Nancy Fraser (; born May 20, 1947) is an American philosopher, critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor Emerita of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Widely known for her critique of identity politics and her philosophical work on the concept of justice, Fraser is also a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues. Fraser holds honorary doctoral degrees from four universities in three countries, and won the 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize in Social Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association. She was President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division for the 2017–2018 term.
Early life and education Fraser came from a mixed second generation immigrant family, with a Jewish father and a mother of Irish Catholic and Jewish heritage. Her father's parents were Eastern European immigrants of primarily Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her maternal grandmother's family was of Irish Catholic descent. Her grandmother's father was a Jewish peddler. She describes her parents as "Jewish and very Jewish-identified", but not religious. She had a bat mitzvah and attended High Holiday services at synagogue. She earned her bachelor's degree in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1969, and a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1980.
Career She taught in the philosophy department at Northwestern University for many years before moving to the New School in 1995. She has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. In addition to her many publications and lectures, Fraser is a former co-editor of Constellations, an international journal of critical and democratic theory, where she remains an active member of the Editorial Council. She has been invited to deliver the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University and the Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam. In 2024, a job offer to give lectures at the University of Cologne was rescinded after it was discovered that Fraser had signed a letter "Philosophy for Palestine". Fraser called the decision to disinvite her "philosemitic McCarthyism".
Research Fraser has written on a wide variety of issues, but she is primarily known for her work on the philosophical conceptions of justice and injustice. Fraser argues that justice can be understood in two separate but interrelated ways: distributive justice (in terms of a more equitable distribution of resources), and recognition justice (the recognition of difference between social identities and groups). There are two corresponding forms of injustice: maldistribution and misrecognition. Fraser argues that many social justice movements in the 1960s and 1970s argued for recognition on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity, and that the focus on correcting misrecognition eclipsed the importance of challenging the persistent problems of maldistribution. In other words, Fraser asserts that too much of a focus on identity politics diverts attention from the deleterious effects of neoliberal capitalism and the growing wealth inequality that characterizes many societies. In more recent work, Fraser goes even further in linking the narrow focus of identity politics with the widening gap between the rich and poor, particularly with regard to liberal feminism, which Fraser calls the "handmaiden" of capitalism. Reflecting on Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 book Lean In, Fraser explained:
For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called "productive" labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, "caring" activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between "production" and "reproduction" is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no "emancipation of women" so long as this structure remains intact. In March 2022, she was amongst 151 international feminists signing Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the Russian Feminist Anti-War Resistance.
Books
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