Dancing with Iris

Studies in Feminist Philosophy is designed to showcase cutting-edge monographs

and collections that display the full range of feminist approaches to philosophy,
that push feminist thought in important new directions, and that display the
outstanding quality of feminist philosophical thought.

STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Cheshire Calhoun, Series Editor
Advisory Board
Harry Brod, University of Northern Iowa • Claudia Card, University of Wisconsin •
Lorraine Code, York University, Toronto • Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia Law
School/UCLA School of Law • Jane Flax, Howard University • Ann Garry, California
State University, Los Angeles • Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology • Alison Jaggar, University of Colorado, Boulder • Helen Longino,
Stanford University • Maria Lugones, SUNY Binghamton • Uma Narayan,
Vassar College • James Sterba, University of Notre Dame • Rosemarie Tong,
University of North Carolina, Charlotte • Nancy Tuana, Penn State
University • Karen Warren, Macalester College
PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES:
Abortion and Social Responsibility: Women’s Liberation and the Sublime:
Depolarizing the Debate Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment
Laurie Shrage Bonnie Mann
Gender in the Mirror: Confounding Analyzing Oppression
Imagery Ann E. Cudd
Diana Tietjens Meyers
Self Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and
Autonomy, Gender, Politics Normalized Bodies
Marilyn Friedman Cressida J. Heyes
Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender
Women Philosophers Ellen K. Feder
Edited by Cheshire Calhoun
Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in
Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Ethics, Second Edition
Liberatory Struggles Margaret Urban Walker
Lisa Tessman
The Moral Skeptic
On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Anita M. Superson
Like a Girl” and Other Essays
“You’ve Changed”: Sex Reassignment and
Iris Marion Young
Personal Identity
Visible Identities: Race, Gender and Edited by Laurie J. Shrage
the Self
Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris
Linda Martín Alcoff
Marion Young
Women and Citizenship Edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild
Edited by Marilyn Friedman Nagel
Dancing with Iris
The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young

Edited by
ann ferguson
and
mechthild nagel

1
2009
1
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dancing with Iris: the philosophy of Iris Marion Young /
edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel.
p. cm.—(Studies in feminist philosophy)
ISBN 978-0-19-538912-8; 978-0-19-538911-1 (pbk.)
1. Young, Iris Marion, 1949–
2. Feminist theory. 3. Political science—Philosophy.
I. Ferguson, Ann. II. Nagel, Mechthild.
HQ1190.D36 2009
305.42092—dc22 2008053795

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents

Contributors, vii

part i. homage to iris marion young

1. Introduction, 3
Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel
2. When I Think about Myself as Politically Engaged, I Think
of Myself as a Citizen: Interview with Iris Marion Young, 21
Vlasta Jalušič and Mojca Pajnik
3. Letter to Iris Young, 33
Karsten J. Struhl

part ii. embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

4. Iris Young and the Gendering of Phenomenology, 41
Sandra Lee Bartky
5. Resonance and Dissonance: The Role of Personal Experience
in Iris Marion Young’s Feminist Phenomenology, 53
Michaele L. Ferguson
6. Throwing Like a Girl, Dancing Like a Feminist Philosopher, 69
Susan Leigh Foster
7. Iris Marion Young: Between Phenomenology and Structural
Injustice, 79
Bonnie Mann
vi contents

part iii. theorizing the state: method, violence,

and resistance
8. L’Imagination au pouvoir : Comparing John Rawls’s Method of Ideal
Theory with Iris Marion Young’s Method of Critical Theory, 95
Alison M. Jaggar
9. Between Democracy and Violence and the Problem of Military
Humanitarian Interventions, 103
Bat-Ami Bar On
10. Engendering [In]Security and Terror: On the “Protection Racket”
of Security States, 117
Margaret Denike

part iv. justice: ethics and responsibility

11. Iris Young’s Last Thoughts on Responsibility
for Global Justice, 133
Martha C. Nussbaum
12. Injustice, Evil, and Oppression, 147
Claudia Card
13. The Faces of Animal Oppression, 161
Lori Gruen
14. Making Character Disposition Matter in Iris Young’s Deliberative
Democracy, 173
Desirée H. Melton

part v. justice: democracy and inclusion

15. Iris Young, Global Responsibility, and Solidarity, 185
Ann Ferguson
16. Varieties of Global Responsibility: Social Connection, Human
Rights, and Transnational Solidarity, 199
Carol C. Gould
17. On Immigration Politics in the Context of European Societies
and the Structural Inequality Mode, 213
Máriam Martínez
18. Women’s Work Trips and Multifaceted Oppression, 229
Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo

Works of Iris Marion Young, 243

General Bibliography, 245
Index, 259
 Contributors

Bat-Ami Bar On is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Bing-

hamton University (SUNY). Her primary theoretical interests revolve around
violence and democracy, though she escapes them (often?) by pursuing other
themes.
Sandra Lee Bartky is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and also of the gender
and women’s studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her
fields of specialization have included feminist theory, critical social theory,
existential phenomenology, Foucault, and Marxism. She has written on such
diverse topics as the later Heidegger, female embodiment, white racism, iden-
tity formation, aging, and women’s internalized oppression. Her books include
Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)
and Sympathy and Solidarity (1994).
Claudia Card is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wisconsin, where she has taught since 1966. Her recent books include The
Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Simone
de Beauvoir (2003), and Genocide’s Aftermath (2007), coedited with Armen Mar-
soobian. She is currently at work on two books, one on terrorism, torture, and
genocide and the other an introduction to feminist philosophy.
Margaret Denike is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the human rights
program at Carleton University. For the past decade, she has been active in
national organizations that engage in legal education and law reform initia-
tives, including serving as president of the National Association of Women and
the Law, as a member of the National Legal Committee of the Women’s Legal
Education and Action Fund, and as a member of the Advisory Committee of
viii contributors

