Social Rights and Gender Justice in the Neoliberal Moment: A Conversation

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Social rights and gender justice in the neoliberal moment: A conversation about welfare and transnational politics Nancy Fraser and with Kate Bedford Feminist Theory 2008; 9; 225 DOI: 10.1177/1464700108090412 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com

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Social rights and gender justice in the neoliberal moment A conversation about welfare and transnational politics

Nancy Fraser City University of New York with Kate Bedford University of Kent

FT Feminist Theory Copyright 2008 © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore) vol. 9(2): 225–245.

1464–7001 DOI: 10.1177/1464700108090412 http://fty.sagepub.com

An interview with Nancy Fraser by Kate Bedford

keywords care work, justice, NGOs, religion, US feminism, welfare, World Bank

Introduction (Kate Bedford) Nancy Fraser is called upon frequently for interviews (for example, Fraser and Naples, 2004; Alldred, 1999; Nash and Bell, 2007). This is in part because she has long modelled a feminist ethic of generously spirited critique and interaction. She has been recognized by both social movement activists and academics for her commitment to producing scholarship that critically ‘interprets the world in an effort to change it’ (Fraser and Naples, 2004: 1103), and she has engaged extensively, in and out of print, with many collaborators and critics (Fraser and Nicholson, 1989; Fraser et al., 1994; Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Butler, 1997; Fraser, 1997a). This ethic of exchange makes her a much sought after partner in conversation.

More specifically, the editors of this special issue considered her an indispensable contributor to a discussion of feminist theory and welfare.

While her publications have influenced debates on the Habermasian public sphere, French feminism, critical theory, pragmatism, and postmodernism, she also helps feminists understand welfare. Fraser was one of the first theorists to draw our attention to the thoroughly gendered nature of the US welfare state, noting in 1987 (reprinted in 1989) that the upcoming ‘welfare wars will be largely wars about, even against, women’ (1989: 144) on the grounds that women were the principal subjects of the welfare state – its beneficiaries and paid workers, and providers of the unpaid care targeted for governmental regulation (1989: 147). She was a member of the Women’s Committee of 100, a coalition of activists and academics opposing attempts to ‘reform’ welfare in the United States by ending it, and she has written extensively on US poverty policy, entitlement programmes, and the importance of gender therein. She was one of the earliest feminist thinkers to consider how societies should secure the provision of caring labour when men’s wages stagnated and even married middle-class white women were expected to engage in paid labour (1989), and she invented a feminist thought experiment on this topic that I continue to assign to students for Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) its careful delineation of feminist options and its attentiveness to concerns regarding practical application (Fraser, 1997b). Finally, she has repeatedly called for feminist attention to the redistributive issues at the heart of welfare debates, cautioning against a one-sided definition of justice focused solely on issues of identity recognition. She insists not only that justice must encompass both dimensions of recognition and redistribution (Fraser, 1997b), but also that we must not simply trade ‘a truncated economism . . . for truncated culturalism’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 6).

Moreover, Fraser understood far earlier than most of us that ‘the turn to recognition has dovetailed all too neatly with a hegemonic neoliberalism that wants nothing more than to repress all memory of social egalitarianism’ (Fraser, forthcoming: 5). In this way her work is central to research linking neoliberalism to certain forms of multiculturalism, influencing debates at the cutting edge of critical globalization studies (see, for example, Hale, 2006; Yudice, 2004).

I interviewed Fraser about welfare with these insights in mind. My own work explores how gender and sexuality are being reformulated by processes of neoliberal economic restructuring. I concentrate on the ‘social provisioning’ policies designed by the World Bank, one of the world’s most influential governing institutions (Bedford, 2007, forthcoming). In recent research on the Bank’s gender and development lending, I have argued that policy-makers are attempting to resolve neoliberal tensions between paid and unpaid labour by adjusting partnerships between men and women. They are promoting models of sharing conjugal couplehood in which women enter paid employment and men pick up the slack of unmet care needs. I suggest that this attempt to (re)privatize social welfare provisioning by adjusting intimacies confirms the need for feminist scholarship to denaturalize normative heterosexualities (see Alexander, 1994; Cooper, 1995; Smith, 2001; Wilson, 2004), to show how these are being reconfigured by the Bank as it attempts to re-embed neoliberalism in a more sustainable form (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Porter and Craig, 2004). My work is inspired by Fraser’s insistence that we link cultural analyses of identity politics to political economy. I am particularly interested in the transnational implications of US debates about welfare to which she is such an important contributor. I thus initiated an exchange that intended to put these different perspectives on the welfare policy question into conversation.

KB: When I arrived in the US from the UK eight years ago, one of the first things I was assigned to read as part of my graduate training in Women’s Studies was the 1998 special issue of Feminist Studies on welfare reform, entitled ‘On A Precipice’. The publication stemmed from debates about how to fight the destruction of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] and welfare, ones that had prompted the formation of groups like the Women’s Committee of 100. How should we understand what happened?

How were feminists seeking to make an intervention in these debates?

NF: In the mid-1980s, I was one of a small group of US feminist scholars working on gender and the welfare state. It was already clear to me then, several years before the formation of the Committee of 100, that the Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice question of so-called ‘welfare reform’ was going to be high on the political agenda in this country and that it was going to have a very strong gender dimension. I say welfare reform so-called because what eventually happened, and it was no surprise, was the abolition of poor families’ entitlement to income support – which had been a hard-fought entitlement.1 Although the programme that institutionalized that entitlement was deeply inadequate, its elimination represented a major negative restructuring of the American welfare state, with major negative gender implications because the families served by that programme, AFDC, were overwhelmingly so-called female-headed households – families without a male breadwinner. So this issue seemed to me, and to others at the time, to be the opening wedge of what later emerged, full blown, as neoliberal restructuring.

KB: And what did that involve?

