Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 56, 2009, Pages 97-117

  Fraser, Nancy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64649089391     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. This essay originated as a keynote lecture presented at the Cortona Colloquium on 'Gender and Citizenship: New and Old Dilemmas, Between Equality and Difference' in November 2008. For helpful comments, I thank the Cortona participants, especially Bianca Becalli, Jane Mansbridge, Ruth Milkman and Eli Zaretsky, and the participants in an EHESS seminar at the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale, especially Luc Boltanski, Estelle Ferrarese, Sandra Laugier, Patricia Paperman and Laurent Thévenot.
2. For a discussion of this term, see Friedrich Pollock, 'State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations', in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, London 1982, pp. 71-94.
3. Then, too, economic life in the Communist bloc was notoriously state-organized, and there are those who would still insist on calling it state-organized capitalism. Although there may be some truth in that view, I will follow the more conventional path of excluding the region from this first moment of my story, in part because it was not until after 1989 that second-wave feminism emerged as a political force in what were by then ex-Communist countries.
4. For a fuller account of the 'Westphalian political imaginary', see Fraser, 'Refraining Justice in a Globalizing World', NLR 36, November-December 2005.
5. borrow the term 'resignification' from Judith Butler, 'Contingent Foundations', in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, London 1994.
6. For this change in the grammar of political claims, see Fraser, 'From Redistribution to Recognition?', NLR 1/212, July-August 1995.
7. Hester Eisenstein, 'A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization', Science and Society, vol. 69, no. 3, 2005.
8. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London 2005 [Paris 1999]. For an interpretation of psychoanalysis as the spirit of'the second industrial revolution', which concludes by positing feminism as the spirit of the 'third', see Eli Zaretsky, 'Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism', Constellations, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008.
9. Sonia Alvarez, 'Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO "Boom"', International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 1, no. 2,1999;
10. Carol Barton, 'Global Women's Movements at a Crossroads', Socialism and Democracy, vol. 18, no. 1, 2004.
11. Uma Narayan, 'Informal Sector Work, Microcredit and Third World Women's "Empowerment": A Critical Perspective', paper presented at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, May 2005, Granada; Eisenstein, 'A Dangerous Liaison?'.
12. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY 1998.
13. This formula of'feminism and its doubles' could be elaborated to good effect with respect to the 2008 US Presidential election, where the uncanny doubles included both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.
14. I owe this point to Eli Zaretsky (personal communication). Cf. Eisenstein, 'A Dangerous liaison?'.
15. In some periods, but not always. In many contexts, capitalism is more apt to adapt to than to challenge traditional authority. For the embedding of markets, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 2nd edn, Boston 2001.
16. Susan Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, New York 1989, p. 138.