Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship

Towards a Politics of Difference

S. Hines

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230271890
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318879
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the meanings and significance of the UK Gender Recognition Act within the context of broader social, cultural, legal, political, theoretical and policy shifts concerning gender and sexual diversity, and addresses current debates about equality and diversity, citizenship and recognition across a range of disciplines.

1

Theorising Recognition

Introduction

This chapter is structured into two sections. The first section begins by considering the role of ‘recognition’ within social movement and political theory. Since the 1960s, the notion of recognition has been central to social movement struggles for equality across the arenas of social class, race, embodiment, gender and sexuality, and related issues of identity are the drivers of recognition claims. At the same time, recent social and political theory has examined the meaning and significance of ‘recognition’. In this way, scholars have set out differing parameters when considering the relevance of recognition for social justice. This chapter begins, then, by thinking about the academic turn to recognition alongside the fracturing of social democratic ideals, and especially the rise of identity politics and new social movements, in the late 1960s.

The second part of this section hones in on conceptualisations of recognition in considering the work of key figures in the literature. First, I look in detail at the approaches of Axel Honneth (1995), Charles Taylor (1995) and Nancy Fraser (1995). The chapter then turns to the redistribution/recognition debate. Here Fraser’s work is considered alongside that of Iris Marion Young (1997), Judith Butler (1998) and, again, Axel Honneth. Reading deliberations of redistribution/recognition allows further consideration of the correlation of political theories of recognition and cultural politics of identity. These themes are elaborated as the chapter examines work that has directly addressed gender and sexuality through recognition theory.

The second section of the chapter turns to the UK GRA. First, I outline the clause and criteria of the GRA to assess arguments surrounding redistribution/recognition in the literature previously discussed. Second, I empirically consider understandings of the concept of ‘recognition’ as it is configured in the aptly named Gender Recognition Act (UK, 2004). While subsequent chapters empirically examine the significance and the experiences of the Act as it came into law, here I reflect on how research participants conceptualised the term ‘recognition’ itself. The ways in which participants understood recognition are important for later considerations of how the GRA came to be experienced and, particularly, for exploring the ways in which participants view the Act as having different degrees of significance. The chapter closes by considering the extent to which academic debates around recognition resonate or conflict with the understandings of research participants.

Recognising recognition

The notion of ‘recognition’ forms the backdrop to varied political claims – some distinct and others overlapping – concerning identity, citizenship, material distribution and restoration, which, in turn, speak to national and global structural patterns of (in)equality and routes to social justice. Claims for recognition formulate through a number of identity sites including those related to class, race, ethnicity, nation, religion, the body (for example, around politics of disability), sexuality and gender, and are strongly contested – both institutionally and by other recognition seekers. Politics of recognition in the West emerged from the fracturing of social democratic ideals in the late 1960s, whereby political identification became less tied to social class and occupation. As Simon Thompson remarks, ‘Into this vacated space, so-called new social movements have emerged to present a novel sort of challenge to the politics of social democracy’ (2006: 2). Similarly, Steven Seidman (1997) links the development of recognition claims to an emergent politics of identity in the 1960s. Claims for recognition became articulated on the basis of race, ethnicity and nationhood through the Civil Rights Movement and struggles for multiculturalism; gender through the Women’s Movement; embodiment through the Disability Rights Movement; and sexuality through Sexual Liberation.

While the principles of recognition politics – respect, resources, protection, rights and benefits – have a long and global history, discourses of recognition – the ways in which these principles were articulated – shifted. Rather than claims for equality based upon sameness, social movements in the 1960s developed a language of difference. This marked an emerging self-consciousness and self-confidence among social movements (Seidman, 1997), or, as McLaughlin, Phillimore and Richardson suggest, a politics of reflexivity: ‘What changed was the naming of these dynamics, the political reflexivity which came to recognise recognition itself as salient [ … ]’ (2011: 2). The principle of ‘difference’ thus became central to standards of social justice. Concurrently, a politics of retribution – whereby historical wrongs and practices of injustice (for example, slavery in the United States; the Holocaust in Germany; apartheid in South Africa) were institutionally recognised and expressed – globally took shape (Phillips, 2003). Indeed, issues of race, ethnicity and national belonging and becoming were central to early reflections on the importance of recognition to postcolonial theory (Fanon, 1952), and later considerations of diaspora (Hall, 1990). At conceptual and political levels, then, ‘recognising recognition’ (McLaughlin et al., 2011: 2) incurred longitudinal reflexivity – looking back to social injustices of the past to acknowledge harms committed, to consider their impact in the present and to forge justice for the future. These themes, and especially the question of routes to social justice, are central to recognition debates and are assessed differently by each of the writers considered below.

