Fortunes of Feminism (30 page)

Actually, two different variants of the argument are discernible here, one definitional, the other functionalist. According to the first variant, (hetero)sexual regulation belongs by definition to the economic structure. The economic structure simply
is
the entire set of social mechanisms and institutions that (re)produce persons and goods. By definition, then, the family is part of this structure, as the primary site for the reproduction of persons. So, by extension, is the gender order, which standardizes the family's “products” to conform to one of two, and only two, mutually exclusive, seemingly natural kinds of persons: men and women. The gender order, in turn, is held to presuppose a mode of sexual regulation that produces and naturalizes heterosexuality, while simultaneously producing homosexuality as abject. The conclusion drawn by Butler is that the heteronormative regulation of sexuality is a part of the economic structure by definition,
despite the fact that it structures neither the social division of labor nor the mode of exploitation of labor power in capitalist society.

This definitional argument has an air of Olympian indifference to history. As a result, it risks accomplishing too much. Stipulating that the mode of sexual regulation belongs to the economic structure by definition—even in the absence of any impact on the division of labor or the mode of exploitation—threatens to dehistoricize the idea of the economic structure and drain it of conceptual force. What gets lost is the specificity of capitalist society as a distinctive and highly peculiar form of social organization. This organization creates an order of specialized economic relations that are relatively decoupled from relations of kinship and political authority. Thus, in capitalist society, the link between the mode of sexual regulation, on the one hand, and an order of specialized economic relations whose raison d'être is the accumulation of surplus value, on the other, is attenuated. It is far more attenuated, certainly, than in precapitalist, pre-state societies, where economic relations are largely adumbrated through the mechanisms of kinship and directly imbricated with sexuality. In the late-capitalist society of the twentieth century, moreover, the links between sexuality and surplus value accumulation have been still further attenuated by the rise of what Eli Zaretsky has called “personal life”: a space of intimate relations, including sexuality, friendship, and love, that can no longer be identified with the family and that are lived as disconnected from the imperatives of production and reproduction.
⁶
In general, then, contemporary capitalist society contains “gaps”: between the economic order and the kinship order; between the family and personal life; between the status order and the class hierarchy. In this sort of highly differentiated society, it does not make sense to me to conceive the mode of sexual regulation as simply a part of the economic structure. Nor to conceive queer demands for the recognition of difference as misplaced demands for redistribution.

In another sense, moreover, the definitional argument accomplishes very little. Butler wants to conclude that struggles over sexuality are economic, but that conclusion has been rendered tautologous. If sexual struggles are economic by definition, then they are not economic in the same sense as are struggles over the rate of exploitation. Simply calling both sorts of struggles “economic” risks collapsing the differences, creating the misleading impression that they will synergize automatically, and blunting our capacity to pose, and answer, hard but pressing political questions as to how they can be
made
to synergize when in fact they diverge or conflict.
⁷

This brings me to the functionalist variant of Butler's second argument. Here the claim is that the heteronormative regulation of sexuality is economic, not by definition, but because it is functional to the expansion of surplus value. Capitalism, in other words, “needs” or benefits from compulsory heterosexuality. It follows, according to Butler, that gay and lesbian struggles against heterosexism threaten the “workability” of the capitalist system.

Like all functionalist arguments, this one stands or falls with the empirical relations of cause and effect. Empirically, however, it is highly implausible that gay and lesbian struggles threaten capitalism in its actually existing historical form. That might be the case if homosexuals were constructed as an inferior but useful class of menial laborers whose exploitation was central to the workings of the economy, as African Americans, for example, have been. Then one could say that capital's interests are served by keeping them “in their place.” In fact, however, homosexuals are more often constructed as a group whose very existence is an abomination, much like the Nazi construction of Jews; they should have no “place” in society at all. No wonder, then, that the principal opponents of gay and lesbian rights today are not multinational corporations, but religious and cultural conservatives, whose obsession is status, not profits. In fact, some multinationals, notably American Airlines, Apple Computers, and Disney, have elicited the wrath of such conservatives by instituting gay-friendly policies, such as domestic partnership benefits. They apparently see advantages in accommodating gays, provided they are not subject to boycotts or are big enough to withstand them if they are.

Empirically, therefore, contemporary capitalism seems not to require heterosexism. With its gaps between the economic order and the kinship order, and between the family and personal life, capitalist society now permits significant numbers of individuals to live through wage labor outside of heterosexual families. It could permit many more to do so—provided the relations of recognition were changed. Thus we can now answer a question posed earlier: the economic disabilities of homosexuals are better understood as effects of heterosexism in the relations of recognition than as hard-wired in the structure of capitalism. The good news is that we do not need to overthrow capitalism in order to remedy those disabilities—although we may well need to overthrow it for other reasons. The bad news is that we need to transform the existing status order and restructure the relations of recognition.

With her functionalist argument, Butler has resurrected what is in my view one of the worst aspects of 1970s Marxism and socialist-feminism: the over-totalized view of capitalist society as a monolithic “system” of interlocking structures of oppression that seamlessly reinforce one another. This view misses the “gaps.” It has been resoundingly and persuasively critiqued from many directions, including the poststructuralist paradigm that Butler endorses and the Weberian one adapted by me. Functionalist systems theory is one strand of 1970s thought that is better left forgotten.

