Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the \ by Nancy Fraser

Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the \ Reviews

• 
  Andrea

  A enjoyable range of essays on a range of issues, what I love is the constant attempt to evaluate theory in terms of its practical and emancipatory possibilities, can it in fact enable us to achieve the world we want? She struggles with bringing together critical theory and postmodernism/structuralism in a very fruitful way, using language that can reach the broadest audience possible in line with her own politics, and in my opinion tackles some of the most important issues faced by the radical left...sadly enough really, because she wrote this 13 years ago now.
• 
  Jayu Eleuthéria

  Like most essay collections, it oscillates between brilliant portions and pure filler.
• 
  Tanay Bakshi

  Nancy Fraser has given remedies to solve the problem of two types of injustices - economic injustice and cultural injustice meted out to the marginalised collectives. But, the major focus is on the bivalent collectives and what remedies are proper in order to fete justice to bivalent collectives like gender or race who face both kind of injustices - economic as well as cultural.
  Fraser has intentionally complexed her writings as she herself isn’t able to arrive at a conclusion. Her post-socialist critique is to the point and accurate. A nice read it is.
• 
  Caeli Corvere

  Fraser já levantava questões muito pertinentes já na década de 90. Livro fenomenal, ainda que em certo sentido, um pouco datado, mas ainda extremamente relevante.
• 
  Sry Handini Puteri

  Things that I think should be highlighted from the book.
  
  1. Fraser argues how status quo (in 1974) were dwelled in identity politics. This resulted into decoupling of cultural politics from social politics. This was problematic because it limits the option to address justice. She believed that economic injustice and cultural injustice is intertwined, thus redistributing income, reorganizing the division of labor and transforming economic structure is critical. Even though these analyses lack practical elaboration.
  
  2. There is a significant concept of difference, equality, and equity. Equality meaning that treating women exactly like men. This is problematic because equality presuppose “the male as norms”. She argued that it entails treating women exactly like men according to male-defined standards will disadvantaged women as it doesn’t acknowledge and recognize the substantial difference between women and men.
  
  3. Seven normative principle of gender equity:
  
  a. The antipoverty principle: prevent poverty in achieving gender equity. More care for solo-mother family
  
  b. The anti exploitation principle: preventing exploitation of vulnerable people to achieve equity. Needy women with no other way to feed themselves and their children, for example, are liable to exploitation by abusive husbands, by sweatshop foramen, and by pimps. Welfare provision should aim to mitigate exploitable dependency. The availability of an alternative source of income enhances the bargaining position of subordinates in unequal relationships. The non-employed wife who knows she can support herself and her children outside her marriage has more leverage within it.
  
  c. The income-equality principle: distribution of real per capita income. Women suffer from “hidden poverty” due to unequal distribution within families. This rules the unequal pay for equal work and undervaluation of women’s labor and skills.
  
  d. The leisure-time-equality principle: equal distribution of leisure time. Women engage both in paid work and unpaid primary care work simultaneously and women are more likely to suffer disproportionately from “time poverty”. Women “felt tired most of the time””. It is unfair because men only require a single shift for men and a double shift work for women.
  
  e. The equality-of-respect principle: Equality of respect requires recognition of women’s personhood and recognition of women’s work. Currently women are only seen as sexual objects for the pleasure of male subjects. The principle of equal respect rules out social arrangements that objectify and deprecate women.
  
  f. The anti-marginalization principle: Social policy should promote women’s full participation on a par with men in all areas of social life – in employment, in politics, in the associational life of civil society. Women shall not be enclaved in a separate domestic sphere nor removed from the life of the larger society. This requires provision of the necessary conditions for women’s participation, including day care, elder care, and provision for breast-feeding in public.
  
  g. The Anti-androcentrism principle: Women ought not to assimilate to men. Social policy should not require women to become like men nor to fit into institutions designed for men in order to enjoy comparable levels of well-being.
  
