Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN: 1989) by Nancy Fraser

for the Handbuch Kritische Theorie: Werke—Begriffe—Wirkung, ed. Robin Celikates, Rahel
Jaeggi, and Martin Saar (J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart: 2019)

by Christopher F. Zurn, christopher.zurn@umb.edu

The 1989 publication of Nancy Fraser’s Unruly Practices confirmed the arrival of a major new
voice in critical social theory and feminist theory. Insightfully following “Marx’s definition of
critique as ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’” (113), Fraser engages a
row of major theories to see whether or not they do in fact help clarify the major social
movements of the 1970’s and 80’s. Her simultaneous focus on both intellectual developments
and political practices places her squarely within the tradition of critical social theory even as she
engages significant developments in feminist, structuralist, Marxist, poststructuralist,
deconstructive, radical, contextualist, neo-pragmatist and anti-essentialist modalities of thought
on the way to developing her own socialist-feminist critical theory.

The book comprises eight articles previously published in eminent journals and a new,
introductory, essay defending the place and import of politically engaged radical intellectuals.
The first three articles assess the advantages and disadvantages of Foucault’s work for the type
of engaged political theorizing characteristic of critical social theory. Three further essays
critically interrogate the social and political theories of Richard Rorty, 1980’s French Derrideans,
and Habermas with a like focus. All six essays pointedly ask: when we take a capacious view of
each oeuvre, to what extent are their characteristic conceptual apparatuses, social theories, and
political analyses insightful and relevant, or distorting and irrelevant, for illuminating the central
struggles and wishes of oppositional social movements occurring in the late welfare-state
capitalist democracies of North America and Europe? The title of her famous essay on
Habermas, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” captures the fundamental question she asks
of Foucault, of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, and of Rorty as well. The final two articles, in
combination with the introductory essay, begin to develop Fraser’s own theory—what she calls
“a socialist-feminist critical theory of late capitalist political culture” (161)—in the context of
struggles over the interpretation of women’s and men’s needs when those needs are addressed or
ignored by state welfare provisions and by the political conflicts that arise around government
action. I’ll focus on the three most influential groups of articles: the Foucault articles, the
Habermas essay, and the two pieces on feminist politics of need interpretation.

Fraser’s very first academic article, originally published in 1981 in the leading critical theory
journal Praxis International (now called Constellations), was one of the most important early
interventions into debates the English-speaking world about Foucault’s work, particularly his
middle period genealogies of disciplinary power and knowledge. The subtitle of the article
succinctly summarizes Fraser’s assessment: ‘Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.’ In
this and the other two essays on Foucault—a 1983 Salmagundi article and a 1985 article in
Ethics (the premiere journal of practical philosophy)— Fraser argues for three main claims. First,
Foucault’s empirical social theory is extremely important for critical theorists, as it recommends
that we look beyond the coercive power of the state and the economic power of the marketplace

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if we want to assess the full range of modalities and spaces where contemporary power operates.
In particular, new forms of disciplinary and bio power require political theorists and activists to
think more deeply about the importance of both everyday practices and expert discourses, and
hence to attend to capillary power in ostensibly non-political spaces beyond the state and the
market, spaces such as the family, prisons, the military, schools, sexuality, medicine, psychiatry
and social science itself. Fraser’s second main claim is that, however empirically insightful,
Foucault’s work nevertheless cannot supply the kind of normative insight and practical guidance
that we should expect from a critical social theory. While some theorists had already leveled the
old philosophical charge of self-refuting relativism against Foucault’s normative claims, Fraser’s
pathbreaking work went beyond this mere abstract meta-ethical debate. She fully interrogates a
number of different possible normative stances that Foucault toys with at different points as he
rejected the dominant modern framework of humanistic, enlightenment values of autonomy,
rights, legitimacy, reciprocity and mutual recognition. Was this a merely philosophical rejection
of foundationalism, or a substantive rejection of humanist values tout court? Was it a rejection of
modernist values as beside the point in disciplinary societies, or was he recommending a new
alternative framework of values celebrating the resistance of bodies and pleasures? Fraser works
through these and other options, showing the limits of each, ultimately concluding that, given its
confusions, critical theory could not profit from Foucault’s own normative self-presentations.
Fraser’s third main claim is that, in the absence of any convincing alternative normative
framework articulated by Foucault, critical theory should take a page from feminist
reconceptualizations of autonomy and domination, and undertake an interdisciplinary
reassessment of modernist and humanist values to fulfill the essential normative tasks of social
criticism: identifying domination, distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of
resistance, suggesting what change is desirable or worthy, and so on. In short, she recommends
we take seriously Foucault’s empirical social theory, agree with his anti-foundationalism, but
reject his ungrounded and confusing calls for some kind of post-humanist moral framework of
criticism.

