Reconsidering Nancy Fraser: Back to the Future 1997-2024

In her accomplished work Justice Interruptus (1997), feminist theorist Nancy Fraser identified a critically significant change in the grammar of what she termed ‘political claims making’. Representative of a paradigmatic shift, which, fast forward to the contemporary, now epitomises the arguably superlative triumph of the cultural. Indeed, viewed from our present-day perception of events, the cultural call for recognition has far surpassed the social demand for material justice. The discernibly recognised politics of hyper-visibility has dialogically resulted in the suppression of the social dimension of egalitarian redistribution. Accordingly, the acute insight and farsighted appraisal of both the cultural and social realms - appreciated in the context of her time of writing - were protean developments in these crucial organising domains. The paradigmatic emphasis of the cultural has resulted in the structuring of culturally-defined effects that have reverberated throughout society, acting as determinants impacting the realisation of egalitarian material social justice. Substantive for the lives of selected societal groups in particular, notwithstanding the visible relocating of these groups from the plural margins to the centre.

In this paper, I return to reconsider the arguments of Fraser and investigate to what extent her brilliance in capturing a transformative moment still affords relevance and applicability. This paper provides explicit foreground of how - absent of Fraser being in possession of an omniscient crystal ball - her work foresaw the current climate so vividly and presciently, from an altogether differing perspective of the pre-Millennium period. This paper provides a close reading and retrospective of the central concerns elaborated and mounted in her 1997 publication, reconsidered against what we now recognise as economic maldistribution. Consideration is then given to ongoing concerns about digital-representational politics and the mobilisation of selected ‘skin types’ to resonate meaning. Resonant as part of a systemic meaning-making commodification practice, demanded by late-stage capitalism. In so doing, this paper illustrates the importance of re-engaging the work of Fraser to provide sufficient progression to critically explore where we are currently, in dialogue with increasingly pressing questions of social justice.