the Law Commission of Canada. Her publications cover a range of topics in

feminist philosophies and human rights theories, including constitutional
equality jurisprudence, the ethics of war, discourses of evil, institutional perse-
cution, and sex-based discrimination.
Ann Ferguson is a social justice activist and Emerita Professor of Women’s
Studies and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She
has written two books and numerous articles in feminist theory, ethics, and
politics. The books are: Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Domi-
nance (1989) and Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (1991).
She has also coedited a book in feminist ethics with Bat-Ami Bar On, Daring to
Be Good: Feminist Essays in Ethico-Politics (1998).
Michaele L. Ferguson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Sci-
ence and a junior faculty affiliate with the women and gender studies program
at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her work in feminist and democratic
theory has appeared in Hypatia, Politics & Gender and the University of Colorado
Law Review. She is the coeditor with Lori Marso of W Stands for Women: How
the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (2007). She is cur-
rently working on a book manuscript entitled Sharing Democracy.
Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Professor in the Department
of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. She is the author of Reading Dancing:
Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (1986); Choreography and
Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (1996); and Dances That Describe
Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull (2002). She is also
the editor of two anthologies: Choreographing History (1995) and Corporealities
(1996) and the coeditor of the journal Discourses in Dance.
Carol C. Gould is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science and Director
of the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at Temple University. She is editor
of the Journal of Social Philosophy and past president of the American Section of
the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Gould
is the author of Marx’s Social Ontology, Rethinking Democracy, and Globaliz-
ing Democracy and Human Rights, editor of seven books including Women and
Philosophy, Beyond Domination, The Information Web, Cultural Identity and the
Nation-State, and Gender. She has published numerous articles in social and
political philosophy, feminist theory, and applied ethics.
Lori Gruen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Feminist, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University where she also directs the Ethics in
Society Project. She is the coeditor, with Alison Wylie, of Hypatia: A Journal of
Feminist Philosophy. Gruen works at the intersection of ethical theory and ethi-
cal practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked
in traditional ethical investigations such as women, people of color, nonhu-
man animals, and the like. She has published widely on topics in practical
 contributors ix

ethics including: animal ethics and mind, ecofeminist ethics and politics, and
sex law.
Alison M. Jaggar is Arts and Sciences College Professor of Distinction in Phi-
losophy and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado at Boul-
der. Her books include: Feminist Frameworks (coedited, third edition 1993);
Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983); Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist
Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (coedited 1989); Morality and Social Jus-
tice: Point Counterpoint (coauthored 1995); Living with Contradictions: Controver-
sies in Feminist Ethics (1994); The Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy,
coedited with Iris M. Young (1998); Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist
Reader (2008); Abortion: Three Perspectives (coauthored 2009); and Pogge and
his Critics (2010). Jaggar was a founder member of the Society for Women in
Philosophy and is past chair of the American Philosophical Association Com-
mittee on the Status of Women.
Vlasta Jalušič is a senior research fellow at the Peace Institute (Institute for
Contemporary Social and Political Studies), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Associate
Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at Ljubljana University. She
has published articles and chapters on gender, women’s rights, Eastern Euro-
pean politics and transition, war, violence, and Hannah Arendt.
Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo is Professor of Geography at SUNY College at
Cortland. Her scholarly work integrates gender and ethnicity into geographic
research and curriculum. Her publications include two coauthored books
Issues in Multiculturalism: Cross National Perspectives (second edition 1999) and
Diversity, Multiculturalism and Social Justice (2002); two coedited books Issues
in Africa and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century (2001) and The Africana
Human Condition and Global Dimensions (2002). She has served as an execu-
tive board member of the Geographic Perspectives on Women Specialty Group,
and on the editorial boards of Gender, Place, and Culture and Wagadu: A Journal
of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies.
Bonnie Mann is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.
After years of feminist activism, much of it in the battered women’s move-
ment, she now teaches feminist philosophy and lives with her partner and four
daughters in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of Women’s Liberation and the
Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (2006) and a cofounder of the
Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology.
Máriam Martínez is a researcher at the Department of Political Science of the
Autonomous University of Madrid. She was a visiting researcher at the Uni-
versity of Chicago during the fall of 2005 and at the Institute for Research on
Women and Gender at Columbia University during the 2006–2007 academic
year. She is the author of “Iris Marion Young’s Political Thinking: Feminism
and Politics of Difference from a Difference Perspective” in Contemporary
x contributors

Political Thinking (2008). She is finishing her dissertation, called “On Desire and
Difference: The Feminist Approach of Iris Marion Young to the Political.”
Desirée H. Melton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the College of Notre
Dame of Maryland. She specializes in social and political philosophy and criti-
cal race theory and has interests in existentialism and literature. She recently
published an article on the role dispositional vulnerability has in recognition of
racial injustice. Currently, she is working on an essay that explores vulnerabil-
ity, hope, and other existentialist themes in Toni Morrison’s Sula.
Mechthild Nagel is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New
York, College at Cortland and a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Afri-
can Development at Cornell University. She is the author of Masking the Abject:
A Genealogy of Play (2002), the co-editor of Race, Class, and Community Identity
(2000), The Hydropolitics of Africa: A Contemporary Challenge (2007), and Pris-
ons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality (2007). Nagel is the editor-
in-chief of the journal Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender
Studies.
Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law
and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School, Philoso-
phy Department, and Divinity School; she is an associate in the classics and
political science departments, a member of the Committee for Southern Asian
Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. Her most recent
book is Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equal-
ity (2008).
Mojca Pajnik is a scientific counselor at the Peace Institute, Institute for Con-
temporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Assistant
Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. She
has published on migration, gender, and the media. Her current research is
focused on citizenship and migration.
Karsten J. Struhl teaches political and cross-cultural philosophy at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and the New School. He has coedited
Philosophy Now (1980), Ethics in Perspective (1975), and The Philosophical Quest:
A Cross-Cultural Reader (2000). His articles have appeared in a variety of jour-
nals, books, and encyclopedias on such topics as ideology, human nature, just
war theory, war and terrorism, socialist ethics, global ethics, democracy as a
universal value, and visions of communism.
4
PART I