NF: I would analyse it from two perspectives. Seen first from the material perspective, the effect was to worsen the economic situation of poor women and children, and beyond that, to reduce all women’s exit options vis-à-vis abusive marriages and exploitative jobs. But seen, second, from the symbolic or expressive perspective, the assault on AFDC sent a clear message that recipients of this programme were scroungers who had been getting something for nothing, hence that their caregiving and childrearing labour had no social value. That, of course, spoke volumes about the value of caring more generally. The larger implication was that the only socially valuable activity was waged work. No matter how low-paid, deadend, or demeaning, waged work and waged work alone conferred ‘independence’ and full citizenship. (At least for the poor and working classes, since the non-employed propertied classes somehow escaped this stigmatization!) In this way, the demonization of ‘welfare dependency’ helped to elaborate the new neoliberal social imaginary. An attack on both caregiving and on public provision, it simultaneously valorized waged work and marketization.

KB: Could I ask you to give us more detail on the ‘attack on the public’?

NF: I’m sure that you in Britain are familiar with this phenomenon, but it is especially severe in the United States. Here, it is increasingly the case that publicly provided services are severely degraded and massively inferior to their commodified counterparts. The most obvious examples are public hospitals and urban public schools. In these cases, and many others, there has been a wholesale abandonment of public services by the middle classes, indeed by anyone who can afford to opt out. As a result, the whole meaning of the public sector has changed. What used to signify the democratic ideal of shared citizenship and a common status now connotes the stigmatized, pathetic dependency of those who can’t make it on their own.

This association of the public with illegitimate dependency has a strong gender dimension as well. On the one hand, it contrasts with a view of the marketized private sector as the sphere of independence, a view that remains laden with connotations of manliness. On the other hand, it also contrasts with an idea of legitimate dependency, which retains feminine Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) associations. So, in neoliberalism’s marriage of convenience with cultural conservatism, it is fine for a woman to be dependent on her husband because this is private dependence, and because women should be married and heterosexual. By contrast, illegitimate dependence is dependence on the state, on the public purse. And that is equated to scrounging, to not paying your own way, to getting something for nothing.

KB: Let’s talk about the gendered implications. You were one of the first theorists to draw our attention to the thoroughly gendered nature of the US welfare state – the distinction between masculine social welfare programmes such as unemployment insurance and social security that are given in cash, that are seen as entitlements based on contributions and given to rights-bearers, and feminine programmes like AFDC and food stamps that are humiliating and have a heavy surveillance component, and in which recipients are framed as charity recipients (1989: 151). How has this changed, with attacks on social security, pensions, the neoliberal evisceration of the public sphere and the idea of citizenship entitlements to social provisioning?

NF: In the US, the idea of the public dependant, or ‘the scrounger’, acquired a feminine coloration as a result of its association with AFDC, the eliminated entitlement to income support for poor families. Thus, the gender coding of this idea was originally grounded in the division of the US welfare state into the two streams you just mentioned. Recently, however, the stigmatization of ‘public dependency’ has spread beyond the specifically female-coded part of the welfare state, which has in any case been severely reduced. We now face a new, apparently gender-neutral ideology of privatization which is articulated in the accents of class. This new ideology divides the population into two classes: those who are responsible, proactive and capable of managing their affairs on their own; and those who are passive, if not simply incompetent, and in need of public tutelage. Whereas members of the first group exercise autonomy by administering their own retirement funds and freely deciding to save and invest, those in the second abjure responsibility, rely on the public retirement system, and cede control of their lives to the federal government.

Widely touted by business interests who want to privatize Social Security, this new ideology promotes a marketized conception of citizenship. As a class contrast, it counterposes the supposed autonomous competency of the professional classes to the supposed dependent incompetence of ordinary workers. But below the surface one can also discern a gender and racial-ethnic subtext. The investment world that is valorized here is notoriously masculinist and Euroamerican, while the world of dependency to which it is juxtaposed includes women and racialized minorities, along with the iconic ‘white male worker’. Here, then, is an element of continuity in an otherwise radically new vision: gender, ‘race’ and class interpenetrate here, too, as they always have in US welfare ideology, to code symbolically elaborated status hierarchies.

KB: Since you have mentioned it twice, I want to talk a little about this symbolic dimension of welfare. In a 1999 interview for a British anthology Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice on new social movement activism, you identify welfare as a key example of the need to think integratively about the relation between cultural struggles and social and economic struggles (Alldred, 1999: 131). If I understand you correctly, the imperative here is one of redistributive interventions that will re-establish a legitimate public sphere. What are the symbolic dimensions of that?

NF: Yes. I am saying that in order to successfully contest the onslaught of privatization, and the associated degradation of the public sector and of social citizenship, it is necessary to tackle both the cultural and the economic dimensions of welfare. On the one hand, one must expose the inegalitarian distributive consequences of privatization, which violate common ideals of citizenship and social justice. But on the other hand, one must also contest the various symbolic meanings that I’ve been outlining, especially masculinist constructions of social value that depreciate caregiving. Struggles for an economically just and materially adequate system of public provision cannot possibly succeed unless they confront those symbolic meanings. So I am claiming that the two go hand-in-hand, the material side and the symbolic side.

KB: I have some questions about caregiving and its relation to debates about welfare. I want to go back to the ‘After the Family Wage’ chapter of your 1997 book (1997b), in which you addressed the gender order that should be embedded in a restructured welfare state given the decline of the male breadwinner/female housewife model that had been at the heart of Fordism. You addressed two alternative policies there: a ‘universal breadwinner’ model based on promoting women’s full employment with state provision for enabling services like day care, and a ‘caregiver parity’ model, supporting informal care work through state provision of allowances. In a classic Fraser moment, you refused to accept such a limited choice, and you argued that neither promised gender equity. In particular, you argued that neither model asks men to change, and thus you suggested a third possibility – to induce men to do primary care work (1989: 61). Any revised thoughts on this question?

