Fortunes of Feminism (2 page)

Nevertheless, as I argue in “What's Critical About Critical Theory?” (1985), Habermas failed to actualize the full radical potential of his own critique. Substantializing analytical distinctions between public and private, symbolic reproduction and material reproduction, system integration and social integration, he missed their gender subtext and naturalized androcentic features of the social order. Lacking the resources to adequately conceptualize male domination, he ended up suggesting that “juridification” in familial matters led necessarily to colonization—hence that feminist struggles to expand women's and children's rights were problematic. The effect was to jeopardize the analytical insights and practical gains of second-wave feminism.

In general, then, this volume's first chapter develops a critique of an important left-wing critic of social democracy. Chapter 2, in contrast, marks a shift to constructive feminist theorizing. Aiming to put to work the lessons of the previous chapter, I sketch a gender-sensitive critique of the structural dynamics and conflict tendencies of late-capitalist societies. “Struggle over Needs” (1989) reconceptualizes the welfare state by resituating distribution within discourse. Building on Habermas's insights, it employs a version of the linguistic turn to underwrite the expanded understanding of politics associated with second-wave feminism. The key move here is a shift from the usual social-democratic focus on conflicts over need satisfaction to a new, democratic-feminist focus on the “politics of need interpretation.” The effect is to replace the distributive paradigm, which posits a monological objectivism of basic needs, with a gender-sensitive communicative paradigm, which construes the interpretation of needs as a political stake. This approach differs from Habermas's in a crucial respect. Instead of naturalizing hegemonic notions of public and private, I treat those categories, too, as discursively constructed, gender- and power-saturated objects of political struggle; and I link the politicization of needs to feminist struggles over where and how to draw the boundaries between “the political,” “the economic,” and “the domestic.” The aim is to repoliticize a range of gender issues that Habermas unwittingly took off the table.

“Struggle over Needs” also borrows from, and revises, another great New Left–inspired critic of the democratic welfare state: Michel Foucault. Like Foucault, I maintain that needs politics is implicated in the constitution of subject positions, on the one hand, and of new bodies of disciplinary expertise, on the other. But unlike him, I do not assume that welfare professionals monopolize the interpretation of needs. Rather, situating “expert discourses” alongside both the “oppositional discourses” of democratizing movements and the “reprivatization discourses” of neoconservatives, I map conflicts among these three types of “needs-talk.” Thus, where Foucault assumed a single, disciplinary logic, my approach discerns a plurality of competing logics—including some with emancipatory potential, capable of challenging male domination. Drawing not only on empirical insights but also on normative distinctions, it aims to guide a feminist activism that would transform social reality.

If “Struggle over Needs” maps the contours of welfare-state discourse in the 1980s, the next chapter examines a term that became central in the 1990s. Coauthored with the feminist historian Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency'” (1994) reads the changing vicissitudes of that “keyword of the welfare state” as a barometer of shifting political winds. Written at the height of the “welfare reform” frenzy in the US, when attacks on “welfare dependency” dominated policy debates, this essay charts the process by which that characteristic neoliberal preoccupation came to supplant the longstanding social-democratic focus on combating poverty.

“A Genealogy of ‘Dependency' ” excavates buried layers of discursive history that continue to weigh on the present. Mapping changing configurations of political economy and gender dynamics, this chapter analyzes two epochal historical shifts in the meanings of “dependency”: first, the shift from a preindustrial patriarchal usage, in which “dependency” was a non-stigmatized majority condition, to a modern industrial male-supremacist usage, which constructed a specifically feminine and highly stigmatized sense of “dependency”; and second, the subsequent shift to a postindustrial usage, in which growing numbers of relatively prosperous women claim the same kind of “independence” that men do, while a more stigmatized but still feminized sense of “dependency” attaches to “deviant” groups who are considered “superfluous.” Along the way, Gordon and I demonstrate that racializing practices play a major role in historical reconstructions of “dependency,” as do changes in the organization and meaning of labor. Questioning current assumptions about the meaning and desirability of “independence,” we conclude by sketching a “transvaluative” feminist critique aimed at overcoming the dependence/independence dichotomy.

If the dependency essay provides a feminist critique of postwar welfare states, the following chapter seeks to envision a feminist alternative. The key, I claim in “After the Family Wage” (1994), is to modernize the obsolete underpinnings of current arrangements—especially the presupposition of long-lasting, male-headed nuclear families, in which well-paid, securely employed husbands support non-employed or low-earning wives. This assumption, which descends from industrial capitalism and still undergirds social policy, is wildly askew of postindustrial realities: the coexistence of diverse family forms, increased divorce and non-marriage, widespread female participation in waged work, and more precarious employment for all. It must give way, in the welfare states of the future, to arrangements that can institutionalize gender justice.

What, accordingly, should a postindustrial welfare state look like? “After the Family Wage” evaluates two alternative scenarios, each of which qualifies as feminist. In the first, the age of the family wage would give way to the age of the “Universal Breadwinner.” Presupposed by liberals and “equality feminists,” this approach would guarantee social security chiefly by facilitating women's wage-earning—above all, by reforming labor markets and providing employment-enabling services such as day care and elder care. In a second vision of postindustrial society, the era of the family wage would give way to the era of “Caregiver Parity.” Favored by conservatives and “difference feminists,” this approach would support informal carework in families—especially through caregiver allowances. These approaches assume divergent conceptions of gender justice: whereas the first aims to conform women's lives to the way men's lives are supposed to be now, the second would elevate caregiving to parity with breadwinning in order to “make difference costless.” Yet neither approach, I argue here, is wholly satisfactory. Whereas the Universal Breadwinner model penalizes women for not being like men, the Caregiver Parity model relegates them to an inferior “mommy track.” I conclude, accordingly, that feminists should develop a third model—“Universal Caregiver”—which would induce men to become more like women are now: people who combine employment with responsibilities for primary caregiving. Treating women's current life patterns as the norm, this model would aim to overcome the separation of breadwinning and carework. Avoiding both the workerism of Universal Breadwinner and the domestic privatism of Caregiver Parity, it aims to provide gender justice and security for all.