HOMAGE TO IRIS MARION

YOUNG
This page intentionally left blank
 1
4

Introduction

Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel

In Homage to Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young was a brilliant, creative, and prolific political thinker, phi-
losopher, and activist. Her career was cut short by her untimely death at the
age of 57 in 2006, but her ideas and theories continue to be influential all over
the world. Young has created compelling complex theories of justice, social
oppression, gender, and democracy that combine insights from phenomenol-
ogy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory in a unique way. Her achievement in
successfully combining these approaches is all the more impressive since pro-
ponents of these various approaches have often presented them as inconsistent.
In order to celebrate her unique vision and the many facets of her intellectual
contributions to political thought and feminist philosophy, we undertook to cre-
ate this anthology of writings about her work, including a hitherto unpublished
recent interview with her that will document and deepen the understanding
and spread of her ideas. In what follows, we will outline the important legacy
of the major aspects of her work and show how the chapters we have already
collected explore and develop these aspects in critical and interesting ways.
Both of us have benefited from knowing Iris as a friend, fellow activist for
social justice, and feminist theorist. We both want to comment a bit on this
from our own points of view.

Mechthild Nagel
Iris Marion Young was a mentor of many graduate students like me who par-
ticipated in the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA), a role she took very seri-
ously. At the first national conference of RPA at Des Moines, Iowa, 1994, I was
4 homage to iris marion young

invited to join Young on a plenary to discuss the future of the RPA. The day
before the plenary I rewrote the paper with the help of other graduate students
to put forth a call of action for the RPA to set up a mentorship program for
radical students. After I gave my talk to a sympathetic audience, Young saw an
opportunity for organizing, and facilitated a brainstorming discussion, reso-
lutely cutting off any responses that wanted to veer off into abstract philoso-
phizing about other plenary speakers’ papers. As a result of that discussion,
we set up a directory of RPA members and senior members who volunteered
as publishing coaches and who would read our papers before we sent them
off for publication. I was elated to have our political struggle and point of view
validated by Young, a senior, established philosopher of the RPA.
Her seminal book Inclusion and Democracy (2000) begins with a narrative
of collecting petitions on the streets, and shows junior scholars that it is not
only possible, but that it is indeed necessary to combine a theoretical commit-
ment to resistance (of “one dimensional man,” see Struhl, chapter 3) with a
passionate engagement for speaking truth to power.
Little did I, as a graduate student, know at that time how much she enjoyed
a critical reflection of her own work to the point of generosity. At an APA con-
ference, having heard my paper (Nagel 1993) on the critique of community
ideal, which argued that her own approach did not go far enough in disman-
tling this ideal, Young calmly turned to another presenter and queried whether
he would incorporate my ideas into his argument.
What stays most vividly with me is her infectious laughter, her enthusiasm
for life, whether it is good ideas, good food, or love of jazz music, Iris Young:
Presente!

Ann Ferguson
I have known Iris Marion Young since the late 1970s when we were both a
part of a group called Marxist Activist Philosophers (MAP). In the early 1980s,
this group transmogrified into SOFPHIA (Socialist–Feminist Philosophers
Association), an American study group of men and women which still exists
and meets twice a year. Young was one of the intellectual leaders of this group
from the beginning, not only in creating and critiquing social theory, but also
in making practical connections to that theory, which included encouraging
the group to go to antiwar, pro-union, and other social justice demonstrations
when they were in the venue of the conference.
During the 1970s and 1980s, I was influenced by both Gayle Rubin’s
concept of “sex/gender systems” (Rubin 1975) and the way that Heidi Hart-
mann had put that concept to work in conceptualizing the changing relation-
ship between capitalism and patriarchy (Hartmann 1981). I was building on
these two approaches, and busy developing my own socialist–feminist analy-
sis of women’s oppression, which theorized capitalism and patriarchy as dual
 introduction 5

systems of domination (cf. Ferguson and Folbre 1981; Ferguson 1989, 1991).
Even though Young also identified as a socialist–feminist, I was momentarily
taken aback when she published her critique of just the sort of dual systems
theory I was working on in the same anthology in which my first paper was
published (Young 1981)! This was just the first of many friendly disagreements
that we were to have over the next twenty years or so, but I always felt that we
were basically in fundamental political agreement in spite of them. Partly this
had to do with our mutual feminist activism, which forced both of us to juggle
meetings of the autonomous women’s movement with meetings of mixed left
organizations for social justice, such as the Rainbow Coalition, the antinuclear
power movement, the civil rights movement, and the various antiwar move-
ments, starting with the Vietnam war. We also for a time in the 1980s were
members of a small group of women faculty and students called the Socialist–
Feminist Group, which tried to combine a study group with feminist activism in
the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts where we both lived. I always admired Iris
for the way that she was able to work in social justice coalitions as a local activist
yet also continue her very important theoretical work on the feminist theory of
gender and the body, justice, the politics of difference, democracy, and, in her
last work, the implications of corporate globalization for global justice.
Iris Marion Young was perhaps one of American feminist philosophers’
most prestigious public intellectuals: always a little ahead of the rest in grasp-
ing the implications of the political events and movements of the day, and
undertaking to write analytic essays about them. I think, for example, of her
excellent piece in Signs (2003) on the masculinist security regime perpetuated
by the U.S. government under George W. Bush as a reaction to the 9/11 World
Trade Center bombings, as well as her article on the U.S. government’s reac-
tion to Hurricane Katrina (2006d). As I indicate in chapter 15, my own work
continues to be influenced by her ethical and political insights, and I only wish
that she were still with us to shine her clear light of analysis and activism on
coming struggles. Fortunately, the seeds she has planted have taken root in
diverse places and many, including the authors in this volume, continue the
strands of her approach. In this sense we are all working in solidarity for femi-
nist social justice along the path she began.