NF: Not on the importance of asking men to change, no. My only reservation is that the article took for granted the national framing of the question.

Like all my welfare work in those years, the article implicitly assumed that the ideal post-industrial feminist welfare state would be located in a bounded political community that corresponds to a territorial state. It neglected transnational processes and simply assumed the existence of national economies. As a result, it also overlooked pressing questions about how to secure provision for refugees, undocumented immigrants, displaced persons, and citizens of failed or very poor states. Today, I would explicitly raise such questions about the framing of welfare provision. But apart from that, all of my earlier instincts remain intact. I continue to be drawn to approaches that aim to overcome the gender division of labour, to soften the public–private distinction, and to scramble the care–work distinction. I still hold firm to those preferences and to the broader sensibility that underlies them.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) KB: I wonder how that sensibility is related to current shifts in state and transnational policy.

I ask because my work on the World Bank has found a lot of support for the idea that men should be more involved in domestic labour and the family, to pick up the slack of unpaid caring work as women move into paid employment. The poor are in essence being urged into restructured partnerships as a survival strategy under neoliberal capitalism – partnerships in which women work more and men care better. This is based on the idea that in economic crises, people rely upon their kin, that kinship relations should be shored up – you know, the classic neoliberal emphasis on privatization, responsibilization. So you get the Bank lending five million dollars to Argentina for a family-strengthening and social capital promotion programme that aims to ‘strengthen family cohesion [and] solidarity between male and female members’ of households (World Bank, 2000: 1), to ‘test the hypothesis that the promotion of a more cohesive and less segregated family life will positively impact the ability of families to face challenges posed by poverty’ (p. 3). Family strengthening and fatherhood promotion have thus been reframed as a form of social safety net provision in economic crisis and as a purportedly progressive gender policy aiming to get men to share caring labour. World Bank gender staff are involved in this initiative. They helped design it, actually. They are arguing that this is a progressive gender policy because it gets men to share household duties.

NF: Does it?

KB: I don’t know yet! But I have done research on similar sorts of initiatives, for example, World Bank-funded gender training workshops in Ecuador targeting indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian men on the basis that they’re not doing enough labour in the household and that they need to care better, to express more of what one workshop coordinator called ‘family love’. And the evidence there is mixed. But again, this is a classic neoliberal policy framed as a progressive gender intervention. So I’m rereading and rethinking the debate since 1989 in the light of these increasing debates about men in welfare, the pathologization of ‘deadbeat dads’, the new efforts around marriage and fatherhood promotion. How do these feminist conversations about men and care work land in a neoliberal moment where they can be picked up by neoliberal institutions to say ‘Indeed, we need to get men into caring labour’? And I wonder if we can think of gender outside this referent of the sharing male/female couple?

NF: What you’re telling me is fascinating. I didn’t know about this stuff, but I can see it is very significant. Off the top, I have several thoughts. One goes along the line that you were suggesting, that this policy orientation is aimed at providing stopgaps or substitutes for public services that are being retrenched. So I’m suspicious. Why insist on an equitable gender division of unpaid care work now, at exactly the moment when public provision is being dismantled? Where were you way back when? Then, too, I would want to look very closely at why they are specifically targeting racialized Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice minorities, poor communities and so on. Is there really any evidence that those men are less caring, worse fathers than the owners of the great estates and enterprises and so on? It has that blaming-the-victim, culture-ofpoverty feel to it. If these suspicions are right, it wouldn’t be the first time that feminist ideas were co-opted for other agendas, including capitalist restructuring. This doesn’t mean that the ideas themselves are wrong, however, only that feminists need to attend very closely to the context in which we elaborate and defend them. Specifically, we must make clear that our ideal of gender justice does not concern private-sphere caregiving alone, that it also requires robust gender-sensitive macro policies of job creation and public provision.

KB: This brings me to my next question, regarding the question of scale in debates about welfare and social provisioning. You argue in recent work that while feminists need to continue struggling against injustices of misrecognition and maldistribution, they also need, in a globalized order, to struggle against what you call misframing, where a state-territorial frame is imposed on transnational sources of injustice, in an attempt to deny the poor and/or the pariah groups the chance to press transnational claims (Fraser, 2005: 305). Could you talk a little bit about your notion of misframing in that respect? I think it has the potential to be really helpful as we try to think through this issue of shifts in scale and welfare.

NF: Sure. I started from an observation about the current grammar of social conflict. Just as at an earlier point, roughly 10 years ago, I took as my starting point the shift in the grammar of political claims-making from redistribution to recognition, now, in my newer work, I have tried to connect that up with another such shift: from a grammar in which the question of the ‘who’ was taken for granted to one in which it is fiercely contested. What I mean by the ‘who’ question is simply: who counts as a subject of justice? Whose needs and interests deserve consideration? Put differently, what is the proper frame for reflecting on justice? It is a defining feature of the present conjuncture, as I understand it, that this question is increasingly subject to political dispute. We have moved from a moment in which the national-territorial-state frame went without saying to a moment in which it is subject to challenge. This is not to say that most people endorse a global or transnational form of social citizenship, but nationalists must now defend their view against rival understandings of the ‘who’. Today, accordingly, all the old debates about redistribution and recognition are effectively overlaid with another order of debate about who counts with respect to redistribution or recognition.