Debating recognition: Honneth, Taylor and Fraser

Each of the writers considered here have overlapping concerns; each is concerned with theorising means by which to bring about social justice. Each also links the emergence of recognition to claims of new social movements as discussed above. For Axel Honneth (1995), recognition politics can be characterised by a shared sense of becoming – a collective identity. Charles Taylor argues that contemporary politics ‘turn on the need, sometimes the demand for recognition [ … ] on behalf of minority or “subaltern” groups, in some forms of feminism, and in what is called the politics of multiculturalism’ (1995: 225). Following Habermas (1994), both Honneth and Taylor suggest that the need for recognition is pre-rational; humans are driven not by self-interest but by the desire for understanding and reciprocity.

From a different premise, Nancy Fraser (1995) also underscores the notion of identity in her discussion of recognition: ‘A great many contemporary social movements can only be properly understood from a normative point of view if their motivating demands are interpreted along the lines of a “politics of identity” – a demand for the cultural recognition of their collective identity’ (2003: 111). Each of these writers agree that political arenas have moved beyond a previous overriding focus on social class and, moreover, on issues of material redistribution. Yet recent years have seen a return to class by writers arguing for the increased salience of class as both an identity and as a marker of growing material inequalities in capitalist societies (Skeggs, 1997; Hennessy, 2000; Savage, 2000; Taylor, 2012). It is alongside social class, then, not in the place of, that issues of identity, culture, and difference have come to the fore.

Honneth, Taylor and Fraser also concur on the significance of recognition, each engaging with recognition not only as means by which to understand the contemporary political terrain, but as a method of achieving social justice. As Thompson discusses, each writer ‘articulates a political theory of recognition which is based on the premise that a just society would be one in which everyone gets due recognition. In such a society, in other words, all individuals and groups would enjoy the practical acknowledgment that they deserve’ (2006: 3). Later chapters of this book will indicate that recognition claims, however, are far from democratic. Rather, demands for collective recognition are frequently pitted against those of other groups. For now, though, my point is to trace connecting themes in the work of Honneth, Taylor and Fraser. In this way, each writer suggests that recognition lies at the heart of social justice. Honneth (1995) argues that, since the development of the self is a dialogical process, recognition is key to social inclusion. Liberal states should strive to enable both social recognition and autonomy. This balance, he believes, prevents ‘anti-social striving for independence’ (2002: 504). Honneth goes so far as to map human development in terms of recognition, or, at least, to suggest that recognition struggles emerge from elemental desire to avoid the ‘moral suffering’ that arises from ‘misrecognition’.

Taylor (1995) also suggests that social justice depends on recognition and proposes that collective recognition be included into politics of rights. For Taylor, then, recognition of the self – or self-identity – is dependent on the recognition of others. The alternative, he argues, is to invite ‘nonrecognition’ or ‘misrecognition’, which ‘can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being’ (1995: 25). Later chapters of this book return to Taylor’s notions of non-recognition and misrecognition, arguing for the significance of these terms when considering recognition of gender diversity. Here, though, it is important to reflect on Taylor’s intervention: misrecognition is a process of oppression. Fraser (1995) also invokes the effects of misrecognition, suggesting that when misrecognition of social status occurs, it reduces the ability to be a social actor:

To be misrecognised is to be denied the status of a full partner in social interaction and to be prevented from participating as a peer in social life as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitutes one as comparatively unworthy of respect.

Fraser (2003: 27)

As Fraser links misrecognition to ‘unworthiness’, Honneth talks about the significance of recognition for the self to ‘appear in public without shame’ (2004: 355). Here, then, recognition holds important affective qualities and is fundamental to emotional characteristics – self-worth, respect and dignity. Honneth’s (1995) discussion of ‘struggles’ around recognition thus draws attention to the impacts of social visibility and acknowledgement. ‘Struggles’ arise when individuals or groups feel invisible or unacknowledged, and, hence, excluded. Inclusion is therefore central to recognition as are equality and visibility. If recognition is based on equality and inclusion, however, what happens to the acknowledgement of claims by groups who do not want to be included in dominant political life and who refute notions of equality? Later chapters consider these questions in relation to gender and sexual diversity.

