‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory’: Feminist Materialism, Intersectionality and the Social Totality of the Frankfurt School

Abstract

This is certainly not the first contribution to address the nature of Critical Theory, nor the first to address the necessarily feminist character of Critical Theory. Given that most of the writing concerned with the latter has gone largely unheard in much of IR and IPE scholarship, it seems appropriate to address this subject again. In 1985, Nancy Fraser, in her seminal piece ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, engaged with Habermas’s conceptualization of distinct logics of symbolic and natural reproduction relating to the spheres of life-world and system-world as crucial to his Critical Theory. Fraser exposed these distinctions as conceptually inadequate and potentially ideological, highlighting the ‘dual aspect’ of both spheres and logics. She showed how Habermas’s logic potentially:

directs attention away from the fact that the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor, albeit of unremunerated and often unrecognized labor. Likewise, it does not make visible the fact that in the paid workplace, as in the household, women are assigned to, indeed ghettoized in, distinctively feminine, service-oriented and often sexualized occupations. Finally, it fails to focalize the fact that in both spheres women are subordinated to men.

(Fraser, 1985, p. 107)