One major cause of this shift is the transnationalizing or globalizing dimension of neoliberalization which was not considered in my earlier analyses but which is unmistakable today. As neoliberals clamour for enhanced ‘flexibility’ for the sake of ‘international competitiveness’, the effect is to call into question the assumption of the bounded political community which was so central to the social democratic project. As a result, the struggle for social citizenship can no longer be waged in the old way. It is not sufficient today to contest the level and shape of provision among fellow citizens. In addition, we must struggle over the proper frame Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) for social citizenship. Earlier, the democratic social consensus privileged both the distributive dimension of justice and the ‘Westphalian framing’ of political space. Today, however, both those pillars of social democracy have been called into question. On the one hand, as I argued before, the increasing salience of recognition struggles has decentred the idea that distribution is the privileged dimension of justice. On the other hand, as I’m arguing now, the new salience of transnational politics and claimsmaking, ranging from human rights activism to international feminism and to the World Social Forum, has problematized the national answer to the question of the ‘who’. The frame is now a question and a stake of political struggle. Of course, this situation is not historically unprecedented. On the contrary, I believe that there have been other historical periods in which frame questions were salient, just as there have also been periods of relatively stable hegemony in which that question was effectively foreclosed.

What I’m suggesting, then, is we’re now in a period of the first type. There are now competing frames in play, along with the idea that the frame itself can be a question of justice.

This is the most important point: frame choices are matters of justice.

When questions of distribution or recognition are framed so as to wrongly exclude some people from consideration, then we encounter a metainjustice, in which first-order questions of justice are unjustly framed. In order to conceptualize the question of the frame as a question of justice, I have found myself needing a term to name such meta-injustices, and so I’ve come up with the term misframing. Although this is a term I invented, I did not invent the idea. Rather, the notion of misframing implicitly informs transnational activist projects that oppose both border-disregarding freemarket neoliberalism and knee-jerk national-protectionist responses. The forms of activism that interest me contest both of those positions simultaneously, by implicitly invoking the idea of misframing. What I have done is to give a name and some conceptual justification to an insight that already informs such activism.

KB: This is actually one of my favourite elements of your work: its generous spirit, and the example it sets for a feminist ethic of learning from, and engaging with, social movements. You also talk very concretely about the charge of feminist activism, as you understand it, related to these injustices of misrecognition, maldistribution and misframing. You suggest, for example, that feminists in Europe see their task as threefold: to help create egalitarian, gender-sensitive social welfare protections at the transnational level; to integrate such redistributive policies with egalitarian, gendersensitive recognition policies that do justice to European cultural multiplicity; and to do it all without hardening external borders, ensuring that transnational Europe doesn’t become ‘fortress Europe’ (2005: 305).

This is very compelling.

NF: Just don’t ask me how!

KB: No, I’m not going to ask you how to do it. I am going to ask you, though, how those concerns compare with how you understand the charge of US feminism, particularly given the current climate of immigration reform, Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice and your past critique – one that I think is still salient – of US feminism as failing to address redistributive concerns with sufficient force?

NF: Let me begin with the past critique which still seems salient to me as well. The idea was that US feminism got too wrapped up in the recognition dimension of gender – whether in the ‘affirmative’ form of identity politics or the ‘transformative’ form of ‘anti-essentialism’. In both cases, there was a tendency to lose sight of the political economy dimension. But I never thought that feminism was uniquely culpable. I saw this, rather, as part of a larger shift in political culture, so I would say the same thing about other progressive social movements. I would also say that the problem was largely a failure to think contextually, to situate the struggles within the movement in relation to external developments. Thus, too many US feminists failed to notice that while we were arguing about essentialism, neoliberals and Christian conservatives were taking over the country! The Committee of 100, to go back to your first question, was an exception, in that it was trying to anticipate, and prepare for, a large-scale policy shift which we can now see was the opening wedge of neoliberalism. It was exceptional, too, in taking the national political arena seriously, unlike most other currents of the movement, which were turning inward, away from broader arenas of struggle. This, I think, is the kernel of truth in Thomas Frank’s interesting but ultimately flawed book What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). The recognition-oriented Left gave insufficient attention to these broad shifts in the political zeitgeist, especially with respect to political economy issues. I suspect this was less the case in Britain, where the greater strength of the Marxist and Labour Party traditions allowed for a more nuanced appreciation of the insights and blind spots of the cultural turn. You have, I think, a stronger tradition than we have of left-wing concern with political economy. Perhaps feminists in Britain absorbed that from the general political culture and succeeded in maintaining a better balance between redistribution and recognition than we did. But, on the other hand, I believe that my early critique has some traction in the UK too. I see the Third Way as another version of this shift from redistribution to recognition insofar as it valorized a form of multicultural recognition while promoting labour-market ‘flexibility’, thus combining a neoliberal economic policy with a seemingly progressive recognition policy. That was better than what we faced in the United States, which was a regressive economic policy and a regressive recognition policy! But nevertheless it had its own shortcomings.

All that concerns my prior critique and you asked about how I see the task of US feminism today. I would say that for us, right now, the most pressing issues have less to do with either distribution or recognition per se than with a third dimension of justice, which I have recently called ‘representation’. I’d be happy to talk later about that revision of my framework. What I want to stress now, though, is that the whole redistribution/ recognition problematic seems to me at the moment to have been dwarfed by the intensified militarization and unilateralization of US policy, especially the invasion of Iraq and the so-called ‘war on terror’. So when I think about the question of framing and who counts in the US context, the first Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) thing that leaps to mind are questions like: why don’t we have official body counts of Iraqi deaths but only of American deaths? Why didn’t we have international and transnational institutions capable of taking the overwhelming sentiment of world public opinion against the Iraq invasion and converting it into real efficacious power? These are also questions about framing but they’re in a different register. They’re less immediately in the economic and symbolic-cultural registers and more evidently in the political register, although they have clear economic and cultural subtexts.

KB: What does this political register mean for your understanding of justice now?

NF: As you know, I started out with a two-dimensional conception of justice, encompassing redistribution and recognition, which I aligned with quasi-Weberian notions of class and status; and I saw gender as implicating both dimensions. Well, for a long time people asked me, ‘You’ve got class and status, economy and culture, but where’s politics’, or as Weber would call it, ‘party’? And I used to say, ‘I don’t need a separate political dimension of justice. Both redistribution and recognition are political, in the sense that they harbour illegitimate power asymmetries.’ Yet, in the back of my mind, I worried about whether that was an adequate answer.