Dialogues with Iris

Chapter 2, by Vlasta Jalušič and Mojca Pajnik, and chapter 3, by Karsten Struhl,
reveal the personal, political, and international reach of Iris Marion Young.
In the interview and the personal letter, we find a person who is committed
to make political theory come alive and a scholar who is intensely engaged in
political struggles. In her obituary, Seyla Benhabib (2007) notes that Young
was deeply committed to the ideals of American democracy and her struggles
against injustice were rooted in American city life—New York City where she
6 homage to iris marion young

was born; Worcester, Massachusetts, where she began her teaching career;
Pittsburgh, where she gained international fame with her various publications;
and her last city, Chicago, where she continued to be a political activist and
gained fame as a political theorist.
Young’s articulation of a politics of difference is very much indebted to
these lived experiences, and thus, Benhabib surmises, Young does not com-
prehend the “murderous dimensions of ethnic, religious, national, and lin-
guistic conflict” engendered by a politics of difference when it is not rooted in
democratic constitutionalism (p. 442). We imagine that Young’s response to
Benhabib would have been similar to the argument outlined in the epilogue on
“International Justice” (1990a):
Group difference is the source of some of the most violent conflict
and repression in the world today. An essentialist and absolutist
understanding of social group difference is often more pronounced
and deadly in places outside of relatively tolerant Western capitalist
societies. . . . An ideal of politics as deliberation in a heterogeneous public
which affirms group differences and gives specific representation to
oppressed groups is, I believe, immediately relevant to each of these
situations. An ideal of community as shared final ends and mutual
identification is even more absurd in these contests than in the
context of any city in the United States (p. 260, emphasis added).
Young (2000) answers her critics’ objections in detail in chapter 3, “Social dif-
ference as a political resource.” She contends that a politics of difference cannot
be reduced to a logic of identity; rather, instead of having a substantive identity,
groups have a relational logic (p. 82). Arguably, Young’s influence on politi-
cal philosophers has spread beyond North America, which suggests that her
analysis has global import since local scholar–activists have been encouraged
to translate her U.S.-centered analysis into their own non-U.S.-based contexts.
Young’s work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, and Swedish.
Furthermore, Young’s teaching and conference schedule took her to all conti-
nents and many contested areas, including Palestine, and several of her writ-
ings are devoted to a philosophical analysis of issues relating to international
justice and global democracy.
It was during Young’s last travel to Europe in May 2006 that contributors
Vlasta Jalušič and Mojca Pajnik were able to interview her at the Peace Insti-
tute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In her interview with them she addresses Benhab-
ib’s and other critics’ concerns about how best to address conflict and identity
issues. Young discusses the political notions of gender, democracy, globaliza-
tion, and the public sphere, defending her general claim that politics is not best
understood in terms of identity. With respect to the European Union, Young is
troubled by the rise of a new European nationalism and critiques Habermas’s
and Derrida’s call for a European public space. They entirely overlook that there
 introduction 7

already exists a global public sphere, which contains more than the two power-
ful actors, the United States and the European Union. Given her cosmopolitan
leanings, Young notes an increasing role of social movements for a growing
global (not only European) public sphere.
Although social movements are theorized in her earlier work on global
democracy, Inclusion and Democracy (2000), they play even a more prominent
a role in this interview and in her recent book, Global Challenges: War, Self-
Determination and Global Justice (2007). In particular, Young draws inspira-
tion from the student-led anti-sweatshop movement, which propelled her to
study accountability and responsibility in a more encompassing way than lib-
erals (Rawls) or luck egalitarians (Dworkin) do. In several of her last writings,
Young focuses on the ethico-political responsibility of global actors, emphasiz-
ing a social connection model of struggle and solidarity over a punitive lia-
bility model, which individualizes wrongs and apportions blame accordingly
(cf. Chapter 11 by Nussbaum). Struhl’s “Letter to Iris Young” (chapter 3) notes
that Young refuses to embrace the concept of blame and focuses on responsi-
bility instead. Quoting Young from her last book project Responsibility for Jus-
tice, Struhl says “Rhetorics of blame can get in the way of taking action against
structural injustices for which many of us share responsibility.” As always, he
claims, Young’s theoretical reflections are aimed at allowing us to better under-
stand our specific social reality, and they become tools for political interven-
tion. He concludes by invoking the spirit of “Iris Young, presente!” as a way
for those of us who shared her political goals to continue to be inspired by her
life and work.
In the next section, we present the meaning of praxis philosophy according
to Young from a gendered perspective. What does it mean to experience—and
perform—feminine embodiment as a feminist activist?

Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Gender

Under the influence of her study of Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beau-

voir, Young started her intervention into feminist philosophy with her essay
“Throwing like a girl” (1980), followed by “Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity
and alienation” (1984) and “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling”
(1990b). Taking the phenomenological starting point of these two authors, she
accepts their metaphysical approach to the body that emphasizes its meaning
as a lived experience and a situation one finds oneself in, rather than the clas-
sic empiricist or idealist reduction of the body into a collection of sensations or
the Cartesian dualist separation of the mind as the active consciousness and
subject and the body as a passive material object. While she accepts Beauvoir’s
critique of Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the masculine body as the quintes-
sential human body, she rejects her characterization of the feminine body as
8 homage to iris marion young

