of the other; later, she expands on this model to address the tendency of globalized neoliberalism to negate responsibility for both economic and social issues.
• 
  Chiara

  Interessante, forse a tratti poco scorrevole. La prima parte è molto teorica, adatta a chi ha una buona base filosofica (soprattutto Habermas). L'ultima è un po' ripetitiva, mentre quella centrale è un excursus storico fatto molto bene.
  La Fraser sa di cosa parla e come spiegarlo.
• 
  Kieran

  The first few essays on welfare didn't really hit home for me, even though I recognise how great those ideas are, I feel that you can tell they're a part of a dated discourse. The rest are absolutely fantastic!
• 
  Chris Tolve

  This is a collection of Frasier's essays centered on the relationship between feminism, gender and capitalism. I only give it three stars because they are written in a very academic style and consequently contain a lot of fluff and redundancy. The book length could probably have been cut in half and still preserved all of the content. Still, there is much of value. By far, Her genealogy of dependency is the best essay in the book. The historical shift it describes from viewing wage labor as a form of dependency to viewing it as independence for the worker, in contrast to dependence on the state or other social institutions, is fascinating and extremely important at a theoretical level. Frasier's critique of certain strands of feminism for abetting neoliberalism or failing to integrate both redistribution and recognition politics into a unified movement, which is present throughout most of the book, is also prescient, even though I am ambivalent about her normative conclusions. Her revision of Polanyi in the final essay is similarly useful.
• 
  Matthew

  Very engaging introduction to feminist theory, the weaving-in of socialist theory throughout provided for a very rich understanding of why any just liberating movement must run along economic, political and cultural lines in tandem.
  
  Stand-out essays for me were 'A Genealogy of "Dependency"' and 'Feminist Politics in the Age of Recognition'. In both there were truly exciting moments as things clicked that are now intuitive in the language used by the left of society.
  
  Through all the essays it's interesting to see how the language of feminist theory develops as used by Fraser and maps to the wider usage by society as a whole.
• 
  Otrapixel

  Le doy 5 estrellas porque el reclamo que le hace Habermas es maravilloso: Fraser demuestra la lectura ante la ausencia del género como un concepto determinante para la creación de las sociedades. Teoría de la acción comunicativa al separar lo reproductivo/productivo demuestra que no sólo los filósofos eran ciego ante los reclamos de las feministas, la academia también.
  
  (Igual siento que debió agregar ensayos que dejaran clara la división entre la categoría del reconocimiento y representación, porque agrega un ensayo que habla de una dimensión binaria entre la Justicia redistributiva y de reconocimiento. )
• 
  Lauren Kennedy

  As someone else has said, I don't feel I could give an honest review of this book other than to say it felt like wading through treacle. I do have some (not a lot of) sociological and philosophical knowledge, as well as a little understanding of the history of feminism, and I still struggled. Critical Theory is known for being impenetrable, and this is no exception, sadly.
  
  Perhaps for the more knowledgeable on crit theory! I'm sure enjoyable for others, with some incisive analysis, it's clearly an important contribution.
• 
  Brian

  Wanted an introductory book on feminist theory and its development. This book had all the theory, but none of the introduction that I needed. I struggled in many parts, especially those that seemed geared toward supporting/refuting philosophers I had never read, or in some cases heard of.
  
  There were essays covering three distinct eras of feminist thought in the 20th Century. I think I understand the way the essays were organized, but the essays themselves and their arguments were harder for me to parse.
• 
  Charlie Sanjaya

  Fortune of Feminism is a thoroughly great read. More than ever, we need a feminism that is critical to neoliberalism yet able to explore alternative beyond tamed capitalism under social democratic model. The last chapter is especially important and highly recommended to be a central question we need to ask as a movement.
• 
  Tara

  3.5 - a difficult read without a really solid background in social philosophy and critical theory.
• 
  Eleonora

  Necessario. Una riflessione sul ruolo della donna e il progressivo abbandono dello stato.
• 
  Sofia

  3.5
• 
  Marina

  One of the best books I've read. A very good summary and a brilliant analysis of the feminism, it's history and it's possible future.
• 
  Zoya

  I love her and I wish I could think like her.
• 
  Olan McEvoy

  Nancy Fraser is one of the most perceptive philosophers and social critics of our time. This book is a collection of her essays dealing with feminism’s relationship to capitalism and work over the period of 30 years.
  
  While each essay is individually excellent, the book is introduced as if they will make up a coherent work, rather than being separate essays. In spite of this, the essays often open the topic of the book as if it needs to be introduced and explained in detail again and again. After the first couple of essays this becomes really tiresome, which isn’t helped by the academic style of the texts.
  
  This isn’t to criticise the content of Fraser’s work - I think she’s truly brilliant and I particularly found her rebuttal of criticisms she has received from postmodern feminists to be convincing. Instead my issue with the book is that given a bit of re-writing and structuring, it could be a much more readable and coherent work. Instead it sort of feels like you’re going around in circles.
  
  I look forward to reading more of Fraser’s works which are actual books rather than an essay collection dressed up as a book.
• 
  Nathan Fisher

  I didn't find this a particularly well-selected or structured collection -- at times, begging for elaboration; at others, noticeably redundant -- but Fraser remains a clear-headed and bold thinker; while I think some of her attempts to 'unify' disparate tendencies remains incomplete, some of the work here is fantastic -- particularly the sections on competing notions of social 'needs,' the genealogy of notions of 'dependency,' her uncompromising corrective to certain Lacanian feminists, and her ability to identify exactly the tendencies within second-wave feminism that so neatly dovetailed with those of neoliberalism (while refusing to collapse the movement into those).
• 
  Georgina Jiménez

  Nancy Fraser es indispensable para analizar críticamente el (los) feminismo(s) y el concepto de justicia desde una mirada de interseccionalidad.
  En algunos momentos el libro tiende a repetirse (entendible en una colección de ensayos escritos a lo largo del desarrollo de sus propias teorías) pero es un excelente desarrollo cronológico de cómo las intenciones, los fines y las interpretaciones del feminismo y la justicia van cambiando de acuerdo al encuadre ideológico predominante; los errores que se cometen, las posibles soluciones y el porvenir teórico y práctico completan el análisis de lo que hace falta y lo que se puede hacer. Muy recomendable.
• 
  Sara Salem

  Last time I read a book that is a collection of essays just thrown together. Her intro was brilliant which is why I decided to read the book, only to find out that the chapters don't match because they are all essays on different topics and are not brought together well. Sad, since her work is so important.
• 
  Muireann

  This rating reflects the poor selection of essays that make up this collection, rather than a judgement on Frasers writing as such, which probably can't be ranked by stars!