And in the end I decided it was not, because I came to appreciate that there can exist systematic obstacles to participatory parity that are rooted neither in the political economy nor in the status order but, rather, in the political constitution of society. I concluded, in other words, that the political constitution of society matters, that it has some relatively autonomous force and is not merely superstructural. I was led to that conclusion by two different sets of considerations. The first set concerns what I now call ‘ordinary political misrepresentation’ which arises when a political community’s decision rules deny equal political voice to those who are already assumed to be members. Examples are electoral rules that deny parity of participation to women, national minorities, ideological minorities, and so on. Important as I now believe those injustices to be, my thinking was even more influenced by a second set of considerations, concerning what I call ‘meta-political misrepresentation’. That form of political injustice is located at another level. Not the level of disparities within a given frame, but the prior level at which such frames themselves are constituted and who counts as a member in the first place is determined. Injustices of misframing, as I understand them, belong to this metalevel, as they arise from the constitution of the broader political space within which bounded polities are embedded and in which they relate to one another. And it was primarily due to my interest in misframing that I eventually took the plunge and incorporated the third, political dimension of justice into my framework. As I became preoccupied with the transnationalization of politics, I found that this dimension afforded a way to theorize struggles over globalization as struggles over the frames and scales of justice.

KB: Can I drag us back to the state for a second? As I said, my research is on the World Bank, specifically on its gender policies. The Bank is Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice increasingly playing a role as a provider of transnational welfare services – it is the world’s largest and most influential development institution, after all. I’m very interested in the way that the division of social welfare services is falling out, reconstituting the public in certain neoliberal forms which you sketch out, and reconstituting political space, that is, the relationships between the state, the transnational and the local NGOs. I have a couple of questions that relate to these broader issues of redistribution and recognition in a phase of post-national politics, or to put it less starkly, in a phase where we see the increasing transnationalization of politics. One of them is about the role of the state, ideally. There’s a trend in the Northern academy to be very celebratory about the potential for transnational globalization and social movement mobilization in a transnational frame. That’s present in the South as well but there’s also a sense of: ‘we want the state to be able to provide social services; our states are undermined, their sovereignty is being stripped, and we are concerned about transnational institutions circumventing state structures, even if it happens with the aid of NGOs.’ So how do you revisit the role, ideally, of the state?

NF: That’s a tough question. To begin with, I see a stark division of opinion in both regions, in the North and in the South. In addition to the positions you’ve described, I could cite left-wing statists in the North, such as labour unions and social democrats, who oppose immigration and ‘free trade’, hoping to bolster workers’ power, public provision and state steering capacities. As I see it, their position is ambivalent: from the perspective of the national frame, it looks like progressive opposition to class injustice, but from the perspective of the broader transnational frame, it looks like defence of privilege. Likewise, you can find actors in the South on both sides of this issue. In addition to the statists you mentioned, I could cite left-wing transnationalists, like the Zapatistas, who start from the assumption that their chances of ever getting a democratic state with the will and capacity to provide social services for them depend massively on reform of the interstate system and of the governance structures of the global economy. I confess that I see considerable merit in that last argument. But you also asked about ideals. The ideal for me is that institutions at all levels be democratically accountable and endowed with sufficient steering capacity to solve the problems posed at the level in question. The reason people want their states to have the capacity to regulate their affairs is that, historically, the territorial state has been the sole locus of democratic legitimacy. To the degree that anything remotely approaching democratic legitimacy has ever been institutionalized in the modern world, the territorial state is it. Yet many pressing issues today cannot be satisfactorily handled at that level. Some can, of course. But to deal, for example, with global warming or public health in the context of transborder epidemics, it is not sufficient to have democratic control over one’s own state. In addition, we urgently need public powers at the global level, powers with real teeth that can take collectively binding decisions and enforce them, if necessary, on recalcitrant actors, such as rogue states or multinational corporations. But then the question arises: how could such institutions be Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) democratically legitimate and accountable? My view is that the democratic virtues, such as they are, that have been associated historically with states – and that move many people even today to insist that they want a strong state – those virtues must also be envisioned and institutionalized at the transnational and global levels. This doesn’t mean that I want to eliminate states; on the contrary, I am confident that states will play an important role in any desirable future that we could imagine. But it is not a zero sum game. It is not the case that if you build up the state you don’t need to pay attention to the surrounding transnational institutional environment. I believe, rather, that states will only be able to do what we want them to do if we establish the right kinds of global and transnational public powers.

KB: I have a connected question about the role of NGOs in this restructuring of political space. Alongside the increasing transnationalization of debate about public welfare, there’s been a parallel movement downwards to increase the responsibility of individuals, certainly, but also of NGOs. I’m thinking of local emergency response interventions that we saw around Hurricane Katrina in response to the manifest failure of the state to provide for human welfare in that context,2 and of a broader global shift towards reliance on NGOs in terms of self-help provisions, micro credit, small-scale projects to aid survival, and so on.

NF: Or the faith-based alternatives which are so powerful in the US, on the one hand, and in the Muslim world, on the other hand.

KB: Right – exactly. Social movements are stepping in to pick up the slack as the state retreats from welfare provision, unintentionally further undermining the vision of a shared responsibility – whether it is vested in the collective as a whole, or the state takes it up on our behalf – to provide health services, welfare, and so on. And NGOs don’t seem to have a whole lot of choice. With Hurricane Katrina, for example, the state response – to the extent that the state had a response – was a militarized one. So how can social movements respond to that context critically while still providing services to ensure community survival? I really see this as a feminist issue, given the increasing reliance of states and transnational policy actors on feminist NGOs to provide social services. Several Latin American scholars have argued that this helps divest the state of its responsibilities to citizens, and positions feminist activists as service providers, hereby depoliticizing feminism, and increasing divisions between those women identified as NGO service deliverers and those targeted as clients (Lind, 2005; Alvarez, 1999; León, 2005). I’m thinking of Sonia Alvarez’s classic discussion of the NGOization of feminism for example. With a feminist sensibility, how do we respond to this?

