civil society

family

justice

public sphere

occupation / innovator as

philosopher

university teacher

nationality

American

political scientist

scientific organization

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

sociologist

innovator in the field of

feminist theory

political theory

social theory

gender studies

is grounded in a distinction between public/private that reflects particular configurations of power and norms that can be contested, and struggled over, not pre-given interests which are regarded as immutable.

Fraser (1992) argues that rather than accepting this liberal separation as pre-given, we need to acknowledge that where the dividing line between public and private is drawn, and who draws it, reflects particular configurations of power and norms that can be contested, not pre-given interests which are regarded as immutable. The drawing of the public/private distinction is therefore something to be struggled over. Certainly the public/private divide is not fixed, as we saw in the last century by the struggles of the labour movement and the feminist movement in particular. The former has succeeded in making issues such as health and safety at work matters of public concern, whilst the latter has succeeded in placing domestic violence on the public agenda.

is not a mere 'haven in a heartless world' but rather, it straddles a caring lifeworld and the larger system of male-dominated economic distribution and labor-exchange (i.e. Housework).

Yet Fraser thinks it is a mistake to see the family in this way. We do not understand families adequately, she suggests, if we see them only as 'havens in a heartless world.' Instead, we need to understand them as institutions that straddle lifeworld and system. They are sites of labor-exchanges (unpaid in the case of household work that women typically perform) and economic distributions (typically controlled by male heads of households). Consequently, to conceive of emancipatory struggles as struggles against the colonization of the lifeworld, as Habermas does, can serve an ideological function. With regard to the family, we risk supporting and reinstating a domain, not of free and equal communicative action, but of male domination and female subordination. As Fraser puts the point, a critical theory that wishes to avoid this danger must be careful not to 'put the male-headed nuclear family and the state-regulated official economy on two opposite sides of the major categorical divide.'

is necessarily understood from the standpoint of a distribution of resources, a recognition of different kinds of contributions and linguistic representation.

distribution (of resources), recognition (of the varying contributions of different groups), and representation (linguistic).

is, in fact, not open to all but is constituted by exclusions (by gender, social status, ethnicity and property ownership).

number of significant exclusions.' In contrast to Habermas' assertions on disregard of status and inclusivity, Fraser claims that the bourgeois public sphere discriminated against women and other historically marginalized groups: '. . . this network of clubs and associations philanthropic, civic, professional, and cultural was anything but accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the arena, the training ground and eventually the power base of a stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a 'universal class' and preparing to assert their fitness to govern.' Thus, she stipulates a hegemonic tendency of the male bourgeois public sphere, which dominated at the cost of alternative publics (for example by gender, social status, ethnicity and property ownership), thereby averting other groups from articulating their particular concerns.

Nancy Fraser

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Nancy Fraser