inevitably experienced as “immanence,” or as hindering the human potential

for “transcendence” in ways that the masculine body is not so experienced.
Thus, while she argues that feminine bodily comportment involves restrict-
ing one’s space and mobility compared to masculine bodily styles, this has its
source in the particular social situation of women conditioned by sexist oppres-
sion. She is less pessimistic than Beauvoir in her analysis of the potentials
for the feminine body to escape such social alienation, since pregnancy and
breasted experience may contain uniquely positive types of consciousness not
reducible to the effects of social oppression.
Young’s phenomenological analysis of feminine body styles and experi-
ences has influenced trends in dance and performance theory, including the
poststructuralist gender theory of Judith Butler (1990). Her meditations on the
different type of self–other relations experienced among mothers as pregnant
and breastfeeding caretakers of children has inspired thinkers formulating an
ethics of care based on the gendered division of labor as in Hartsock (1983) and
Ruddick (1989). Young’s analysis of the feminine habitus of spatiality was part
of the inspiration for further feminist scholarship by corporeal feminists as
evinced in Elizabeth Grosz’s work (1994). Susan Bordo (1993), also known for
her philosophy of the body, acknowledges that
Young’s study of pregnant embodiment . . . suggests pregnancy makes
uniquely available . . . a very different experience of the relationship
between mind and body, inner and outer, self and other than that
presumed by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other architects of the
modernist subject. The conception of autonomy assumed by that
model, for example, is challenged by an embodiment that literally
houses ‘otherness’ within the self. (p. 96)
In this volume, Susan Foster (chapter 6) explores Young’s impact on dance and
performance theory, while Sandra Bartky explores the relevance of Young’s
early papers on “throwing like a girl” and “breasted experience” for her early
work. Influenced by Young’s analysis of femininity as a body style, Bartky her-
self has written an important essay (Bartky 1990) connecting this idea with that
of Michel Foucault on disciplining bodies through the social creation of what
he calls “power/knowledges” based in social sciences such as criminology,
penology, psychiatry, education, and medicine. In this essay, Bartky extends
the notion of self-disciplining of bodies to the daily practice of femininity
through makeup, clothing, exercising, and bodily comportment in the service
of creating a feminine body. Here, although she critiques aspects of Young’s
phenomenological analysis of the feminine body, she nonetheless argues that
her analysis is consistent with poststructuralist work on disciplining the body
through material practices and social discursive gender norms.
Young was a pathbreaker in terms of her use of personal experience as
examples in her phenomenological writings. This was important to Western
 introduction 9

feminist activist theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s, which had rejected more
mainstream leftist analyses of social oppression and exploitation that focused
only on the public structures of the state and economy, and ignored the private
world of the family, sexuality, and parenthood. The slogan “the personal is the
political” came from the experience of political-consciousness-raising groups
that allowed women to connect their personal experiences as lovers of men
and mothers and workers with other women and to see the underlying com-
mon structures of oppression both in public and private life. Various theo-
rists, including Young, were pioneers in applying the methodological insight
that personal experiences could illuminate and show forth social structures
that could support theoretical lines of thought. She used this insight in all
of her phenomenological writings in ways not done by the more impersonal
approaches of her mentors, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir. One of our contribu-
tors, Michaele Ferguson, shows the way that Young used the personal as an
important source of theorizing, under the assumption that revisiting our past
experiences deepens our theoretical understanding, and that telling our per-
sonal histories is crucial to cultivating identity and political agency. She argues
that unlike Young’s later turn to the critical theorist concept of public recogni-
tion as a key demand of social movements based on identity politics, her earlier
work supplies us with a important new method of argumentation that creates a
resonance of the reader’s to author’s experience that is neither over-generalizing
nor ignores differences between women.
Toward the end of her short but amazingly fruitful career as a political
philosopher and feminist theorist, Young was concerned that her earlier phe-
nomenological approach to feminine subjectivity, following in the tradition of
Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, was being used to promote an undue empha-
sis on women’s subjectivity and identity politics rather than attention to the
social, political, and economic structures of power that create gender, racial,
and class oppression. In the late 1980s, Western feminism suffered a crisis
when mainstream activists and thinkers were accused by women of color of
excluding their concerns about racism and class oppression (cf. Hooks 1984)
based on an essentialist and additive concept of women’s nature (cf. Spelman
1988) that assumed all women had a common nature, whether biological or
socially constructed, which would ground a feminist identity politics. Many lib-
eral and radical white feminists had made the sex/gender distinction in order
to assume that biological females are taught a gender of femininity that is used
to perpetuate male dominance, and were using this theory as the basis for a
feminist identity politics that assumed women have a common interest in unit-
ing to fight sexist oppression even if they have racial, ethnic, class, or national
privileges through their differences. But the development of a feminist inter-
sectional analysis by women-of-color feminist activists (such as Moraga and
Anzaldúa (1983) and the Combahee River Collective (1977) ) and theorists work-
ing in legal theory (Crenshaw 1991) and sociology (Collins 2000) challenged
10 homage to iris marion young

whether the gender identities of white women and women of color were the
same because of their different positioning in legal, economic, political, and
social/symbolic structures.
Young had earlier supported the emphasis on a politics of difference against
what she termed “gynocentric feminism” (Young 1985), and later in her impor-
tant book Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a). Young, however, takes a
pro-gynocentric position in the republication of the essay. As she says
Reflection on and revaluation of female gendered experience is
uniquely empowering and provides important critical leverage.
Gynocentrism seizes the meaning of sexual difference and
femininity for women and by women, instead of acceding to
patriarchal culture’s definition of women as lacking and deficient in
relation to a humanist norm. A gynocentric approach also exposes
how epistemologies, standards, and accounts of experience that claim
neutrality and universality themselves express specifically masculine
experience. (1990b, p. 7)
It is clear from these essays that Young oscillates between trying to save some
insights of radical feminism on the one hand, while rejecting its essentialist
implications so as to take differences between women into account. She pur-
sued a critique of mainstream feminist identity politics in two further essays,
ten years apart, taking somewhat different approaches. Young’s essay “Gen-
der as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective” (1994) develops
Sartre’s distinction between a series of things and a political group. The former
is created by common relations of individuals to what he called the “practico-
inert,” that is, to structures such as the sexual division of labor, normative
heterosexuality, and male sexual objectification of women. However, such
common relations do not create a common gender identity or political con-
sciousness, particularly since family relations, racial/ethnic, class and sexual
preference differences, not to mention nationality, may pit women in differ-
ent situations against each other in positions of social privilege and oppres-
sion connected to these other differences. Young distinguishes between the
relational commonality women may have due to gendered social structures,
which makes them a series, and a common political consciousness of similar
interests that would make them a political group. There is no way to get the
majority of women to think of themselves as members of a collective political
group without the conscious work of constructing coalitions and alliances,
which negotiate women’s differing political agendas based on their social dif-
ferences. Hence her analysis critiques feminist identity politics as too sim-
plistic in its assumption that common gender structures will by themselves
provide a common identity and feminist agenda.
Young’s more recent article on the relation of gender to the lived experi-
ence of women is “Lived body vs. gender: Reflections on social structure and
 introduction 11

