In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts.

ABSTRACT This paper explores two emancipatory ways that the struggle over recognition can take under conditions of social invisibility and hyper-visibility: that of social visibilization, and that of a dialectical interplay between invisibility and visibility. The theories of recognition of Honneth and Rancière acknowledge that recognition is based on socially mediated perceptual processes that enable or prevent recognition: whether and how subjects become socially visible or remain invisible. For Honneth, social invisibility is a marker of (...) misrecognition and consists of deliberate inattention and ignorance of others, so that struggles over recognition must take place, in part, through making previously invisible subjects visible. I argue here that Honneth’s account of social (in)visibility and his corresponding view of recognition in terms of properly formed visibilization, while valuable, prove insufficient when considering how racialized societies are underpinned by the power dynamics of invisibility and hyper-visibility. I turn to the works of Fanon, Ellison, and Rancière to illustrate these dynamics and to offer an account of how struggles over recognition requires practices of dis-identification from these dynamics that involve attempts to create interstices within dominant orders of (in)visibility where subjects might appear on their own terms. (shrink)

Struggles for recognition are at the same time struggles over what it means to recognize and be recognized. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth propose two mutually exclusive ways to understand recognition: either as a matter of justice or as a matter of identity. This article argues against the limitations of both of these construals of recognition, and offers a third way of construing it: as a matter of freedom. Recognition is not reducible, empirically or normatively, to (...) any of these, however. Moreover, it needs to be regarded both more critically and more openly since what we are dealing with is a practice and an ideal that is by its very nature deeply contestable and therefore subject to unforeseeable historical and normative change. Rather than trying to fix the meaning of recognition in order to give it a determinate role in ambitious theories of justice, it would be better to proceed more sceptically, attentive both to the complexities of recognition relations and to alternative ways of conceiving them and going on with them differently from before. (shrink)

In order for the concept, 'recognition', to play a critical role in social theory, it must be possible to draw a distinction between due recognition and failures of recognition. Some recognition theorists, including Axel Honneth, argue that this distinction can be preserved only if we presuppose that due recognition involves a rational response to "evaluative qualities" that can be rightly perceived in the context of social interaction. This paper points out a problem facing recent defenses (...) of this "perception model" and proposes a solution. I begin by making explicit three criteria broadly shared by recognition theorists: an adequate theory of recognition must be (a) critical, capable of drawing a distinction between due recognition and recognitive failure; (b) minimally idealist, able to accommodate the mediating role of subjectivity in human receptivity to value; and (c) historicist, should not rule out a priori that the values involved in recognitive practice are historically emergent. I then argue that Honneth's version of the perception model cannot fulfill these criteria simultaneously. Drawing upon an Aristotelian notion of evaluative perception and working through an example from Zadie Smith's On Beauty, I defend an alternative view that is, I argue, better equipped to meet these three criteria. (shrink)

I would like to present a two part response to the following question that Seyla Benhabib posed at a conference at Harvard University in 1999: “Is there a Transition from Distribution to Recognition?” The first part proposes that issues of distribution and recognition should be seen as aspects of political struggles, rather than distinct types of struggle, and thus a form of analysis is required that has the capacity to study political struggles under both aspects. The second (...) part suggests that struggles over multicultural and multinational recognition are undergoing an important change in practice which requires a corresponding change in the prevailing forms of analysis. These two recommendations rest on and follow from an underlying orientation. The primary but not exclusive orientation would be practices of freedom rather than theories of justice. The aim of such an aspectival political philosophy and corresponding democratic political practice would not be to discover and constitutionalize thejust and definitive form of recognition and distribution, but to ensure that ineliminable, agonic democratic games over recognition and distribution, with their rival theories of distribution and recognition, can be played freely, with a minimum of domination. (shrink)

