Rebellious practices. Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory brings together a series of highly discussed essays on feminism and social theory. Read together, they constitute a sustained critical encounter with some of the leading European and American approaches to social theory. In them, Nancy Fraser develops a new and original socialist-feminist critical theory that overcomes many of the limitations of current alternatives. First, she presents a set of critical essays in which she deploys philosophical and literary techniques to separate the chaff from the wheat in the works of Michel Foucault, the French deconstructionists, and Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. Then, in a group of constructive essays, she incorporates her views into a new critical theory of political culture in late capitalism. And in the last section of the book, all the topics are integrated into a general theory of "the politics of interpretation of necessity." This concept becomes the axis of the socialist-feminist critical theory of the last chapter.