reflexivity” (2005). Here she responds to Toril Moi’s Sexual Difference position
that rejects social science’s understandings of gender as socialized in favor of a
lived body approach that rejects the sex/gender distinction. In contrast, Young
pursues a middle path between the French and Italian Sexual Difference theo-
rists, while also rejecting poststructural performative theories of gender, which
seem to eliminate any separate effectivity of biologically sexed bodies in favor
of a social construction of gender through stylized repetitions of gender norms.
Young agrees with the phenomenological Sexual Difference approach in seeing
body-based experience as involved with a gender that is experienced as binary,
but her analysis gives an in-depth analysis of the lived body that also theo-
rizes psychological gendered imaginaries that can explain transgendered and
intersexed body situations. However, unlike the Sexual Difference approach,
she argues that gender as a theoretical construct does not reduce to the lived
body or its psychological imaginaries, but retains a use in analyzing the social
structures mentioned in her previous article on gender as seriality. In her last
public talks, Young went out of her way to critique Sexual Difference theory
arguments that she worried used her own earlier phenomenological writings
to reject the social structural concept of gender.
Bonnie Mann, in “Iris Marion Young: Between phenomenology and struc-
tural injustice” (chapter 7), argues that Young’s theory has the resources to
retain its theoretical mix of phenomenological and critical social structural
analysis of gender in spite of Young’s worries. Her own approach develops
farther than Young did with the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of the femi-
nine imaginary, and argues that it is Young’s implicit account of the feminine
imaginary domain that makes her body essays the most important contribution
to a feminist political phenomenology since Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Mann sees
the connection between women’s lived bodily experience and gendered social
structures to relate to the aesthetics of feminine body style, made possible by
the unconscious psychological process of the feminine imaginary. She further
links this notion of the imaginary to Benedict Anderson’s trope of imagined
communities that connect individuals to potential collectivities. In this way,
imaginary processes can be said to provide links for possible political identifica-
tions and dis-identifications, which explain the layers of difference in the lived
experiences of women and women-identified people.

Theorizing the State: Method, Violence, and Resistance

Toward the middle of the 1990s, Young marked a transition in her career by
seeking to amplify the nonideal theoretical approach to the ethico-politics of
justice, democracy, and the analysis of state power she had begun in 1990
with the publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference. In this book, she
had critiqued the classic approaches to justice as a problem of fair distribution
12 homage to iris marion young

of goods, and argued for a paradigm of justice that involved government and
public political and economic processes that allowed for the development of
people’s capabilities for free and autonomous decision making, and involved
inclusive democratic processes that acknowledged social differences and
respected social movements.
In her later work, Young tells us in her opening chapter on democracy and
justice that “[d]emocracy is hard to love” (2000, p. 16). She proceeds to give us
a nonidealist account of a deep democracy, which endorses inclusion, political
equality, reasonableness, and publicity. Young offers ideals, for example, of dif-
ferentiated solidarity, without resorting to idealist theory, that is, she does not
bracket the “messiness” of deliberative decision-making that other democracy
theorists are glad to do (e.g., Cohen, Gutmann and Thompson, Rawls, and
Habermas). Young insists that in order to have a true commitment to inclu-
sion, we must be attentive to different ways of seeing deliberation carried out,
such as greeting rituals, story telling, and rhetorical styles, so that our theory-
making of inclusive democracy should not favor philosophers accustomed to
rational, disembodied, and emotionally sober, argument construction.
Young, unlike John Rawls, does not bracket social identities. She made
this clear in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a), where she critiques
Rawls’s distributive paradigm (Rawls 1971) for its social atomism. Using the
tools of critical theory and phenomenology, she foregrounds intersubjectivity,
group differentiated ideals, and class relations, which liberal idealist thinkers
such as Rawls do not account for. In comparing the methods of John Rawls
and Iris Marion Young (chapter 8), Alison M. Jaggar argues that Rawls’s the-
ory is ideal in several interrelated methodological senses: he prioritizes prin-
ciple over practice; he relies on a fictional reasoning process; and his theory is
designed for an imagined world that lacks many problematic aspects of human
nature and human society. By contrast, Young’s method is nonideal: it priori-
tizes practice over principle; it respects the reasoning of actual people; and it
addresses the nonideal world of structural inequality and cultural difference.
Jaggar argues that the nonideal aspects of Young’s methodology enable her to
develop a theory of justice that is more comprehensive, relevant, and norma-
tively acceptable than Rawls’.
Young’s nonidealist approach also challenges Habermas’s rational-
ist deliberative ideals, in particular, in his construction of an ideal homoge-
neous public. In Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young enlarges Habermas’s
ideal public sphere with social, “messy” concepts, which have a productive
role even as they reflect a struggle perspective. For instance, for democracy
to be inclusive, state institutions must be in tension with civil society (p. 157)
and public discourses are often “messy, many-levelled, playful, emotional”
(p. 168). In “Thinking between democracy and violence” (chapter 9), Bat-Ami
Bar On sheds light on the methodological similarities and differences between
 introduction 13

