  We consider the covariant gauge field theory of fractons, which describe a
new type of quasiparticles exhibiting novel and nontrivial properties. In
particular, we focus on the field theoretical peculiarities which characterize
this theory, starting from the fact that, if we accept the paradigm that
quantum field theories are defined by their symmetries, fractons unavoidably
come together with linearized gravity. The standard Faddeev-Popov procedure to
gauge fix the theory leads to a scalar gauge condition, which has two important
drawbacks: it is frozen in the Landau gauge and linearized gravity cannot be
obtained as a limit. In this paper we adopt a tensorially alternative gauge
fixing, which avoids both problems. In particular, this allows to show that
important physical features, like the counting of the degrees of freedom, do
not depend on a particular gauge choice, as expected. Moreover, the resulting
gauge fixed theory contains both fractons and linearized gravity as a limit,
differently from the standard scalar choice.