The significance of the affective and the emotional run through recognition debates. In his seminal essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1992), Taylor distinguishes between the ‘intimate sphere’ and the ‘public sphere’. On the former, he situates love (affective and intimate relationships) as central to identity and thus to recognition. On the latter, he differentiates between two aspects of public recognition: a ‘politics of universalism’, through which autonomy is protected in the granting of rights, and a ‘politics of difference’, which protects individual identity. The fissures between a politics of universalism and a politics of difference run through subsequent chapters of this book and are reflected on directly in Chapter 7. Honneth (1995) also writes of the significance of love as an affective attachment to personal identity. He adds on to this the importance of rational autonomy – or respect – to a universal model of recognition and draws attention to the recognition of esteem, which he sees as arising through collective values. The place of respect and esteem within recognition struggles will be further explored towards the end of this chapter in empirical consideration of the GRA. While Honneth, and to a lesser extent, Taylor, draws on psychoanalysis to link the emotional and the political – the self, the intimate and the public – Fraser refutes the place of psychoanalysis in political theory. Moreover, she argues strongly against developing political theory through accounts of individual subjectivity. Instead, Fraser insists that recognition and, by turn, misrecognition, is located in social and political structures. It is from this premise that Fraser foregrounds socio-economic redistribution in theorising a politics of recognition.

Material redistribution and cultural recognition

The rise of a politics of recognition has been discussed as a paradigm shift (Hobson, 2003) wherein concerns over redistribution of material resources have been overshadowed by claims for respect based on individual or group difference. Indeed, Fraser repeatedly argues that: ‘we are facing a new constellation in the grammar of political claims making. In this constellation, the center of gravity has shifted “from redistribution to recognition” (Fraser, 1995)’ (2003: 22). Fraser explains:

The usual approach is to view recognition through the lens of identity. From this perspective, what requires recognition is groupspecific cultural identity. Misrecognition consists in the depreciation of such identity by the dominant culture and the consequent damage to group members’ sense of self. Redressing this harm requires engaging in a politics of recognition. In such a politics, group members join together to refashion their collective identity by producing a self-affirming culture of their own. Thus, on the identity model of recognition, the politics of recognition means ‘identity politics’.

Fraser (2003: 23)

From different premises, later chapters of this book, reject a model of identity politics for accounting for, and protecting, gender diversity. I argue that a politics of identity has operated as an excluding mechanism. In Chapter 7, I suggest that a politics of recognition is harboured by its ties to identity as an authentic characteristic and argue for the potentials of a politics of difference. Fraser’s original point of contention with recognition politics is, however, a different one. In her essay ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemma’s of Justice in a “Postsocialist Age” ’, published in New Left Review in 1995, Fraser states the importance of economic redistribution in enabling social justice (Fraser, 1995). In her view, the ‘identity model’ has brought about ‘the displacement of redistribution by recognition’ (2003: 24). In other words, issues of cultural difference have become more important in contemporary politics than economic inequalities.

Fraser is not alone among political theorists in arguing that a ‘cultural turn’ has displaced issues of economic inequality (Phillips, 2003). Key thinkers within political theory subsequently argued that increasing material divisions in society were being ignored through an increasing focus on identity and difference. Brian Barry and Richard Rorty offer extreme examples of this position. In responding to the argument that the Left fails to take adequate account of racial difference, Barry responded that ‘it is multiculturalists who are blind to the ever-widening differences that are such a deplorable feature of most contemporary societies [ … ] in the quality of education and healthcare available to people with different incomes’ (2001: 63–64). Similarly Rorty believes that there are ‘dangerous consequences of developing a left that neglects class and money by focusing on the elimination of prejudice and sexism’ (2000: 18). Of course, the contention from white men on the Left that a focus on race and gender (and sexuality) dilutes attention from the class struggle is not new, and Chapter 2 maps the impacts of such argument on the emergence of social movements based around gender, sexuality and, later, gender diversity. It is important to note that Fraser herself did not fit with a Leftist position that denied the significance of identity to contemporary politics and models of social justice. Fraser’s interjection was as a theorist of recognition herself and, as earlier discussion indicates, her work is deeply concerned with the harms endured through misrecognition: ‘a politics of recognition is politically useful and indeed morally required’ (2008: 83). Indeed Fraser offers a direct challenge to Rorty’s rejection of recognition politics: ‘I conclude that the Left should reject Rorty’s proposal to turn back the clock. [ … ] it should build on the gains of the last forty years, which have expanded and deepened the meaning of social justice’ (2008: 88). Hence, in contrast to Barry and Rorty, Fraser does not propose a move away from a politics of culture (recognition). Rather she argues for the need to (re)instate an economic model of social justice (redistribution) in conjunction with a politics of recognition. For Fraser, then, a model of social justice must equally concern aspects of recognition and redistribution.

