Recognition politics can substitute for and thereby mask material redistribution

Evidence

Nancy Fraser describes how feminism took an intersectionist approach, allying with other emancipatory movements around class, race, and sexuality to challenge structural subordination of women. However, in the Reaganite–Thatcherite 1980s, feminism was confronted with a very different political animus that prioritized privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of capital controls and that emphasized competition rather than welfare. In this context, Fraser sees feminist ideals being resignified, surrendering their broader claims for social justice in favor of the rhetoric of recognition. Feminism became absorbed into identity politics, and issues of culture were elevated above those of political economy. Out of this shift emerged “a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” under neoliberalism that overlooked the grotesque inequalities, job insecurity, low wages, and negligible welfare provision resulting from reforms designed to promote individualism and discourage broader solidarities. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 186

Categorization

• XREF: This is the same recognition-vs-redistribution mechanism at work in the multiculturalism absorption — a pattern the reader can transfer to how novels foreground cultural identity while naturalizing economic precarity (Changez’s and Changez-type protagonists). — connects to: Image and style can override corruption and policy failure in public esteem — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2055; Recognition must be taken seriously alongside redistribution in any contemporary justice theory — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 79
• DEFINE: Introduces the recognition-versus-redistribution distinction the reader needs to evaluate whether a novel’s contestation is substantive or merely cultural.