Butler and Fraser

[fuwang]

Ming directed me to two articles about some intersections between the struggle against heterosexism and Marxist capitalist critique. Judith Butler's article posits that Nancy Fraser (the other author) reduces that struggle to the "merely cultural" - a critique that situates heterosexism not as a material case of maldistribution of resources but as

Comments

[mingerspice]

I'm just finishing Butler's article, and I have to say that one of her most persuasive points is that if we attempt to address the economic by demanding the subordination of the "merely cultural", we will not have addressed the historical circumstances, but instead have recreated those circumstances that led to the rise of the social movements condemned as "identitarian". Thus, conflict will once again arise, and no attempt at enforced "unity" will be successful so long as the demands of those social movements go unheard. Although I recognize that this position has some problems - first, it presumes historical determinism (although I don't know if that is really a "problem" that can be critiqued from a Marxist POV, since it has a strong streak of historical determinism itself); second, it seems to presume a stability of queer unrest - that is, there would always be something "queer" to be suppressed and thus the orthodoxy would always generate queer social movements in opposition to it; third, it takes for granted (perhaps) the idea