In this introductory paper, I discuss the second-personal approach to ethics and the theory of recognition as two accounts of the fundamental sociality of the human form of life. The first section delineates the deep affinities between the two approaches. They both put a reciprocal social constellation front and center from which they derive the fundamental norms of moral and social life and a social conception of freedom. The second section discusses three points of contrast between the two approaches: (...) The accounts differ in that the second-personal approach opts for a narrower conception of recognition focusing on mutual moral accountability, whereas recognition theory suggests a broader conception including relations of love, respect, and esteem. Secondly, the accounts differ as to how they conceive of the interrelation of the I-thou and the I-We relationship. Finally, they differ with regard to the way they think of struggles for recognition. Whereas the second-personal approach suggests that we can understand struggles on the basis of a transcendental infrastructure of second-personal address, the theory of recognition considers norms of recognition as themselves constituted by dialectical social struggles. The paper closes with a reflection on the ways in which both approaches can help us understand the social vulnerability of the human form of life. (shrink)

The paper applies insights from Axel Honneth's recent book, The Struggle for Recognition, to the South African situation. Honneth argues that most movements for justice are motivated by individuals' and groups' felt need for recognition. In the larger debate over the relative importance of recognition compared with distribution, a debate framed by Taylor and Fraser, Honneth is presented as the best of both worlds. His tripartite schema of recognition on the levels of love, rights and (...) solidarity, explains how concerns for equality and difference are two separate needs, even though both must be satisfied. Past and ongoing struggles in South Africa can be understood as struggles for recognition. The African Renaissance itself, to be successful, must address economic and recognition issues simultaneously. (shrink)

I argue that Axel Honneth, reappropriated Colwyn Trevarthen's distinction between primary and secondary intersubjectivity,into his critical social theory. How the concept of primary intersubjectivity gets re-incorporated, or indeed, re-cognized in Honneth’s conception of recognition, however, is a complex issue that Iexplore in this essay. It is linked to questions not only about child development, but also about whether one should understand recognition in terms of a summons, following Fichte, or in terms of a struggle, as Honneth, following (...) Hegel, suggests, or in terms of a gift, as Ricoeur, following Hénaff suggests. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred (...) like furious clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists. (shrink)

Competition for positional goods is an important feature of contemporary consumer societies. This paper discusses three strategies for a normative evaluation of positional competition. First, it criticizes an evaluation in terms of people's motives to engage in such competition. A reconstruction of an American debate over the status-motivation of consumer behavior shows how such an analysis founders on the difficulties of distinguishing between status and non-status motives for consumption. Second, the article criticizes an approach based on assessing the (positive and (...) negative) externalities of positional competition. This approach is plagued by the methodological difficulty of determining the relevant externalities and their weight. The article then puts forward a third kind of evaluation, in terms of recognition relations. Starting from Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, I will propose to think of positional competition as a struggle for one kind of recognition that is necessary to personal autonomy, i.e. recognition according to the principle of achievement. Finally, the paper discusses the question of how we can assess the legitimacy of interferences with positional competition. I argue that the recognition-based approach has a better response to this question than the externalities-based approach, especially with regard to the liberal objection that such interference is a violation of personal freedom. (shrink)

The adoption of the Legal Codes has generated a debate regarding use therein of the concept of family. Today, the family is in an area of decline due to profound socio-economic mutations, which have caused several processes to become acute, such as individualization, divorce, abandonment of the prospect of marriage, increase in number of abortions, deterioration of the condition of children and adolescents. In spite of all this, the Legal Codes have preserved the traditional concepts. Likewise, the development of NRTs, (...) insemination, surrogate mothers, demands for rights for the gay couples and their fight for acknowledgement have also contributed to this socio-cultural shift. We use the concept of family in its classical meaning; any other meaning configurations remain in the area signifying a couple/pair that do not have the possibility of procreation in themselves. Under the circumstances, we plead for the reconstruction of the family. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the struggle of alternative subcultures for recognition from a philosophical perspective. This examination makes use of Honnethian critical theory to examine the philosophical dimensions of the formation of subcultural groups. More specifically, this article makes use of the Goth subculture as a case study in order to shed light on the centrality of the concept of recognition to the activities of subcultures, and to outline the material harms that follow (...) from a lack of recognition. (shrink)