In general, then, the chapters comprising Part I advance a radical critique of the welfare state from a feminist perspective. Exuding an optimistic sense of expansive possibility, they assume that feminist movements could help to remake the world, dissolving male-supremacist structures and overturning gender hierarchies. Simultaneously presupposing and radicalizing the socialist imaginary, they validate the efforts of second-wave feminists to expand the political agenda beyond the confines of social democracy. Repudiating welfare paternalism, they shift the focus of critical scrutiny from class distribution to gender injustice broadly conceived. Whether critical or constructive, these chapters seek to render visible, and criticizable, the entire panoply of structures and practices that prevent women from participating on a par with men in social life.

Part II, in contrast, evinces a more sober mood. Written during a period of waning left-wing energies, the chapters included here map the shift from early second-wave feminism to identity politics. Interrogating various currents of feminist theorizing, they document the process by which the cultural turn seemed to swallow up political economy, even as it should have enriched it. In addition, these essays track the growing centrality of claims for recognition within feminist activism. Situating those claims in historical context, they probe the fateful coincidence of the rise of identity politics with the revival of free-market fundamentalism; and they analyze the dilemmas feminists faced as a result. More generally, Part II diagnoses the shrinking of emancipatory vision at the fin de siècle. Seeking to dispel the mystique of cultural feminism, these chapters aim to retrieve the best insights of socialist-feminism and to combine them with a non-identitarian version of the politics of recognition. Only such an approach, I maintain, can meet the intellectual and political challenges facing feminist movements in a period of neoliberal hegemony.

“Against Symbolicism” (1990) scrutinizes one influential current of theorizing that unwittingly helped to divert the feminist imagination into culturalist channels. On its face, of course, nothing could be more opposed to identity politics than Lacanian psychoanalysis, which associates the wish for a stable identity with a devalorized “imaginary register.” Nevertheless, as I argue here, feminist efforts to appropriate that theoretical paradigm inadvertently undermined their own professed anti-essentialism by failing to challenge some basic assumptions of Lacanian thought. Moreover, and equally unfortunate, by slighting political economy and avoiding institutional analysis, they ended up colluding with cultural feminists in making language and subjectivity the privileged foci of feminist critique.

“Against Symbolicism” discloses the self-defeating character of Lacanian feminism. Building on my earlier efforts to theorize the discursive dimension of women's subordination, this chapter assesses the relative merits of two ideal-typical approaches to signification: a structuralist approach, which analyzes symbolic systems or codes, and a pragmatics approach, which studies speech as a social practice. If one's goal is to analyze the workings of gender domination in capitalist societies and to clarify the prospects for overcoming it, then the pragmatics approach has more to offer.

“Against Symbolicism” elaborates this claim via critical discussions of Jacques Lacan (as read by feminists) and Julia Kristeva. Although both thinkers are widely viewed as poststructuralists, I contend that both continue the structuralist legacy in important respects. Thus, feminist efforts to appropriate Lacan have foundered on what I call “symbolicism”: the homogenizing reification of diverse signifying practices into a monolithic, all-pervasive, and all-determining symbolic order. In Kristeva's case, this problem is complicated but not overcome by the incorporation of an anti-structuralist, “semiotic” moment, intended to historicize “the symbolic.” The effect is to establish an unending oscillation between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives: in one moment, Kristeva naturalizes a reified maternal identity; in another, she nullifies women's identities altogether.

The feminist quarrel over essentialism is broached more directly in Chapter 6. Diagnosing the shriveling of the feminist imagination, “Feminist Politics in the Age of Recognition” (2001) charts the progressive uncoupling of recognition from redistribution in feminist theorizing and feminist politics. Troubled by the prevalence of one-sided, culturalist feminisms, this essay proposes to marry the best insights of the cultural turn with the nearly forgotten but still indispensable insights of socialist-feminism. Rejecting sectarian constructions that cast those perspectives as mutually incompatible, I analyze sexism as a two-dimensional mode of subordination, rooted simultaneously in the political economy and status order of capitalist society. Overcoming gender subordination, I argue, requires combining a feminist politics of recognition with a feminist politics of redistribution.

Developing such a politics is not easy, however, as gender cuts across other axes of subordination, and claims for gender justice can conflict with other presumptively legitimate claims, such as claims for minority cultural recognition. It follows that feminists should eschew “single-variable” perspectives, which focus on gender alone, in favor of approaches that can handle hard cases, where injustices intersect and claims collide. To adjudicate such cases, such as the “headscarf affair” in France, I introduce two conceptual innovations. First, at the normative-philosophical level, I introduce the view of justice as
parity of participation
. Designed to identify two different kinds of obstacles (economic and cultural) that prevent some people from participating as peers in social interaction, the principle of participatory parity overarches both dimensions of (in)justice—(mal)distribution
and
(mis)recognition—and allows us to bring them together in a common framework. Second, at the social-theoretical level, I propose to replace the standard “identity” model of recognition with a
status model
. Aimed at avoiding the former's tendency to reify identity and displace struggles for redistribution, the status model posits that what deserves recognition is not group-specific identities or cultural contents, but the equal standing of partners in interaction. Applying these two concepts, the chapter offers a novel reading of the headscarf affair and a sympathetic critique of French feminist understandings of
parité
. More fundamentally, it proposes a way of repositioning feminist politics in the “age of recognition.”