Fortunes of Feminism by Nancy Fraser

Prologue to a Drama in Three Acts
    From today’s vantage point, the history of second-wave feminism appears as a drama in three acts. Emerging from the ferment surrounding the New Left, the “movement for women’s liberation” began life as an insurrectionary force, which challenged male domination in state-organized capitalist societies of the postwar era. In Act One, feminists joined with other currents of radicalism to explode a social-democratic imaginary that had occulted gender injustice and technicized politics. Insisting that “the personal is political,” this movement exposed capitalism’s deep androcentrism and sought to transform society root and branch. Later, however, as utopian energies began to decline, second-wave feminism was drawn into the orbit of identity politics. In Act Two, its transformative impulses were channeled into a new political imaginary that foregrounded “difference.” Turning “from redistribution to recognition,” the movement shifted its attention to cultural politics, just as a rising neoliberalism declared war on social equality. More recently, however, as neoliberalism has entered its current crisis, the urge to reinvent feminist radicalism may be reviving. In an Act Three that is still unfolding, we could see a reinvigorated feminism join other emancipatory forces aiming to subject runaway markets to democratic control. In that case, the movement would retrieve its insurrectionary spirit, while deepening its signature insights: its structural critique of capitalism’s androcentrism, its systemic analysis of male domination, and its gender-sensitive revisions of democracy and justice.
    Historians will eventually explain how neoliberalizing forces succeeded, for a time at least, in defusing the more radical currents of second-wave feminism—and how (one hopes) a new insurrectionary upsurge managed to reanimate them. For critical theorists, however, there remains a prior task: to analyze alternative grammars of the feminist imaginary in order to assess their emancipatory potential. Here the goal is to ascertain which understandings of androcentrism and male domination, which interpretations of gender justice and sexual democracy, which conceptions of equality and difference are likely to be most fruitful for future engagements. Above all, which modes of feminist theorizing should be incorporated into the new political imaginaries now being invented by new generations for Act Three?
    Though not written with this aim in mind, the essays collected here can nevertheless be read today as preliminary attempts at such a reckoning. Composed over the past twenty-five-plus years as interventions in theoretical debates, they document major shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s. For this volume, I have grouped them in three parts, which correspond to the three acts of the drama I have just sketched. In Part I, I have included pieces that seek to marry a feminist sensibility to a New Left critique of the welfare state. Targeting not only the latter’s androcentrism, but also its bureaucratic organization and near-exclusive focus on distribution, these essays situate second-wave feminism in a broader field of democratizing, anti-capitalist struggles. Reflecting the historical shift from mainstream social democracy to the new social movements, they defend the latter’s expanded understanding of politics, even as they also criticize some influential ways of theorizing it. Part II charts subsequent alterations in the feminist imaginary. Noting the broader cultural shift from the politics of equality to the politics of identity, these chapters diagnose dilemmas facing feminist movements in a period of ascendant neoliberalism. Troubled by the relative neglect of political economy at the fin de siècle, they criticize the eclipse of “struggles for redistribution” by “struggles for recognition,” even as they also