  4. In postindustrial society would give way to the age of the universal breadwinner. It aims to achieve gender equity principally by promoting women’s employment. The point is to enable women to support themselves and their families through their own wage-earning. The breadwinner role is to be universalized, in sum, so that women, too, can be citizen-workers. In order to do this, it requires major new programs and policies of employment-enabling services, such as day care and elder care aimed at freeing women from unpaid responsibilities so they could take full-time employment on terms comparable to men. Another essential element is a set of workplace reforms aimed at removing equal-opportunity obstacles, such as sex discrimination and sexual harassment. Reforming the workplace requires reforming the culture. None of this would work, however, without one additional ingredient; macroeconomic policies to create full-time, high-paying, permanent jobs for women. These would have to be true breadwinner jobs in the primary labor force, carrying full, first-class social insurance entitlements. Social insurance, finally, is central to Universal Breadwinner.
  
  
  
• 
  Otrapixel

  De acuerdo con todo menos con eso de que ser mujer puede llegar a ser un elemento periférico para algunas (además porque la interseccionalidad como herramienta feminista parte de análisis transversalmente a las mujeres)
  
  Uh, y la discusión que le da a Fraser y que da sobre el trabajo sexual? 20/10. Fraser es maravillosa.
• 
  Daniel Menezes

  Alguns dos textos são muito bons, em especial o que fala de democracia radical e o que prpcura analisar o dilema entre igualdade e diferenciação no âmbito das lutas identitárias e pós-socialistas. A maioria das análises tem como eixo o feminismo.
• 
  Michael

  In the introduction to Justice Interruptus (1997), Nancy Fraser outlines three conditions of what she calls the "postsocialist" condition, the post-1989 state of the Left in the West: 1) "the absence of any credible progressive vision of an alternative to the present order" (1); 2) a shift in discussion from redistribution to recognition; and 3) "resurgent economic liberalism" that increases economic inequality (2-3).
  
  While a politics of recognition often seems at odds with a politics of redistribution, Fraser argues in Chapter 1 that these two goals need not be mutually exclusive. She outlines the limitations of redistributive affirmation (liberal welfare state) and recognition affirmation (mainstream multiculturalism) (example: affirmative redistribution ignores how the economy is gendered; 29), and argues instead for a combination of transformative redistribution (socialism is the model here) and recognition (deconstruction) (27-31).
  
  Chapter 3 responds to Habermas's conception of the liberal public sphere, offering a few corrections from feminist scholarship: there was and is not a single public, nor should we prefer a single public sphere; difference cannot be bracketed; private interests should be considered in public, when the case can be made that they are of public concern (e.g., spousal abuse); and we shouldn't necessarily have a sharp distinction between civil social and the state. Fraser also offers the term subaltern counterpublic in which "members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (81). Regarding the public/private distinction, Fraser argues that much is delegitimized as being of public interest because it has been domesticated or personalized, and that critical theory needs to investigate further this distinction (88). She calls for strong publics, publics that both form public opinion and engage in decision-making, as opposed to weak publics that often don't affect decision-making (90).
  
  Chapter 4 explores the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debate of the 1990s, during which Thomas was able to claim his private life off-limits but Hill was not (105). She writes, "To be subject to having one's privacy publicly probed is to be feminized" (107). Additionally, the public/private distinction is also raced (112). Publicity is also limited in power: it is not, as liberal theory contends, necessarily simply a matter of making something private into something public (116).
  
  Chapter 5 outlines "a genealogy of 'dependency,'" showing how the term had positive (or at least normal) connotations of general subordination, but as it became gendered and raced differently, it became individualized and psychologized, and came to mean deviation (125-144).
  
  I've omitted summaries of Fraser's other chapters, because these are the ones that felt most salient to my work.
• 
  Fritz

  nancy fraser is an interesting, if facile commentator on grander issues of politics; but an engaging critic of habermas. what a waste.
• 
  Kristin

  thoughtfully written critical theory(ies) of justice that gave me quite a bit to think about. the book is more a collection of essays that sometimes reads disjointed.