NF: I strongly agree with this diagnosis, with Alvarez’s account of the problem and with your elaboration of it. It seems to me to state the problem quite well. So I do think we face a dilemma. In many cases, doing nothing is not an option, so social movements step in, providing absolutely necessary, urgently needed help. But I have two thoughts about that. One is that what we want, in the end, is a two-track model of politics: a first track comprising formal public institutions that take and implement binding Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice decisions, provide services and so on; and a second track comprising social movements in civil society that contest those institutions, hold them accountable, try to get them to broaden their mandate or whatever. That’s the picture that feminists and democrats of every stripe should strive to realize in the end. Then the question is: what happens on the social movement side when events conspire to dismantle or destroy their natural addressees which are the formal institutions? Social movements exist, after all, to challenge the formal institutions, not to replace them. When the formal institutions are in the process of being downsized or dismantled, then what exactly should social movements be doing? That’s thought one.

Thought two, which follows, is to try to distinguish, if possible, between those cases in which ‘state replacement’ activities of social movements function, in effect, to ratify, consolidate, reinforce neoliberalization, and those cases in which activities that might on their face look similar actually function differently, to widen contestation, to alter the balance of power, and to set in motion broader struggles that could eventually build up the institutional track. I don’t have a concrete example to give you but it seems to me that it would be worth developing ways to distinguish between these two kinds of replacement interventions, between those that are unlikely to lead to anything further, that are pure stopgaps, on the one hand, and those oriented to altering the institutional landscape, to building constituencies for strengthening public institutions that can be held accountable. So the question is: can we envision ways of doing two things at once, providing urgent services, on the one hand, and mobilizing the recipients on behalf of structural institutional change, on the other? Or, rather, can we do the first in a way that also promotes struggles for the second?

KB: How about using rights-based arguments for some of these interventions? I’m thinking, for example, of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union’s recent Freedom Rides across the US, collecting testimony from poor people to give to UN agencies as proof that through welfare reform the US violates poor people’s rights guaranteed under the UNDHR, or of the Poor People’s Economic Rights Coalition and its efforts to get hearings at the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights on a similar basis. I use these in my teaching as examples of reframing the conversation about welfare within the language of rights, with local groups pressuring transnational institutions to make the US government accountable for its rights violations. What are the possibilities for such reframing and what do you see as potential limitations? What can a rights-based strategy offer a movement against poverty – in both recognition and redistribution – and where does it fall short?

NF: Some thinkers are deeply sceptical about the language of rights, but I’m not one of them. I’ve never subscribed to the view that rights-talk necessarily individualizes and depoliticizes social struggles. On the contrary, I view rights as both a language of mobilization and also an institutional device for translating social movement power into structural change. In the case of welfare, surely, it is a much better language of mobilization than the language of need, because it stresses the agency of Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) the poor. Whereas the needs idiom positions its subjects as passive recipients of others’ largesse, rights-talk casts them as agents and bearers of entitlement. So the latter is far more empowering. Rights-talk may be especially useful in the sort of case you mentioned which leverages the moral force of the international human rights regime against a state that is very quick to brand others as human rights violators while exempting itself from like scrutiny. This ‘boomerang’ strategy as Keck and Sikkink (1998) have named it is also a kind of reframing. It appeals beyond the taken-forgranted frame of US domestic policy to the international frame in order to enhance the power of American welfare claimants vis-à-vis their own government. But let me add a final caveat about rights-talk. It is crucial that progressive forces not assume that the content and meaning of rights is simply given or established once and for all. Rather, they need to engage in what I am tempted to call the politics of rights interpretation, in which the content and meaning of rights is a stake of struggle. And they need to be alert, too, to the ways in which right-wing actors use the language of rights precisely to block efforts to deepen and broaden equality. I am thinking of such classic US stratagems as ‘fetal rights’ and the right to be free of ‘reverse discrimination’, not to mention the emerging transnational development of ‘intellectual property rights’, all of which serve to bolster or exacerbate injustice.

KB: Could you talk a little about the theory of governmentality as it is currently informing your work? What do you draw from this theoretical frame as a way to think about the restructuring of welfare?

NF: Sure. Although I am sometimes typecast as a Habermasian, I feel a real affinity with some aspects of the governmentality paradigm. As early as the 1980s, long before I had ever heard of governmentality, I was already trying to deal with related questions. At that time, I was interested in the way that different regimes and discourses position welfare claimants. At one point, I analysed the US welfare state as a ‘juridical-administrative-therapeutic apparatus’ that translates political struggles over the interpretation of needs into legal, administrative and/or therapeutic matters (1989: 154). A bit later, Linda Gordon and I analysed the US campaign against ‘welfare dependency’ (Fraser and Gordon, 1994) in terms that anticipated Nikolas Rose’s (1999) account of ‘responsibilization’. One could call these early efforts governmentality analyses avant la lettre. Although I hadn’t yet read Foucault’s famous lecture on that subject (Foucault, [1979] 1991), I was in effect working the same side of the street, explicating forms of ‘political rationality’ that induce dynamics of depoliticization in welfare regimes, transforming political actors into clients, consumers, and technologists of themselves. Later, of course, I did encounter the Foucauldian material, and ever since I have closely followed British work on governmentality which I find useful in several ways. First, it clarifies the neoliberal repositioning of the social citizen as the manager of ‘his’ own personal human capital.