Competition for positional goods is an important feature of contemporary consumer societies. This paper discusses three strategies for a normative evaluation of positional competition. First, it criticizes an evaluation in terms of people's motives to engage in such competition. A reconstruction of an American debate over the status-motivation of consumer behavior shows how such an analysis founders on the difficulties of distinguishing between status and non-status motives for consumption. Second, the article criticizes an approach based on assessing the (positive and (...) negative) externalities of positional competition. This approach is plagued by the methodological difficulty of determining the relevant externalities and their weight. The article then puts forward a third kind of evaluation, in terms of recognition relations. Starting from Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, I will propose to think of positional competition as a struggle for one kind of recognition that is necessary to personal autonomy, i.e. recognition according to the principle of achievement. Finally, the paper discusses the question of how we can assess the legitimacy of interferences with positional competition. I argue that the recognition-based approach has a better response to this question than the externalities-based approach, especially with regard to the liberal objection that such interference is a violation of personal freedom. (shrink)

AI systems have often been found to contain gender biases. As a result of these gender biases, AI routinely fails to adequately recognize the needs, rights, and accomplishments of women. In this article, we use Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition to argue that AI’s gender biases are not only an ethical problem because they can lead to discrimination, but also because they resemble forms of misrecognition that can hurt women’s self-development and self-worth. Furthermore, we argue that Honneth’s theory of (...) recognition offers a fruitful framework for improving our understanding of the psychological and normative implications of gender bias in modern technologies. Moreover, our Honnethian analysis of gender bias in AI shows that the goal of responsible AI requires us to address these issues not only through technical interventions, but also through a change in how we grant and deny recognition to each other. (shrink)

The need for justice for individuals, groups, and society as a whole has perhaps never been more pressing. The presence or absence of social recognition plays a vital role in both social injustices and efforts to overcome and prevent them. Critical theory philosopher Axel Honneth’s influential accounts of recognition and struggles for recognition contain important insights about injustice and social justice movements. Unfortunately, some of Honneth’s concepts are narrow and need expansion for them to be useful in (...) considering social injustices and responses to those injustices. This is especially true if we are to understand and respond to current social justice issues such as Black Lives Matter and the climate crisis. -/- Douglas Giles presents an important corrective and addition to Axel Honneth’s view of recognition that gives the concepts of recognition, misrecognition, and struggles for recognition more explanatory power. He first critiques Honneth’s portrayal of misrecognition as being a simple lack of recognition and provides an alternative view of misrecognition as complex and multidimensional, helping us better understand the causes and effects of injustices. He then engages in a critical examination of Honneth’s account of struggles for recognition—the emancipation from injustice. The American civil rights movement and women’s suffrage movements are archetypal political struggles for recognition, but Honneth, like Charles Taylor and others, sees struggles for recognition only as political struggles, leaving out much of the story of struggles for recognition. In response, Giles presents a more robust picture of struggles for recognition that decentralizes struggles for recognition by including individual experience and agency. -/- This contribution to recognition studies expands the reality of recognition and misrecognition beyond theoretical concepts into the daily lives of individuals. Recognition is essential for affirming one’s identity and one’s place in community and society. Misrecognition is at the heart of many injustices from interpersonal relations to structural socioeconomic inequalities. Struggles for recognition are ubiquitous for everyone because people’s need for recognition extends far beyond political recognition. Giles crafts a view of recognition and misrecognition that identifies some important problems in critical theory’s approach to social justice and offers new conceptualizations to assist future research in various fields of critical social theories. (shrink)

