In general, then, the principal blindspots of Habermas’s theory with respect to gender are traceable to his categorical opposition between system and life — world institutions and to the two more elementary oppositions from which it is compounded, the reproduction one and the action-contexts one. Rather, the blindspots are traceable to the way in which these oppositions, ideologically and androcentrically interpreted, tend to override and eclipse other, potentially more critical elements of Habermas’s framework—elements like the distinction between normatively-secured and communicatively-achieved action contexts and like the four-term model of public-private relations.
Habermas’s blindspots are instructive, I think. They permit us to conclude something about what the categorical framework of a socialist — feminist critical theory of welfare state capitalism should look like. One crucial requirement is that this framework not be such as to put the maleheaded, nuclear family and the state-regulated official economy on two opposite sides of the major categorical divide. We require, rather, a framework sensitive to the similarities between them, one which puts them on the same side of the line as institutions which, albeit in different ways, enforce women’s subordination, since both family and official economy appropriate our labor, short-circuit our participation in the interpretation of our needs, and shield normatively secured need interpretations from political contestation. A second crucial requirement is that this framework contain no a priori assumptions about the unidirectionality of social motion and causal influence, that it be sensitive to the ways in which allegedly disappearing institutions and norms persist in structuring social reality. A third crucial requirement, and the last I shall mention here, is that this framework not be such as to posit the evil of welfare state capitalism exclusively or primarily as the evil of reification. What we need instead is a framework capable of foregrounding the evil of dominance and subordination.48