And second, it connects up with the literature on governance without government at the global and transnational levels. In the present moment, important shifts are occurring in the mode and scale of political domination. Thus, we urgently need to understand the new dynamics of Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice power, their logic and rationality. The governmentality perspective is an important tool for addressing these issues.

KB: Is that how you best understand the contemporary relevance in the US welfare state of increased surveillance, increased distinctions between the redeemable versus the absolutely unredeemable, the increasingly repressive interventions associated with welfare?

NF: The return of the repressive, yes. That is a major contemporary development. We need now to understand the relation between welfare and militarization, including the so-called ‘prison-industrial complex’ that Loïc Wacquant (2002) has written about, whereby incarceration serves as substitute for welfare provision and full employment, especially for young African-American men. We need to further broaden the venerable feminist insight that welfare is not a self-enclosed topic that can be understood in isolation from major social-structural forces. Welfare can only be adequately understood in relation to the organization of labour, on the one hand, and that of lethal force, on the other. The governmentality perspective has the potential to help us develop that insight. It directs our attention to the logic of ruling, which subtends various institutionalized power complexes that are too often studied in isolation.

KB: Do you have any thoughts about the limitations of this framework?

NF: I’m a fairly eclectic thinker, prone to doubt that any one conceptual framework is alone sufficient. As I see it, the governmentality framework, like every other framework, sheds light on some things but obscures others.

It doesn’t give us nuanced ways to understand contestation, counterdiscourses, forms of self-organization by the populations who are subject to governmentalized initiatives. It doesn’t foreground struggles for hegemony. By and large, it tends to treat official power logics and discourses as the only game in town, whereas I would treat them as one strand among others, albeit an important strand.

KB: Another strand of your discomfort with this Foucault-inspired critique of neoliberalism seems to be that it rests on a very damning indictment of the Fordist welfare state. Your early work on the US welfare state as a juridical-administrative-therapeutic apparatus argued that the welfare state was not simply a unified repressive agent but rather a compromise forced by progressive movements, one with unintended consequences that its architects could not control (1989: 157). We see that sentiment echoed in a recent piece on Foucault and post-Fordism. You note here that Foucault shows us the dark underside of Keynesian welfare state’s most vaunted achievements (Fraser, 2003: 160); he frames social services as disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms as panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures as deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices as vehicles of subjection. You suggest, compellingly, that this account is a troublesome one. It ignores the progressive potential for these interventions, reducing all large-scale social welfare interventions to just disciplinary regulation. As a beneficiary of many such large-scale redistributive interventions to secure social justice, this position makes sense to me, as Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) does your refusal to cede the possibilities for better policy alternatives to relentlessly local, privatizing provision.

NF: Yes, that’s right. Another early essay of mine called ‘Struggle Over Needs’ (1990) followed Foucault in analysing the depoliticizing expert strand of welfare discourse but parted company with him in plotting its interaction with two other strands: the privatization strand that was pushing to eliminate welfare and the new-social-movement strand that was seeking to democratize it. So I conceived the problem as a three-way struggle between the technocratic forces of governmentalization, the antistatist forces of privatization, and the democratizing forces of emancipatory movements. Even then, I saw Foucault as offering a partial picture, as he only considered the first side. As a result, he usefully highlighted the disciplinary side of the Fordist welfare state but not the emancipatory, progressive side. I wanted to develop an account that integrated both sides of the story.

KB: An account that included the strands dealing with the agents who were defending or trying re-articulate, in new terms, a struggle for what we might call social democracy, for justice projects that aimed at redistribution?

NF: Yes, but the situation today is somewhat different. At the point I was just describing, when neoliberalism was just beginning to emerge, there was still a three-sided struggle. On one side stood the social democratic establishment, on another stood proponents of privatization. On the third side, finally, stood emancipatory social movements including feminism that saw the welfare state as a vehicle for social justice in principle but rejected its androcentrism and bureaucratic paternalism and therefore sought to make it more egalitarian, democratic, and participatory. At that point, the privatizers were still sufficiently weak that it was possible to take social democracy as one’s point of departure and launch a robust critique of it from the Left. Today, in contrast, the fault lines seem to me to have simplified. The privatization side is so strong that the once clear divisions between the social democratic establishment and its feminist and new-Left critics now seem to have blurred. For practical purposes, all of them belong to the camp of opponents of neoliberal privatization. That’s how I’d read it today.

KB: I want to ask you about religion before we finish. You have noted recently that US feminism has failed to attract large numbers of workingclass and lower-class women, women who have been drawn to evangelical Christianity as a perceived solution to the insecurities fostered by neoliberalism (2005: 302). In this respect, you describe evangelism as a classic ‘care of the self’ technology well-suited to neoliberalism, focused on telling people to expect and how to endure insecurity in a privatized, individualizing way (p. 303). How do we contest that? And do you have any sense, theoretically, about how we can develop a better analysis of Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice what’s going on here? Political economy and discussions of the welfare state haven’t been very good, as you point out, at dealing with religion, and many liberal social movements have also failed to address the issue. Where is your own thinking taking you in terms of this debate?

NF: It’s harder to state a positive position than to give some examples of things that won’t work. One thing that won’t work, in my view, is to view evangelicalism, as liberals do, through the lens of ethical pluralism. Seen that way, the matter is reduced to a problem of affirmative recognition. The question becomes: how can we in the mainstream appropriately respect the distinctive ethical orientations of minority religious communities while holding the line against their efforts to impose their views on others? It is not that this isn’t a real question. But the pluralism lens affords no access to other dimensions of the issue that are crucial for feminists and social democrats, including the distributive dimension and cross-cutting recognition dimensions such as gender and sexual status hierarchies within the evangelical movement. In addition, this approach affords no insight into the sources of the faith’s attraction for its adherents. As a result, it’s inadequate for anyone who sees some significant segment of evangelicals as potential recruits to feminism or social democracy. But there is also a second approach that won’t be helpful in this regard. I am thinking of the economistic approach proposed by Thomas Frank (2004). Frank maintains that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, that the Left should simply forget about gay rights and abortion, that once we get back to the real bread and butter issues these people will come on board. Now Frank’s economistic approach is the mirror image of the liberal one: whereas pluralism reduces the whole matter to affirmative recognition, he reduces everything to redistribution.