헤겔의 윤리학 내지 사회 · 정치철학에서 아주 많이 거론되고 있는 핵심문제들 가운데 하나가 바로 인정(認定) 내지 승인(承認)의 문제다. 그리고 많은 연구자들은 이 문제를 논의할 때 헤겔의 『정신현상학』(Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807)을 그 중심 텍스트로 삼고 있다. 물론, 사회 속에서 발생하는 인간 상호간의 인정(승인)문제는 실로 중요한 문제가 아닐 수 없다. 사소한 다툼에서부터, 죽음을 초래하기까지 하는 전쟁에 이르기까지의 거의 모든 투쟁의 배경 내지 근저에는 바로 인간 상호간의 인정 내지 무시(無視)가 깔려있기 때문이다. 그러나 적어도 헤겔이 정신현상학에서 말하고 있는 생사를 건 인정투쟁은, 국가가 성립하기 이전의 (...) 자연상태에서 일어나는 현상이지, 결코 국가 속에서 발생하는 사건이 아니라는 점을 간과해서는 안 된다. 헤겔은 후자의 상태(조건)에서 발생하는 투쟁을 결코 ‘인정투쟁’이라고 부르지 않고 ‘결투’라고 불렀다. 이 점을 많은 사람들이 혼동하고 있다. 헤겔이 말하는 맥락을 떠난 의미의 ‘인정투쟁’이 국가 속에서 일어나고 있다고 말할 수 있지만, 그것은 결코 헤겔이 말하는 바가 아니다. 이 점을 입증하기 위해 필자는『정신현상학』이전의 헤겔의 저술들인 『인륜의 체계』(System der Sittlichkeit, 1802/03)와 『예나체계기획』(Jenenser Systementwürfe, 1803/04; 1805/06)에 나타난 인정 및 인정투쟁의 문제를 함께 검토한다. 이 글에서는 후쿠야마의 경우를 예로 들어, 원 저자가 사용한 용어의 본래 의미를 벗어나 자의적(恣意的)으로 용어를 사용하는 오류를 지적하고자 한다. 아울러, 인정투쟁의 결과로 발생하는 주인과 노예와 관련된 그의 이해의 문제점, 플라톤의 혼 3분설에 대한 그의 해석과 관련된 인간본성에 대한 이해의 오류, 특히 ‘패기’[thymos]에 대한 이해의 문제점 등을 지적함으로써 그의 주장이 철학의 고전적인 텍스트들에 대한 깊이 있는 독서 및 정확한 이해를 결여하고 있음을 드러낸다. 이 글의 성격상, ‘역사의 종말’에 대한 그의 이해가 지니고 있는 문제점들에 관해서는 글의 주제와 관련해서만 언급된다. (shrink)

This article argues for the necessity of recognising the collective rights-holding status of ‘sexual and gender minorities’ (SGMs) by examining the limits of the discourse concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in international law. I consider both symbolic interactionism and queer theory, which are critical of the assumption that everyone subscribes to a gender and a sexual identity. The theorisation proposed here accounts for not only people who possess a relatively stable identity, but also people whose situations are not conclusively (...) characterised but still require recognition justice. Not equating SGMs to LGBTI populations, I contend that the use of the term ‘SGMs’ should capture the sociocultural dynamics of the way in which one is made a ‘minority’. In light of the variations regarding sexual and gender norms in diverse contexts, SGMs are conceptually useful to accommodate differential experiences of nonconformity with the normative. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three non-skeptical ways of explaining and reconciling political struggles: monologue, instrumental dialogue, and a comparative dialogical approach promoted by Charles Taylor and James Tully. It surveys the work of Taylor and Tully to show three particular family resemblances: their emphasis on practice, irreducible diversity, and periodic reconciliation. These resemblances are evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain struggles over recognition and distribution. They describe these as dialogical actions, and suggest that a form of (...) dialogical comparison might reconcile their various contested demands. (shrink)

(1996). Homelessness and the struggle for recognition. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 832-835.

