This article theorizes and begins to explore the extent to which academic and nonacademic discourses contribute to the reproduction and legitimacy of the economic status quo. The author argues that economic practices in the United States are often depoliticized in at least two different ways: They are naturalized or essentialized conceptually, and political control over them is limited. Drawing on antiessentialist Marxian economic theory, Gramsci's theory of hegemony, and poststructuralist theory, the author constructs a framework for conceptualizing economic practices in a more politicized manner. The author also provides some specific examples of depoliticized discourses and a few examples of more politicized discourses.
Nancy Fraser has elaborated a framework for analyzing different forms of oppression using the categories of redistribution and recognition. This framework has come under criticism from Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, despite the fact that all three theorists similarly insist that justice is not reducible solely to economic justice and that struggles against ‘cultural’ forms of oppression are equally important. Drawing on the debate between these theorists, in this article I examine the ways in which their respective theoretical frameworks are potentially problematic or do not go far enough in theorizing the complex interconnections among economics, politics and culture. For example, Fraser’s binary economy/culture and Young’s distinction between culture and structure are overly broad and potentially misleading. Butler and Fraser also appear to adopt undertheorized and economistic conceptualizations of ‘the economy’ and capitalism. In the course of my critique, I propose a somewhat different approach to analyzing the causes of various forms of oppression and the relation between different emancipatory struggles. Among other things, I argue that social relationships need to be disaggregated further, into more than just two categories, and that the economic and the cultural (as well as the political) should be analyzed as always complexly overdetermining each other.
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