Thus, he proposes entirely to ignore the professed concerns of evangelicals. Effectively dismissing those concerns as false consciousness, he doesn’t bother himself about what, besides economics, might lie behind them.

So where does that leave us? If neither pure recognition nor pure redistribution will work, it stands to reason that we need to develop a more complex approach that combines elements of both those orientations. On the recognition side, we should acknowledge multiple intersecting status hierarchies, including those of gender, sexuality, race-ethnicity and religion itself, to be sure, but also status issues related to the new information economy which valorizes mobility, worldliness and symbolic facility, while depreciating ‘parochial’ local communities and work that appears non-symbolic. This last type of status issue has everything to do with shifts in the political economy, but it is not reducible to maldistribution. What is at stake here is rather (or perhaps I should say, also) a matter of dignity, of how people who exist largely outside the circuits of cybercapitalism (some of whom, but not all, are ‘losers’ in the economic sense) can maintain their sense of self-worth in our brave new world. Then, too, there are specifically gendered dignity issues, which concern what it means to live a dignified life as a woman who is often a wage worker, a mother, and a divorcée, and who is struggling to support a family in Downloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIV on July 7, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Feminist Theory 9(2) confusing and insecure times. Here, of course, recognition intersects very directly with redistribution. And so I think we on the Left should have a lot to say about supporting families. In the US, evangelical Christians have been in an unholy alliance with big business and neoliberal capital, which is so ironic because there is no greater threat to ‘family values’ than the macroeconomic policies of their allies. Our first priority should be to split that alliance and say very clearly where the real threat to family values lies.

At the same time, however, we must continue to problematize conventional limits on what counts as a proper family. On this point, I disagree with Frank, who proposes to bypass sexuality.

KB: Which links to the next question about the supposedly or purportedly secular nature of the liberal public sphere and the discomfort, therefore, that can be sensed inside some quarters when you have this debate about religion, about faith-based initiatives. This can stem not just from concerns about neoliberal privatization, but also from an investment in secular humanism as supremely – perhaps uniquely – rational. So what is your take on the recent spate of critiques of secular humanism, and Western feminism’s investment in it (Alexander, 2005; Mahmood, 2005)? Can we think of welfare outside of the secular humanist frame? How are solidarity, freedom, and equality thinkable outside it? Any idea what they would look like?

NF: I would distinguish between two different conceptions of secular humanism, one of which I consider problematic, the other of which I strongly endorse. The problematic conception could be called ‘exclusive or perfectionist secularism’. Endorsing atheism as an epistemic and ethical position that rivals theism, this sort of secularism would design public space in a way that privileges the first at the expense of the second. Because it establishes a status hierarchy, it is vulnerable to the critique you cited.

That is not the case, however, with the second conception of secularism, which could be called ‘inclusive or non-perfectionist’. Here secularism is not one substantive ethical or epistemic commitment among others, but rather an overarching frame within which many such commitments may be situated. In theory, then, this sort of secularism need not establish a status hierarchy. It seeks, rather, to create the sort of public space that affords parity of participation to atheists and theists of various stripes. In my view, inclusive secularism represents the best way of accommodating religious and ethical pluralism in a globalizing world. Certainly, no religious orientation can plausibly claim to design public space in a way that is fair to non-believers. Thus, I strongly doubt that the critics you cite have a better alternative. At the same time, however, inclusive secularism is always prone to devolve into the problematic, exclusive variety. So far from being establishable once and for all, it requires an ongoing process of contestation aimed at disclosing, and correcting, previously unnoticed biases. Thus, inclusive humanism is less a fixed and final arrangement than a platform for staging struggles for recognition in the sense of participatory parity.

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Fraser & Bedford: Social rights and gender justice Notes 1. In 1996 Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. It eliminated the statutory entitlement to poverty assistance, replaced the Assistance to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programme, imposed strict time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients, intensified the child support enforcement requirement, and gave states enormous discretion to adopt even more punitive measures such as the family cap – the prohibition of additional benefits when a mother on welfare gives birth to a new child.

Since that time, the welfare rolls have been dramatically reduced and have remained quite low, even during the economic recession of the early 2000s.

2. See for example groups like http://www.commongroundrelief.org/, or ACORN’s response to Katrina at http://acorn.org/?9703, and their critique of the state’s response. Both accessed 28 November 2006.

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World Bank (2000) Argentina Family Strengthening and Social Capital Promotion Project – PROFAM (Learning and Innovation Loan), Project information Document. Project Id: ARPE70374, Report No. PID9623, prepared 31 July.

Yudice, George (2004) The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003) with Axel Honneth; Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (1997); Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (1994) with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell; and Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989). Two new books will appear in fall 2008: Scales of Justice: Re-imaging Political Space for a Globalizing World (Polity Press and Columbia University Press) and Nancy Fraser with her critics, Adding Insult to Injury: Debating Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation, ed. Kevin Olson (Verso Books).

Address: City University of New York, Room 714, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA. Email: FraserN@earthlink.net

Kate Bedford is a Research Fellow at the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Kent. She was until recently a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Women’s Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she taught an advanced seminar on feminist political economy. She has worked on international development projects in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and she has taught numeracy and literacy skills in England. Her current research focuses on the interactions between sexuality studies, international development, and gender policy. She has just completed a book manuscript exploring the World Bank’s new emphasis on male inclusion, strengthening families, and reforming gender norms to encourage a loving balance within monogamous partnerships.

Address: Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NS, UK. Email: K.Bedford@kent.ac.uk

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