The question of what should replace functionalism bears on Butler's third argument against my redistribution/recognition framework. This argument is deconstructive. Far from insisting that the roots of heterosexism are economic as opposed to “merely” cultural, its point is to deconstruct the “material/cultural distinction.” That distinction, claims Butler, is “unstable.” Important currents of neo-Marxian thought, ranging from Raymond Williams to Althusser, have irretrievably thrown it into “crisis.” The knock-down argument comes from the anthropologists, however, notably Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. Their respective accounts of “the gift” and “the exchange of women” reveal that “primitive” processes of exchange cannot be assigned to one side or the other of the material/cultural divide. Being both at once, such processes “destabilize” the very distinction. Thus, in invoking the material/cultural distinction today, Butler contends, I have lapsed into a “theoretical anachronism.”

This argument is unconvincing for several reasons, the first of which is that it conflates “the economic” with “the material.” Butler assumes that my normative distinction between redistribution and recognition rests on an ontological distinction between the material and the cultural. She therefore assumes that to deconstruct the latter distinction is to pull the rug out from under the former. In fact, the assumption does not hold. As I noted earlier, injustices of misrecognition are from my perspective just as material as injustices of maldistribution. Thus, my normative distinction rests on no ground of ontological difference. What it
does
correlate with, in capitalist societies, is a distinction between the economic and the cultural. This, however, is not an ontological distinction but a social-theoretical distinction. The economic/cultural distinction, not the material/cultural distinction, is the real bone of contention between Butler and me, the distinction whose status is at issue.

What, then, is the conceptual status of the economic/cultural distinction? The anthropological arguments do shed light on this matter, in my view, but not in a way that supports Butler's position. As I read them, both Mauss and Lévi-Strauss analyzed processes of exchange in pre-state, precapitalist societies, where the master idiom of social relations was kinship. In their accounts, kinship organized not only marriage and sexual relations, but also the labor process and the distribution of goods; relations of authority, reciprocity, and obligation; and symbolic hierarchies of status and prestige. Neither distinctively economic relations nor distinctively cultural relations existed; hence the economic/cultural distinction was presumably not available to the members of those societies. It does not follow, however, that the distinction is senseless or useless. On the contrary, it can be meaningfully and usefully applied to capitalist societies, which unlike so-called “primitive” societies
do
contain the social-structural differentiations in question.
⁸
Moreover, it can also be applied
by us
to societies that lack these differentiations in order to indicate how they differ from ours. One can say, for example, as I just did, that in such societies a single order of social relations handles both economic integration and cultural integration, matters that are relatively decoupled in capitalist society. This, moreover, is precisely the spirit in which I understand Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. Whatever their intentions regarding “the economic” and “the cultural,” we gain less from reading them as having “destabilized” the distinction than from reading them as having historicized it. The point, in other words, is to historicize a distinction central to modern capitalism—and with it modern capitalism itself—by situating both in the larger anthropological context and thereby revealing their historical specificity.

Thus, Butler's “destabilization” argument goes astray at two crucial points. First, it illegitimately generalizes to capitalist societies a feature specific to precapitalist societies, namely, the absence of a social-structural economic/cultural differentiation. Second, it erroneously assumes that to historicize a distinction is to render it nugatory and useless in social theory. In fact, historicization does the contrary. Far from rendering distinctions unstable, it renders their usage more precise.

From my perspective, then, historicization represents a better approach to social theory than destabilization or deconstruction.
⁹
It allows us to appreciate the social-structurally differentiated and historically specific character of contemporary capitalist society. In so doing, it also enables us to locate the anti-functionalist moment, the possibilities for countersystemic “agency” and social change. These appear not in an abstract, transhistorical property of language, such as “resignification” or “performativity,” but rather in the actual contradictory character of specific social relations. With a historically specific, differentiated view of contemporary capitalist society, we can locate the gaps, the non-isomorphism of status and class, the multiple contradictory interpellations of social subjects, and the many complex
moral imperatives
that motivate struggles for social justice.

Seen from this perspective, moreover, the current political conjuncture is not adequately grasped by a diagnosis centered on the putative resurgence of orthodox Marxism. It is better grasped, rather, by one that forthrightly acknowledges, and seeks to overcome, splits in the Left between socialist/social-democratic currents oriented to the politics of redistribution, on the one hand, and multiculturalist currents oriented to the politics of recognition, on the other. The indispensable starting point for such an analysis must be a principled acknowledgment that
both sides have legitimate claims
, which must somehow be harmonized programmatically and made to synergize politically. Social justice today, in sum, requires
both
redistribution
and
recognition; neither alone will suffice.

On this last point, I feel certain, Butler and I agree. Despite her reluctance to invoke the language of social justice, and despite our theoretical disagreements, both of us are committed to reclaiming the best elements of socialist politics and to integrating them with the best elements of the politics of the “new social movements.” Likewise, we are both committed to retrieving the genuinely valuable strands of the neo-Marxian critique of capitalism and to integrating them with the most insightful strands of post-Marxian critical theorizing. It is the merit of Butler's essay, and I would hope of my own work as well, to have put this project on the agenda once again.

^*
I am grateful for helpful comments from Laura Kipnis and Eli Zaretsky.

1
Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” in
Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics
, ed. Kevin Olson, London: Verso Books, 2008, 42–56.

2
Nancy Fraser,
Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition
, New York: Routledge 1997.

3
See especially the book's Introduction and Chapter 1, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist' Age.''