Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited

Abstract

In “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” recently published in the New Left Review, Nancy Fraser holds second-wave feminism responsible for having lost the integral, multi-dimensional approach that accounted for its power vis-a-vis capitalism and enabled it to struggle against political, economic, and social inequalities all at once. Representing the trajectory of feminism in relation to three different moments of capitalism (stateorganized capitalism, neoliberalism, and the current crisis), Fraser goes far beyond assessing the relative failure of women in translating feminism’s cultural successes into institutional changes. Despite passing comments here and there aimed at softening the tone, Fraser’s text explicitly accuses secondwave feminism of inadvertently legitimizing the structural transformation of capitalism into neoliberalism. Feminist critiques of stateorganized capitalism, she suggests, became cannon fodder for a post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal system. The feminist critique of the family wage, for instance, called for flexible labor conditions, that deprived women of choice in the face of microcredit schemes designed to integrate them into the market. Feminism’s critique of the welfare state was echoed in Margaret Thatcher’s denunciation of the “nanny state.” Macro economic strategies to fight poverty, Fraser notes, have been abandoned in favor of NGO-based local activism. To oppose the historical cunning that makes second-wave feminism an affiliate of neoliberalism, Fraser invites the women’s movement to engage in self-critique in order to reactivate its “emancipatory promise.” The soundness of this position, we shall argue, is seriously marred by causal and empirical negligence. Fraser claims that the most significant mistake committed by feminists is to have abandoned an integral systemic analysis, but she does not specify who did the abandoning, when, and under which circumstances. She speaks of the fragmentation of the movement, but the culprits remain unidentified (99). Thus, recent academic and practical work on feminist economics, participatory feminist budgeting or global strategic sisterhood is disregarded. So too are the processes and struggles