The idea of the struggle for recognition features prominently in
the work of various thinkers from Charles Taylor and Jurgen
Habermas to Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser who are concerned with
the centrality of issues of identity in modern society. In
differing ways, these thinkers use the idea of recognition to
develop accounts of the individual which are opposed to the asocial
individualism of liberal thought and to the abstraction of much
work on the subject.

The idea of recognition expresses the notion that individuality
is an intersubjective phenomenon formed through pragmatic
interactions with others. By highlighting the intersubjective
features of individuality, the idea of recognition has both
descriptive and normative content and it has important implications
for a feminist account of gender identity.

In this brilliant and original book, Lois McNay argues that the
insights of the recognition theorists are undercut by their
reliance on an inadequate account of power. The idea of recognition
relies on an account of social relations as extrapolations of a
primal dyad of interaction that overlooks the complex ways in which
individuality is connected to abstract social structures in
contemporary society.

Using Bourdieu's relational sociology, McNay develops an
alternative account of individual agency that connects identity to
structure. By focussing on issues of gender identity and agency,
she opens up new pathways to move beyond the oppositions between
material and cultural feminisms.