Fraser’s pathbreaking 1985 article on Habermas—republished in 15 other places—starts from a

simple question: how useful is Habermas’s theory of communicative action when applied to
struggles against women’s subordination? Assaying various elements of Habermas’s theory in
the light of feminism, Fraser argues that some can be quite useful while others are more
problematic. In brief, she finds the greatest limitations rooted in Habermas’s sociotheoretic
distinction between lifeworld and system and in the critical theory of colonization that he
develops from it. Fraser points out that patriarchal norms of male-dominance are just as evident
in the systems domains of the official economy and the administrative state as they are in the
lifeworld domains of the nuclear family, education and associational life. Even though
patriarchal norms may operate differently in different areas of social life, from the point of view
of feminism there is a relatively monotonous similarity to women’s subordination across the
system-lifeworld distinction. Furthermore, this entails that the key struggles are not found, as
Habermas claims, in social movements that form at the boundary between system and lifeworld,
struggling against the ‘colonization’ of normatively structured action contexts by systems media
of money and power. Rather, there is a more fundamental struggle between feminism on the one
side and, on the other, the forms of male domination evinced in both systems and lifeworld
contexts. Yet Fraser does find that, suitably reinterpreted in gendered terms, some of Habermas’s
social theory is usefully recuperable for feminism. In particular, she lauds his much more subtle

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four-term understanding of the split between public and private domains than is usually posited.
Consider the ways in which all of the following roles are deeply gendered: public political
citizenship and private client of the welfare state, and, public wage earner in the official
economy and private unpaid childrearer in the household. Finally, Fraser also finds that the basic
Habermasian opposition between action based on communicatively achieved agreement and that
based on unthinking acceptance of pre-given social conventions is crucial for thinking about the
emancipatory potential of feminist social movements.

If Habermas’s specific critical theses about the important fault lines evinced in contemporary
societies is inadequate from the point of view of feminism, what would a more illuminating
“socialist-feminist critical theory of welfare state capitalism” (138) look like? The last two
essays in Unruly Practices, one published in Hypatia (the leading feminist philosophy journal) in
1987 and the other in Ethics in 1989, begin to develop such a theory in terms of the politics of
need interpretations. Here Fraser thematizes political contestation over the welfare state’s
provision of benefits intended to meet individuals’ and family’s needs. In order to address a
relatively new idiom of politics—the politics of need interpretation—distinct from older idioms
of rights and interests, Fraser develops a complex social theory that analyzes the interconnections
between capitalism, the welfare state, bureaucratic forms, expert knowledge, social movements,
and crosscutting interpretative schemes regarding both needs and gender. Fraser takes up the
feminist charge to rethink the relation between the personal and the political by rethinking the
gender subtext of multifarious and complexly overlapping public / private splits: between the
official (masculine) political domain of parliaments and administrative agencies and the
unofficially political domains of the (feminine) family and the economy; between the official
economic domain of paid (masculine) labor and the unofficial economic domain of unpaid
(feminine) domestic labor; and between two-tiers of welfare state provisions for (masculine)
labor-market based benefits and for (feminine) family-based benefits. This then leads to a
political theory focused on the ‘social’, defined as “a relatively new societal arena … [that] is a
site of discourse about people’s needs, specifically about those needs that have broken out of the
domestic and/or official economic spheres that earlier contained them as ‘private matters’” (156).
On this account of how feminists should turn the personal into the political, social movements
engage in interpretive politics whereby dominant, androcentric understandings of needs as
merely private affairs settled by natural gender relations are challenged, de-naturalized, and de-
privatized through participatory dialogue and contestation. Alongside this social theory is a
normative and critical project of “sorting out the emancipatory from the repressive possibilities
of needs talk” (183). She highlights the difficult political balancing act for feminists of, one the
one hand, demanding that the state should provide services addressing needs that were
previously taken to be merely private family matters, and on the other, warding off the effects
that come along with bureaucratic provision of needs such as standardization, psychologization
of collective issues, therapeutic paternalism and depoliticization.

These first major theoretical interventions in Fraser’s still-expanding oeuvre have continued to
be quite influential over the two to three decades since their first appearance in journals and
Unruly Practices. Consider simply that, collectively, the eight articles comprising the core of the
book have been published elsewhere at least 54 times, a testament to their insightfulness and
fecundity to thinkers from many different disciplines and across many distinct conversations. To
begin, they have influentially framed the uptake in English of the politically-relevant thought of

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Foucault, Rorty, Derrida and Habermas. No one can re-read any of these scholars or their
epigones after reading Fraser’s take without a keen sense of exactly where their respective
theories shine light on key issues or alternatively where they obfuscate and confuse. Of particular
power is Fraser’s insistence that we must separate Foucault’s insightful empirical analyses of
practices connecting disciplinary power, expert knowledge and discursive regimes from his
confusing and internally contradictory self-understanding of the moral framework for evaluation
and critique of those phenomena. Equally powerful is Fraser’s incisive reading of the gender
subtext of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and the resulting critique of its systems-
lifeworld framework. Her work is paramount for its nuanced and important account of the many
uses and abuses of the public-private distinction, especially as that has been subject to both
critical scrutiny and innovative use across various feminist social theories and movements.
Finally, her own theory construction shows that we need to attend to the insights of cultural
analyses of evaluative rhetorics and interpretive discourses without losing sight of the complex
nexus of relations between culture and other structural features of social life: institutionalized
practices and norms, status hierarchies, the bureaucratic welfare state, the formal economy of
neo-liberalizing capitalism, the informal economy of reproductive and care work, the various
public spheres of formal politics, civil society and social movement activism, and, diverse
personality formations and subject positions, including gender.

In general, Fraser’s powerful Auseinandersetzungen between the Frankfurt school tradition and
poststructuralism, deconstruction and neo-pragmatism, combined with her own critical discourse
theory of the politics of need interpretation within welfare state capitalism, show critical theory
at its best in bringing together theoretical reflections and practical political concerns. For, by
gauging these different theoretical strategies in terms of their usefulness for analyzing and
critically orienting various social movements—especially the unruly practices of second and
third wave feminisms—Fraser has reanimated the older thematic of the theory-praxis relation.
But now, that theme is not treated epistemologically or methodologically, but rather in
substantive terms: what can and can’t we do with these various critical theoretical frameworks to
illuminate, evaluate, and orient leftist and feminist social movements in their struggles against
domination and oppression?

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