![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents.
Notes
1 Honneth, Recognition as Ideology.
2 In the Brazilian documental film Housemaids (2012), by Gabriel Mascaro, seven adolescents film their family’s housemaids for a week. At the same time that these women have developed a close bond of affection with the family they work with, what it is possible to observe is that they practically live with them, having an own room in the house where they work. Normally, this bedroom is located in the most precarious part of the house – they are very small and usually they do not have with no windows. As these women are exercising a work that it is necessary to capitalist social reproduction, they should not be seen as if they were “helping” these families, as it is possible to observe in the discourse of these adolescents and of the family in general. Furthermore, as they are exercising a real job, they should have vacations and more freedom to go home to visit their relatives, something that they seem not to enjoy. The movie reveals how the activity of social reproduction is low little valued in our society.
3 Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”.
4 Honneth, Freedom’s Right.
5 Ibid., 124.
6 Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 156.
7 See Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women; Delphy, Close to Home; and Federici, Revolution at Point Zero.
8 Honneth, Freedom’s Right.
9 Ibid., 156.
10 Ibid., 158.
11 Ibid., 161.
12 About a social history of family life focused on childhood, see Ariès, Centuries of Childhood.
13 Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 164.
14 Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”.
15 Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 172.
16 Ibid., 173.
17 Allen, “Recognizing Domination”; Connolly, “Love in the Private”; Ferrarese, “Gabba-Gabba, we accept you, one of us”.
18 Honneth, Recognition as Ideology.
19 The way how Honneth’s notion of progress weaks his critique of power was already developed by authours such as Schaub and Culp and Soroko. In their critiques, the use of normative reconstruction as a method of social critique by Honneth is very problematic in the sense that it is committed to a robust notion of progress that invalidates a more potential and radical social critique. See Schaub, “Misdevelopments, Pathologies and Normative Revolutions”, and Culp and Soroko, “Normative Reconstruction without Foundation”.
20 McNay, “Social Freedom and Progress in the Family”.
21 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 117.
22 As Federici points out, Marx also recognized that the discovery of gold and silver in America, the enslavement and entombment of aboriginal population, but also the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies and the turning of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, were also chief moments of primitive accumulation. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 63. In
23 Ibid., 63.
24 Ibid., 74.
25 Ibid., 75.
26 In the Ganz Unten (translated to English as Lowest of the Low), written by the German journalist Günter Wallraff and published in 1985, describes his undercover experiment as a Turkish migrant worker in West Germany over the span of two years. The book reveals the xenophobic treatment and exploitation he faced while playing the role of a young Turkish migrant worker. It was the exploitation of this periphery inside the centre that led middle-class in Germany into a better socio-economic condition. See Wallraff, Ganz Unten.
27 Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” 99.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 100.
30 For a very thought-provoking conversation on capitalism and its social and political faces, see Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism: a Conversation in Critical Theory.
31 Ibid., 102.
32 Ibid., 104.
33 Ibid., 106.
34 Ibid., 108.
35 Ibid., 110.
36 Ibid., 111.
37 Ibid., 113.
38 Ibid., 114.
39 For a more complex sociological analysis on the situation of migrant nannies, who leave their families behind to do the caretaking work of the Global Economy, see Parreñas, Servants of Globalization; Hochschild and Ehrenreich (eds.), Global Woman; and Hochschild, Love and Gold.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 116.