Margot Canaday

Promising alliances: the critical feminist theory of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib

abstractThis essay examines the work of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, two philosophers who have demonstrated that feminist theorists can usefully draw upon both postmodernism and the critical theory tradition, with which Fraser and Benhabib are more clearly associated. I argue that each theorist claims the universal ideals and normative judgements of modernism, and the contextualism, particularity, and skepticism of postmodernism. I do this by revisiting each of their positions in the now well-known Feminist Contentions exchange, by examining the diverse ways in which they reconcile universalism and difference, and by exploring each theorists critique of the Habermasian public sphere.