Yet Fraser does pit social class and economic equality against identity and difference, or, at least, views them as distinct facets of social justice: ‘Insofar as the politics of recognition is displacing the politics of redistribution, it risks aiding the forces that promote economic equality’ (2003: 22), and, it is in this vein, that Fraser has been critiqued for reinforcing a material/cultural divide. Accordingly, Iris Marion-Young has argued against the separation of the economy and culture: ‘Political economy is cultural and culture is economic’ (1997: 154). For Young, questions of economic equality are central to recognition struggles, for example, ‘Many who promote the cultivation of African-American identity [ … ] do so on the grounds that self-organisation and solidarity in predominately African-American neighbourhoods will improve the material lives of those who live there by providing services and jobs’ (2008: 90). Moreover, Young argues that Fraser’s dichotomous model is deeply contradictory:

She treats all instances of group-based claims to cultural specificity and recognition as though recognition is an end in itself. For the movements that Fraser is most concerned with, however, – namely, women’s movements, movements of people of color, gay and lesbian movements, movements of poor andworking class people – a politics of recognition functions more as a means to, or an element in, broader ends of social and economic equality, rather than as a distinct goal of justice.

Young (2008: 101)

Young (2008) asserts that it is impossible to separate conflict between cultural groups from structural struggles over jobs, land and resources. She concludes:

Fraser is wrong to conceptualise struggles for recognition of cultural specificity as contradicting struggles for radical transformation of economic structures. So long as the cultural denigration of groups produces or reinforces structural economic oppressions, the two struggles are continuous.

Young (2008: 104–105)

Like Young, Judith Butler argues that the cultural and the economic cannot be separated. Butler contends that Fraser downplays sexuality politics in labelling them as ‘merely cultural’. For Butler, the regulation of sexuality is intrinsically tied to the political economy. Fraser and Butler’s arguments on sexual politics are considered in detail below wherein I explore recognition debates as they are specifically related to gender and sexuality. Echoing Young, Butler (1998) refutes Fraser’s analytical separation of the economic and the cultural, proposing instead an anti-dualistic model. Reflecting on empirical studies of recognition struggles and social movements, Barbara Hobson (2003) also argues for an intersectional analysis of the material and the cultural: ‘[t]o pose the question that way is to ignore the dynamic interplay between claims to alter maldistribution and challenges to the devaluation of members of a group based on their identities’ (Hobson, 2003: 1). Against Fraser’s dualist model, Hobson suggests that ‘recognition and redistribution become specific lenses for viewing the same struggles, rather than discrete categories’ (2003: 2). Anne Phillips concurs, suggesting that ‘the more we examine social and political movements, the more intertwined the recognition and redistribution questions appear’ (2003: 269).

In their co-authored book Redistribution or Recognition? (2003), Fraser and Honneth expressly debate the relationship between the economic and the cultural. Honneth too cautions against Fraser’s detachment of material and cultural realms. For Honneth, recognition stands as the core normative category of a theory of social justice; all matters of redistribution can – and should – be considered as matters of redistribution (Thompson, 2006). His argument is threefold: that the sharing (or not) of resources is interlinked with cultural values; that the form of the division of labour and labour status is underpinned by cultural values; that redistribution struggles are informed by cultural interpretations. Culture, then, according to Honneth is central to the political economy: ‘[i]t is not advisable to theoretically isolate purely economic or systemic factors from cultural elements with regard to the capitalist economic order’ (2003: 156). Within political theory, the arenas most frequently analysed in relation to politics of identity (re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Prologue
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Theorising Recognition
• 2. Moving for Recognition
• 3. Recognition, Misrecognition and Human Rights
• 4. Claiming and Contesting Recognition
• 5. Recognising and Regulating Intimate Diversity
• 6. Governing Diversity
• 7. From Recognition to a Politics of Difference
• Conclusion
• References
• Index