Nancy Fraser - Unruly Practices, Chapter 7

In this chapter, Fraser addresses the problems and struggles that feminists have in dealing with the issue of welfare. She argues that feminists cannot support existing social-welfare programs because they simply replace a private patriarchy with a public patriarchy, but proposed alternatives are no more palatable. A second set of problems (the first being structural problems such as budget cuts, benefit changes, etc.) regarding welfare policy is more ideological and involves the way in which issues get framed. Fraser hopes provide a framework for inquiry that can show how the structural and ideological relate to one another and that can hopefully shed some light on both.

Fraser argues that we must consider "welfare programs as, among other things, institutionalized patterns of interpretation. Such an inquiry would make explicit the social meanings embedded within welfare programs, meanings that tend otherwise simply to go without saying" (pg. 146). This approach could identify underlying norms and assumptions in the U.S. welfare system and help us understand its structure better. It could also "expose the processes by which welfare practices construct women and women's needs according to certain specific-and, in principle, contestable-interpretations, even as they lend those interpretations an aura of facticity that discourages contestation" (pg. 146). She calls this second issue "the politics of need interpretation".

In the body of the paper, Fraser first provides a brief statistical overview which shows the significantly greater involvement of women with the welfare system (both in means-tested programds and age-tested programs). Women are overwhelmingly the majority of welfare recipients, but they are also the majority of workers employed by the government agencies responsible for its distribution, etc. Finally, women are subject to the welfare system through the traditional role of unpaid caregivers.

Fraser argues that the welfare system does not deal with women on their own terms. Rather, based on gender norms and meanings encoded within it, the welfare system "has its own characteristic ways of interpreting women's needs and positioning women as subjects" (pg. 149). She sees the programs as divided into two types based on the traditional idea of separate spheres (both race and culture specific), which treat the recipients quite differently. The "feminine" or family-based programs deal primarily with women under several assumptions: they focus on households rather than individual women, they serve "defective" families with no male breadwinner, and the ideal recipient is female who makes her claims based on the traditional unpaid role of mother and homemaker. These feminine programs create a position for the (primarily female) recipients as beneficiaries of public charity and clients.

In contrast, "masculine" programs, such as unemployment insurance, social security, etc., are labor-based. They individualize rather than familialize, are designed to compensate for labor market effects, the ideal recipient is male and he makes his claim based on his role as a paid worker, not an unpaid parent or homemaker. These masculine programs create a position for the recipient as a rights-bearer and a purchasing consumer. Such a position provides the beneficiary with more control and is less stigmatized.

Fraser introduces a concept that can be used to analyze the U.S. welfare system: a juridical-administrative-therapeutic state apparatus (JAT). By linking together juridical, administrative, and therapeutic procedures, the system is able to execute "political policy in a way that appears nonpolitical and tends to be depoliticizing" (pg. 154). The juridical element positions the recipients with the legal system by giving (masculine programs) or denying (feminine programs)various rights. The administrative element requires that people must petition to receive benefits. In male programs, subjects must prove that their case meets administrative criteria. In feminine programs, the subjects must prove that they conform to the administratively defined criteria of need. The third element joins the other two by, especially in the feminine subsystem, constructing gender-political and political-economic problems as individual, psychological problems, thereby encouraging recipients, primarily women, to conform their lives and behaviors to the administratively defined situations. Fraser argues that this concept allows us to analyze both the "feminine" and "masculine" subsystems of the U.S. welfare system more critically, showing us the disempowered position of recipients in both subsystems. "All told, then, the form os social citizenship constructed even in the best part of the U.S. social-welfare system is a degraded and depoliticized one. It is a form of passive citizenship in which the state preempts the power to define and satisfy people's needs.

In closing, Fraser points out that "the ideological (as opposed to economic) effects of the JAT's mode of need interpretation operate within a specific and relatively new societal arena. I call this arena 'the social' in order to mark its noncoincidence with the familiar institutionalized spaces of family and official economy" (pg. 156). This arena is a terrain of contestation. There are conflicts among rival interpretations of people's needs. Feminists are actors on this social terrain of contestation and Fraser argues that her approach will allow us to"distinguish several analytically distinct but practically intermingled kinds of feminist struggles worth engaging in the coming welfare wars" (pg. 157).

Key Words:

- Juridical-administrative-therapeutic state apparatus (JAT)

- politics of need interpretation

- "masculine" vs. "feminine" subsystems of the welfare system