This article reflects on the struggle for recognition, in particular on the question of how to avoid people becoming battle-weary. Where do people find the strength to continue this struggle without lapsing into violence? These are questions which we derive from one of Paul Ricoeur’s latest publications Course of Recognition. Ricoeur claims that the only way to avoid the struggle for recognition degenerating into violent conflicts, is to place it in a horizon of hope—the (...) hope that the struggle does not have the final word on interpersonal relations. In this article we take up Ricoeurs suggestion and elaborate it successively from a broad religious perspective and a Christian-Biblical perspective. This also allows us to develop new anthropological insights concerning the Struggle for Recognition. (shrink)

While the mediational theories of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have helped to uncover the role that technologies play in ethical life, the role that technologies play in political life has received far less attention. In order to fill in this gap, I turn to the mediational theory of Hegel. Hegel shows how understanding the mediated nature of experience is vital to understanding the development of political life. Through examples found in the military, in particular concerning the relationship between explosive (...) ordnance detonation (EOD) soldiers and robots, I illustrate how Hegel’s analysis of the “struggle for recognition” can be used to understand human-technology relations from a political perspective. This political perspective can consequently help us to appreciate how technologies come to have a role in political life through our ability to experience solidarity with technology. Solidarity is experienced by users due to the recognition of technologies as serving roles in society that I describe as functionally equivalent to the social roles of the user. The realization of this functional equivalence allows users to learn how they are perceived and respected by society through the experience of how functionally equivalent technologies are perceived and respected. I conclude by focusing on the importance of understanding functional equivalence in design, as well as in the case of the Dallas Police Department having turned an EOD robot from a life-saving to a life-taking device. These examples show why Hegel is necessary for helping us to understand the political significance of recognizing and of misrecognizing technologies. (shrink)

In this essay I examine authority from the viewpoint of the paradigm of recognition: this theoretical framework, as I wish to demonstrate, is particularly suitable for both a clear definition and a consistent practical-normative analysis of authority. In section I propose a definition of authority which, resting on the normative meaning intrinsic to the concept of recognition, allows to systematically differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of authority. After delineating the characteristics of a legitimate political authority, I focus (...) on authority as a means of domination, on the one hand, and of emancipation, on the other. Firstly I consider the long-standing question of why social groups sometimes support an authority oppressing them, and I determine what, instead, can cause a struggle for recognition to occur. Then I discuss hegemony, understood as an intra-group leadership aimed at fostering struggles against domination: can it constitute a legitimate, emancipat.. (shrink)

This article examines a neglected but crucial feature of Honneth's critical theory: its use of a concept of recognition to articulate the norms that are apposite for the contemporary world of work. The article shows that from his first writings on the structure of critical social theory in the early 1980s to the recent exchange with Nancy Fraser on recognition and redistribution, the problem of grounding a substantive critique of work under capitalism has been central to Honneth's enterprise. (...) This answers the routine objection that the recognition paradigm fails to take into account economic or material realities. At the same time, Honneth's approach to the critique of work has undergone significant shifts, and it is yet to be fully developed. The article traces these changes in direction, and it proposes an expressivist conception of work that builds upon the `normative content' of the concept of work described by Honneth in his 1980 essay `Work and Instrumental Action'. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates how the application of New Public Management (NPM) and the accompanying rise of academic capitalism in allocating research funds in the German academic field have interacted with a change from federal pluralism to a more stratified system of universities and departments. From this change, a tendency to build cartel-like structures of allocating symbolic capital resulting in oligopolistic structures of appropriating research funds has emerged. This macro level structure is complemented by the strengthening of the traditional oligarchic structures (...) of research, carried out by an increasing number of assistants under the direction of a professor on the meso level. The outcome of this institutional setting is a significant gap between the appropriation of research funds according to the allocation of symbolic capital and the production of knowledge in publications. The application of NPM therefore needs to be explained more as a result of the normative pressure of a globally established model of “rational” administration, and less as a result of its functional effectiveness. This is demonstrated by an empirical analysis with simple and multiple regressions using data on the allocation of research grants and publication records of German chemistry departments. (shrink)

