Dialogues between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser: Capitalism, Heteronormativity, and New Social Movements

Abstract

The paper shows a certain moment of a debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser. Even when both authors have contributed significant concepts to political philosophy and feminism, we are interested in showing their differences. In the first section we will follow Butler’s defense against a Neomarxism interested in showing sexual dissidence movements as “merely cultural” matters. For this defense Butler refers to the analysis made by Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss about kinship and, from that position, states that, since the origin of civilization, the trafficking of women has taken women as an exchange good that founds heteronormative alliances. For those reasons, Butler argues that sexual dissidence movements are anti-capitalist. The second section of the text shows Fraser’s answer to that assertion. We will see how, by recovering the scheme of distribution-recognition, she proposes a constant interweaving between two exclusion dimensions that allows for precise historical diagnoses of this moment in contemporary capitalism. This allows, in a concrete manner, a diagnosis of social movements without any ahistorical nor deconstructionist leaps that ignore how capitalism has incorporated some expressions of the so-called new social movements.