Affective Equality and Social Justice

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Because the relational realities of nurturing and caring constitute a distinct form of social practice, the affective system is a site of political import, separate from, though intersecting with economic, political, and cultural systems. This chapter claims that affective relations are not social derivatives in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist relations that constitute people collectively, both positively and negatively, in mental, emotional, corporeal, and social terms. The chapter highlights the merits of Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice (2008) but also its limitations regarding the sociological and political realities of the affective domain of social life.