Undergraduate and postgraduate students in education, sociology and gender studies, as well as the general reader with an interest in education or gender.

Unruly Practices brings together a series of widely discussed essays in feminism and social theory. Read together, they constitute a sustained critical encounter with leading European and American approaches to social theory. In addition, Nancy Fraser develops a new and original socialist-feminist critical theory that overcomes many of the limitations of current alternatives. First, in a series of critical essays, she deploys philosophical and literary techniques to assess the work of Michael Foucault, the French deconstructionists, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas. (...) Then, in a group of constructive essays, she incorporates their respective strengths in a new critical theory of late-capitalist political culture. Fraser breaks new ground methodologically by integrating the previously divergent insights of poststructuralism, critical social theory, feminist theory, and pragmatism. Thematically, she deals with varied forms of dominance and subordination in modern, industrial, late-capitalist societies. These themes are integrated in an original theory of 'the politics of need interpretation.' This concept becomes the linchpin of the socialist-feminist critical theory. (shrink)

in a very different sense, to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself On this view, the cultural community continues to exist even when its members arc free to modify the character of the culture, should they find its traditional ...

This is a simple essay. It raises a familiar question about equality, adduces a very small amount of empirical evidence about the social consequences of equality as distinct from prosperity, and broods on the difficulty of providing a really persuasive answer to the question raised. I begin with the view that there simply cannot be anything intrinsically wrong with inequality, move on to the view that there are extrinsic reasons for anxiety, dividing these into conceptual and empirical reasons, though without (...) any great commitment to the clarity of that distinction in this context, and end with some reflections on recent social and political theory. The essay thus begins with what I hope are clear and (what I am sure are) very simple thoughts, before muddying the water pretty thoroughly thereafter. (shrink)