Nancy Fraser

They love identity politics because they want, they think that representation rather than re-distribution is important.

Recognition rather than redistribution in Nancy Fraser's, um, phrasing is the most important thing.

So liberals believe, like, [laughs] we just need to be seen.

Minorities need to be seen.

The texts highlight that feminism's most outstanding contribution to political economy is revitalizing and expanding the concept of social reproduction.

Authors like Stefania Abarca and Nancy Fraser really hammer this home.

Nancy Fraser's work is particularly piercing here.

She argues that capitalism is much more than just an economic system.

It is an institutionalized social order, and that order absolutely could not function without a vast backdrop of cheap, historically female-dominated labor performing the everyday tasks of social reproduction completely outside the logic of the market.

Uh, it sounds way beyond anything that I could have imagined, not just me, any Palestinian that you could talk to.

The idea of seeing this sort of unprecedented global moment of Gaza, or as, as Nancy Fraser called it, uh, the Gaza world moment, where you see that millions of people care very deeply about this topic, it's extraordinary.

The idea of seeing a wave of Western countries recognizing Palestine, imposing sanctions on settlers and settlements, banning trade with settlements, all of it would have been completely unthinkable.

Just the day before October 7th, none of this would have ever happened.

Before that, he completed an MA in conflict revolution at Georgetown.

His scholarship and art making have taken him from the Kennedy Center to Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre.

With support from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, among others, his theater work has tackled subjects ranging from asylum seekers, imagined futures to the legacy of partition, to anti-Muslim hatred.

Today, we're talking about his new book, Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester, published by Routledge, a study of how British Muslims navigate identity, belonging, and public life through performance, drawing on two years of fieldwork in Manchester, including in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.

But then you also see these choices to remove oneself, to kind of step away, you know, to, to, uh, create a distance, um, because it's so overwhelming what has happened and also because there is this, this sort of like notion of sidestepping.

You know, we ...

In a lot of kind of like Western scholarship, I think in a lot of sort of like sociological scholarship, we have sort of this like idea of either people are resisting the dominant narratives against them or they are like running away from them.

Mm-hmm.

Um, then there's Iris Marion Young, um, Throwing Like a Girl, 1980, which I know about.

Nancy Fraser, American, um, political economist and philosopher.

Judith Butler, which most of you will know about, who, uh, has... is focuses on what she calls performativity.

Um, Carol Gilligan, who does critique of atomistic...

Um, and all of that has got to be contested.

But the quotes, very quickly, we've just before a round off, are from Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Nancy Fraser, "Justice requires social arran- arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life." Judith Butler, "The body has its invariably public dimension, constituted as a social phenomenon.

In the public sphere, my body is and is not mine." Carol Gilligan, "In the different voice of women lies the truths of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection." Nancy Chodorow, "The basic feminine sense of itself is connected to the world.

Oh, when we're crying in front of the camera? Um, there's a psychological idea that the, uh, that wholeness can be achieved through recognition and visibility.

In fact, Nancy Fraser wrote an essay from the '90s called Recognition or Redistribution? Because at that time, identity politics was just coming into the fore of left liberal agitations.

The idea of social transformation and revolution seemed to recede farther and farther away, and she as a Marxist was trying to deal with the fact that we were having to almost choose between trying to get recognition for more identities, plural, plural identities, gender identities, especially for women at the time, or should we be fighting for redistribution of surplus value and corporate profits? And at the end, she hedged her bets and she said, "We need recognition and redistribution." Well, I think history has shown her that capitalism has been very good at giving us, seducing us with the redemption of recognition and visibility and deflecting any idea of redistribution.

And in fact, what we've seen in the past 40 years is redistribution of social wealth from the bottom up.

Two critics stand out.

Nancy Fraser argued that the public sphere was never actually open to everyone, since it had excluded women and other groups from the start.

She proposed replacing one public with many, arguing with each other, including publics formed by the very groups shut out of the first one.

Jeff Ely made a related point from history.

Two critics stand out.

Nancy Fraser argued that the public sphere was never actually open to everyone since it had excluded women and other groups from the start.

She proposed replacing one public with many, arguing with each other, including publics formed by the very groups shut out of the first one.

Jeff Ely made a related point from history.

Ideological factors then play an additional after-the-fact role in giving it meaning and valorization.

Nancy Fraser and Mary Harrington, from two very different perspectives, make the argument that the second wave feminist critique of the family wage got absorbed as the ideological legitimization of a labor regime that needed two earners.

But it's also true that changing the structure changes behavior even before the ideas themselves have changed.

Of course, careerism among women wasn't enough to change the domestic expectations of caregiving.