This article merges the ‘terminologies of social change’ from recognition theory and mediatization research to argue that the mediatization of society has eased and accelerated processes of what recognition theorist Axel Honneth calls individualization and social inclusion. This, however, cannot be understood unambiguously as moral progress. Thus, the first part of the article outlines the conceptualization of social change in Honneth’s recognition-theoretical framework, including the critique of recognition theory’s account of power, which problematizes Honneth’s inherent idea (...) of moral progress. Considering this critique, the article follows Douglas Giles’ suggestion that we must distinguish between affirmational and transformational struggles for recognition. The discussion is subsequently related to the conceptualization of social change in mediatization research, which shows that the closely interrelated phenomena of a social relocation of media and a re-orientation of the self help facilitate and constitute the individual’s increased possibilities, but also dependence, with respect to intersubjective recognition from peer groups in many contemporary societies. This provides the starting point for exemplifying how the conditions for affirmational and transformational recognition struggles, and thus individualization and social inclusion, have changed in a mediatized world. This exemplification draws primarily on an in-depth case study of mediated recognition in the lives of four young Danes aged 15 to 30 years with different subcultural identity positions. The main empirical illustrations involve the experiences of the 22-year-old hijabi football freestyler Maarika, who uses her Muslim identity actively on her social media channels to be a role model and to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims and female footballers. (shrink)

Axel Honneth’s development of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Social Theory has increased the amount of attention that is paid to the dimension of political praxis by emphasizing the social struggle for recognition. Nevertheless, the political-sociological axis of this tradition remains relatively unexplored and unclear. Taking this as a starting point, I investigate the contribution that the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot could make to the fortification of this political dimension. I do this by tracing a (...) line of argument through several of Boltanski’s studies in the direction of a political-sociological axis. I show that this aspect of Boltanski’s sociology can be understood as a very fruitful analysis of processes of political articulation that may help Critical Theory overcome a political deficiency. (shrink)

Congdon (2017), Giladi (2018), and McConkey (2004) challenge feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists to come together to analyze epistemic injustice. I take up this challenge by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. I offer the #MeToo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment (...) and sexual assault. I argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. (shrink)

Honneth's fundamental claim that the normativity of social orders can be found nowhere but in the very experience of those who suffer injustice leads, I argue, to a radical theory and critique of society, with the potential to provide an innovative theory of social movements and a valid alternative to political liberalism.

This paper provides a rich reconstruction of the notion of dignity and rights of people and individuals in its Assyrian origins in ancient Mesopotamia. It analysis several particular positions. Among them, Bardaisan, Yacoub Aphraates (Aphrahat), Michael the Syriac, as well as, much later, the missionary policy of the Eastern Church in Asia and the influential of the Nestorian church in Asia.

Whenever an individual asks to be recognized, he asks for confirmation of what he believes himself to be. But he also asks for an establishing act that brings about what he will be once he has been recognized. Recognition is thus marked by a tension between two incompatible demands. Between Cultures is a philosophical attempt to discuss issues related to multiculturalism in the light of this struggle for recognition. Moving effortlessly across various disciplines, it refers to the (...) work of Adorno, Derrida, Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Rawls, Walzer and Wittgenstein to describe a historical and critical politics of recognition. (shrink)

This article questions the meanings and expression of "citizenship" in the context of new Latina and Latino migration into the southeastern United States-a region long marked by legally policed racial systems and now experiencing the varied shocks of globalization. Focused on a legislative campaign that won access to a state-issued driver's licence for undocumented migrants in Tennessee in spring 2001, the article explores some of the tensions that emerged on the road to this unlikely victory and raises questions for the (...) immigrants' rights movement in the US about the costs and gains that may follow from different ways of framing its demands. The dominant frame this particular campaign adopted was a pragmatic and politically acceptable call to improve traffic safety, one that reflected a conscious choice to downplay issues of rights, justice or global perspective. Yet the article also reports that the campaign in fact created and used opportunities for activists to raise issues related to migrant rights. It also made a dramatic, albeit temporary, improvement in the daily lives of migrants in the state. The article then sketches three citizenship norms that current struggles might prefigure. These three norms are: the full right to international mobility of human beings; the right to identity; and duties of citizenship in a globalizing world. (shrink)

In this book Paddy McQueen examines the role that 'recognition' plays in our struggles to construct an identity and to make sense of ourselves as gendered beings. It analyses how such struggles for gender recognition are shaped by social discourses and power relations, and considers how feminism can best respond to these issues.