Fraser came from a mixed second generation immigrant family, with aJewish father and a mother of Irish Catholic and Jewish heritage. Her father's parents were Eastern European immigrants of primarily Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her maternal grandmother's family was of Irish Catholic descent. Her grandmother's father was a Jewish peddler. She describes her parents as "Jewish and very Jewish-identified", but not religious. She had a bat mitzvah and attended High Holiday services at synagogue.[5] She earned herbachelor's degree in philosophy atBryn Mawr College in 1969, and aPhD in philosophy from theCUNY Graduate Center in 1980.
She taught in the philosophy department atNorthwestern University for many years before moving to the New School in 1995. She has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. In addition to her many publications and lectures, Fraser is a former co-editor ofConstellations, an international journal of critical and democratic theory, where she remains an active member of the Editorial Council.[6][1] She has been invited to deliver theTanner Lectures atStanford University and the Spinoza Lectures at theUniversity of Amsterdam.[7] In 2024, a job offer to give lectures at theUniversity of Cologne was rescinded after it was discovered that Fraser had signed a letter "Philosophy for Palestine[8]". Fraser called the decision to disinvite her "philosemiticMcCarthyism".[9]
Fraser has written on a wide variety of issues, but she is primarily known for her work on the philosophical conceptions ofjustice andinjustice. Fraser argues that justice can be understood in two separate but interrelated ways:distributive justice (in terms of a more equitable distribution of resources), andrecognition justice (the recognition of difference between social identities and groups).[10] There are two corresponding forms of injustice: maldistribution and misrecognition.[7]
For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called "productive" labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, "caring" activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between "production" and "reproduction" is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no "emancipation of women" so long as this structure remains intact.[3]
In March 2022, she was amongst 151 international feminists signingFeminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the RussianFeminist Anti-War Resistance.[13][n. 1]
Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis is a collection of essays written from 1985 to 2010[17] that aims at dissecting the "drama in three acts" that according to the author is the thread of second-wave feminism.[18] Act one represents the moment when the feminist movement joined radical movements to transform society through uncovering gender injustice and capitalism's androcentrism, while act two, Fraser highlights with regret, is a switch from redistribution to recognition and difference and a shift to identity politics that risk to support neoliberalism through efforts to build a free-market society.[17][18] Foreseeing act three as a revival of the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis.[19] Feminism must be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women's liberation.[17][19]
The work is considered an important contribution as it provides a clear frame to rethink issues related to labor, emancipation, identity, rights claims at the core of political demands of justice in the contemporary context of neoliberalism.[18] Although a necessary incorporation of political economy into contemporary feminist discourse,[20] Fraser's use of theoretical schemas has been criticized as dense and baffling at times—it is unclear, for example, why there are three types of needs discourses, four registers of dependency, or seven principles of gender justice. M. E. Mitchell, writer for Marx & Philosophy, writes "This [complexity] is, perhaps, owing to her propensity to avail herself of whatever terms best encapsulate processes of institutionalized oppression. Thinking thus, from the ground up, gives her work a complexity that at times compromises the systematic quality and coherence of her theoretical categories."[21]
Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory is a collection of essays written between 1980 and 1989.[22] The book examines the theories of power and source in Foucault, the politics of French deconstruction and Richard Rorty, the politics of gender in Habermas, and the politics of need interpretation in two concluding essays which delineate her own position within contemporarysocialist-feminist critical theory.[23] Contemporaries such asDouglas Kellner have praised Fraser's writings as "seasoned with social hope"[23] and effectively synthesizing feminist commitment to political agency and social progress with several forms of modern and postmodern social skepticism. However, others have criticized her goal of providing "the sort of big diagnostic picture necessary to orient [the current] political practice" of socialist feminism[22] for being both too ambitious and ultimately too narrow. Patricia S. Mann, for example, summarizes the pitfalls of the text as follows:
I wish Fraser had made more of an effort to call upon the resources of analytic philosophy. It is true that analytic philosophers look all the way back to Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham for their paradigms of analytic philosophy. Unfazed because untouched by these notions of social constitution of individuals, or by the irrationalities of individual thought, philosophy offers an outmoded yet still seaworthy vessel for any seeking to ride out the storms of postmodern disillusionment with notions of agency and process. Had Fraser utilized the works of analytic political thinkers when she finally came to formulate her socialist-feminist theory of the welfare state she could have exploited the admittedly "thin" theories of political agency and political rights within political philosophy today.[24]
Fraser, Nancy (1997), "Structuralism or pragmatics?: on discourse theory and feminist politics", in Nicholson, Linda (ed.),The second wave: a reader in feminist theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 379–395,ISBN9780415917612.
Fraser, Nancy (1998), "From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a "post-socialist" age", in Willett, Cynthia (ed.),Theorizing multiculturalism: a guide to the current debate, Malden, Massachusetts: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 19–49,ISBN9780631203421.
Fraser, Nancy (1998), "A rejoinder to Iris Young", in Willett, Cynthia (ed.),Theorizing multiculturalism: a guide to the current debate, Malden, Massachusetts: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 68–72,ISBN9780631203421.
Fraser, Nancy (2008). Olson, Kevin (ed.).Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics. London New York: Verso.ISBN9781859842232.
Fraser, Nancy;Rockhill, Gabriel; Gomez-Muller, Alfredo (2011).Politics of culture and the spirit of critique dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.ISBN9780231151870.
Fraser, Nancy (2013).Fortunes of feminism: from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books.ISBN9781844679843.
^abJadžić, Miloš & Miljković, Dušan & Veselinović, Ana (eds.). (2012).Kriza, odgovori, levica: Prilozi za jedan kritički diskurs,Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeastern Europe:Belgrade, p. 239 (inSerbian)
^For Palestine, Philosophy (November 1, 2023)."Philosophy For Palestine".Philosophy for Palestine.Archived from the original on March 11, 2025. RetrievedApril 27, 2025.
^abFraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1989. Print.
^abKellner, Douglas (1992). "Unruly Practices, Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory".Radical Philosophy Review of Books.6:9–16.doi:10.5840/radphilrevbooks1992622.ISSN1047-8302.
Berger, Silvia (2010), "América Latina, la crisis y el feminismo. Pensando junto con Nancy Fraser", inGirón, Alicia (ed.),Crisis económica: una perspectiva feminista desde América Latina [Economic crisis: a feminist perspective from Latin America] (in Spanish), Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO, pp. 113–136,ISBN9789801241546.Pdf (in Spanish).