Habermas and Young. She examines the role of violence in Young’s later work
by reviewing her essays: “Power, violence, and legitimacy: A reading of Han-
nah Arendt in an age of police brutality and humanitarian intervention” (2001),
“Envisioning a global rule of law” (2002), which she coauthored with Daniele
Archibugi, and “The logic of masculinist protection: Reflections on the cur-
rent security state” (2003). What all three essays (republished in Young 2007)
share is a very critical view of what Young comes to call “official violence,”
the violence perpetrated by agents of the state as means to achieve their mis-
sion of law enforcement either domestically or internationally, and the rhetoric
that is deployed to mobilize support for such violence. The criticism, Young
points out, is motivated by a “hope for a regime of perpetual peace” that Young
believes must never be abandoned, which Bar On reads as a hope for a global
version of liberal democracy. Like Young, Habermas is committed to the pos-
sibility of “perpetual peace” and understands it in liberal democratic terms.
While Bar On thinks that Young’s criticisms of “official violence” are insight-
ful and cohere with similar criticisms developed on the Left, she argues that
Young does not offer a way to think productively about violence when it is
indeed a necessary means to legitimate ends.
Young (2000, cf. chapter 7, “Self-determination and global democracy”)
contests the traditional mold of liberal democracy theorists who cast the
“decent” (Rawls 1999a) nation-state’s appeal to self-determination and sover-
eignty narrowly in terms of noninterference. While Young agrees that a people
(a distinct cultural group) has a prima facie right of self-determination, she
pursues a cosmopolitan argument that holds that the state ought to be divested
from its political authority and local forms of government be empowered, at the
same time that global regulatory regimes, that is, a global people’s assembly,
ought to bring about peace and security for all. Importantly, to counter the
popularity of “noninterference,” Young believes that the ideal of freedom from
domination is needed to address self-determination of a people. They do not
have the right to keep outsiders at bay or oppress them, because a key demo-
cratic and just value is the notion of inclusion. Thus, self-determination along
a social justice framework invites open borders and interdependence of people,
in other words, an ideal of relational autonomy.
The model of noninterference relies on ideas (and myths) of homogeneity
and closed borders that can hardly account for the realities of an interdepen-
dent world. Unfortunately, powerful contemporary security states such as the
United States and the United Kingdom use these myths to block Young’s open
border self-determination ideal. One of our contributors, Margaret Denike,
also draws on Young’s paper “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections
on the Current Security State.” Denike’s contribution “Engendering [in]secu-
rity and terror: On the ‘protection racket’ of security states” (chapter 10) takes
as its inspiration Young’s descriptive exposition of the “security state,” and the
14 homage to iris marion young

modalities of patriarchal power that characterize such current terror-fearing

regimes. It draws and expands upon her analysis of the tactics of paternalis-
tic protectionism (characteristic, for instance, of the security schemes of the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada) through a consideration of
the colonizing, racializing, and engendering effects of the tales of monsters/
terrorist “enemies” and the chivalry of their conquering heroes and humani-
tarian saviors. Denike follows the trajectory of Young’s analysis, tracing the
implications of how security discourses locate and constitute enemies within
and beyond its borders, and she links these implications to the resurgence of
patriarchal/patriotic power of national sovereignty.

Justice: Ethics and Responsibility

Concerns for justice permeate Young’s work, from her prize-winning book
Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a) to her recent books on global jus-
tice (Global Challenges, 2007, and “Responsibility for Justice,” unpublished).
In Inclusion and Democracy, Young (2000) develops a concept of social justice
which promotes self-development (countering oppression) and self-determina-
tion (countering domination)(cf. pp. 31–33). Most democracy theorists do not
focus on self-development but instead build models of self-determination of a
society’s members. Young’s work creatively weaves these two strands together.
Young’s posthumously published book Global Challenges (2007) tackles
conservative and liberal critics’ positions on (United States) welfare state pol-
icies. She is troubled by their atomistic interpretation of the distribution of
goods to less fortunate members of society. True to her nonidealist position,
outlined by Jaggar above, Young critiques Rawls, Dworkin, Murray and Mead,
and Roemer for their myopic positions on the impact of social background.
Young argues for far-reaching political and ethical responsibilities for people
who are being treated unjustly as the result of social structures that were not
caused by them. Our contributor Martha Nussbaum supports Young in her
critiques of the limitations of these other theories, agreeing that they are either
too narrow or too broad in their scope.
Young distinguishes between the liability conception of justice, which
puts blame on particular individuals for causing injustices due to their specific
actions or inactions, as opposed to the shared political responsibility concep-
tion of justice: she also calls this a social connection model (2004). She argues
that shared responsibility applies to anyone who takes part in a social, eco-
nomic, or political process, which causally perpetuates outcomes of injustice
to others, even if the intent of the participation is not to cause such harm.
Young finds that judgments of blame should be downplayed since the accused
would merely become defensive about something that happened in the past. In
 introduction 15

contrast, Young holds that asking the actor to take (shared) responsibility for
future action has a more effective moral/political import.
Nussbaum challenges the strict distinction Young makes between personal
blame and shared political responsibility, on the ground that the existence of
the latter condition makes individuals who share it more or less blameworthy,
depending on their degree of complicity, privilege, and power in shaping or
altering the relevant unjust structures and outcomes. Her conclusion suggests
that we cannot make the distinction Young tries to make between the ethical
duties of individuals based on avoidance of blame and their political duties to
work with others to meet their shared political responsibilities to promote just
social structures and societies. Young addresses a specific example of Black
reparations in the final chapter of her unpublished book. Consistent with her
view on eschewing blame, she rejects material restitution to individual descen-
dents of slaves, but she considers the public accountability of insurance com-
panies, which held policies on slaves, to be a good step in the right direction.
Eschewing blame, for Young, does not mean to forget crimes against a people
which happened in the past. However, remembrance, only for the sake of ven-
geance, is something to be avoided, because it, after all, does not raise the dead
who had been wronged.
If we ought to forgo casting blame, what implications does that political
stance have for the question of evil? What might be said about oppressive evil
encountered by marginalized groups? These are questions that Claudia Card
wishes to pursue in her dialogue with Young on the topics of injustice, evil,
and oppression. Card traces the development of Young’s views on the nature
of groups, especially structural groups, from Justice and the Politics of Difference
(1990a) through Inclusion and Democracy (2000) and Global Challenges (2007)
with a view to laying out the development of her analyses of justice, domina-
tion, and oppression. Young’s view of the possibility of oppression as the prod-
uct of structural injustice without culpability is contrasted with Card’s view of
oppression as a moral evil, in a sense that does imply culpability. If Young is
right that there can be oppression without fault, Card’s view of oppression as a
moral evil will have to be qualified.
While oppression does not constitute a major category in Young’s recent
work—oppression received no entry in the 2007 book index as opposed to the
category of violence—many theorists and teachers still find valuable Young’s
(1990a) famous essay “The five faces of oppression” and are able to apply it
to the different circumstances, from children’s education to community orga-
nizing. Young had hoped for just such wider applications of the analysis of
oppression in her epilogue on international justice (1990a). In this vein, Lori
Gruen discusses “The faces of animal oppression” (chapter 13) in this volume.
In this chapter, Gruen explores the question of oppression beyond the spe-
cies boundary by asking whether and how Young’s categories of exploitation,
16 homage to iris marion young

marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence feature in

human relations to nonhuman animals. Gruen argues that to say that non-
human animals are oppressed is not simply a metaphor but describes a reality
for billions of animals in industrialized societies.
In Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young advocates making some changes
to Habermas’ deliberative or communicative model of democracy. The delib-
erative model is based on inclusive discussion and the belief that everyone who
will be reasonably affected by a decision should be able to participate in dis-
cussion around it. The deliberative model is not perfect, however, sometimes
groups who should be a part of the discussion are “internally excluded”—a
subtle, often unintentional exclusion on the part of privileged groups in which
the manner of deliberation privileges some participants over others. Often,
the excluded are minorities and those from other marginalized groups. Young
suggests that some procedural and communicative changes to democratic
deliberation will reduce the internal exclusion of minorities and other margin-
alized groups since internal exclusion often results from the fact that certain
modes of communication (like dispassionate speech and rational discourse)
are privileged over other equally effective ways of communicating. Since these
privileged modes of communication are often used by privileged members
of the democracy, groups that use other ways to communicate (like passion-
ate speech and storytelling) are excluded from deliberating. With “Making
character disposition matter in Young’s deliberative democracy” (chapter 14),
Desirée H. Melton proposes that the procedural and communicative changes
to deliberative democracy for which Young advocates will only allow for lim-
ited improvement to democratic inclusion between differently situated others
unless deliberators are also attentive to how their character disposition in social
interaction affects their political interaction. Melton suggests that communica-
tion can be enhanced and more genuine if deliberators allow themselves to
become “dispositionally vulnerable” to the other in the social realm, well before
and apart from, any political deliberation. Dispositional vulnerability involves
an acknowledgement of one’s dependence on the other for dignity, a recogni-
tion of one’s lack of autonomy.
Young acknowledges that genuinely greeting differently situated others
before deliberation is risky because it is a vulnerable engagement that requires
one to trust the other. In greeting one another, Young wants deliberators to
acknowledge the dignity of political actors. Melton claims that before this kind
of acknowledgement is achieved in deliberation, one must recognize how
one’s self is “dispositionally dependent” on the other for dignity. Individuals
from both privileged groups and marginalized groups must make this recogni-
tion, which cultivates vulnerable dispositions (although individuals will have
qualitatively different vulnerabilities depending on whether they are privileged
or underprivileged). This kind of deep acknowledgment of the dignity of the
other happens in the social realm, prior to political involvement and without
 introduction 17

an agenda, and carries a greater chance for an enhanced, sincere, and genuine
communication when one does enter into deliberation with differently situated
others.

Justice: Democracy and Inclusion

Young’s theoretical insights on the ideal of participatory democracy come from

her deep understanding of U.S.-based social movements in which there is an
attempt to set up forums in which a variety of personal expressions of opinion
based on different racial, ethnic, gender, and class cultures are given equal voice
and impact. This fuels her interest in adapting Habermas and Benhabib’s goal
of communicative democracy to fit a multicultural model of power inequalities
due to diverse cultural, economic, and political positioning. In her two articles
“Asymmetrical reciprocity: On moral respect, wonder, and enlarged thought”
(1997b) and “Communication and the other: Beyond deliberative democracy”
(1997a), she argues against Benhabib and Arendt that the egalitarian commu-
nicative processes necessary for democracy require not merely cultivating a
desire to sympathize with others by taking their point of view or putting oneself
in their shoes, but a sense of wonder at and respect for their social and cultural
differences. So while she agrees with the need for what she calls “differentiated
solidarity” of political groups in different racial, class, gender, and other social
positions to their members, she leaves open the door to what we might call,
with bell hooks (1984), a “transformational solidarity” of those in privileged
social positions with those in oppressed positions that is not simply based on a
humanist disappearance of difference, but a mutual respect for difference.
Ann Ferguson in “Iris Young, global responsibility, and solidarity” (chap-
ter 15) develops this transformational solidarity concept further and argues that
the preconditions for such a concept to be applicable in today’s globalizing
capitalist world require an alternative global political economy of solidarity to
be in place with its alternative paradigm of justice as solidarity. Rather than just
exhorting individuals to take on social responsibility for others based on shared
connections with them, as Young does, we need to understand that conflict-
ing obligations to family, class, racial, and national groups will obstruct such
a commitment or even the moral ability to acknowledge such a commitment,
until people are able to reconceive their relations with distant others as a part
of shared moral, economic, and political community networks. Fortunately,
such networks are being set up as forms of resistance to the exploitation and
oppression occurring through corporate capitalist and governmental economic
and political policies that ignore harms to local communities, popular classes,
and poor nations in favor of neoliberal policies favoring unrestrained growth of
capitalist markets, favoring large corporations and wealthy nations. Ferguson
teases out those strands of Young’s discussions of solidarity and the structural
18 homage to iris marion young

positioning of groups by institutional racism, sexism, class exploitation, and

imperialism to show how Young’s work lays the base for the elaboration of the
paradigm of justice as solidarity, which is necessary to supplement her para-
digm of justice as shared responsibility due to social connections.
Carol Gould claims in “Varieties of global responsibility: Social connection,
human rights, and transnational solidarity” (chapter 16) that Young attempts
to hold all actors socially responsible in shared global processes like market
production and trade, whether or not they share equal power. This is prob-
lematic, since it excuses multinational corporations and powerful national gov-
ernments that hold the major power to control, perpetuate, and benefit from
these processes. She argues that although Young’s social connection model of
justice importantly takes us beyond simple accounts of liability, it represents
only one of the elements of a full account of responsibilities for global justice.
Gould argues that a human rights perspective that focuses on economic and
social rights supports positive global responsibilities to establish institutions
to realize these rights. Such a conception of responsibility linked to human
rights fulfillment thus importantly supplements conceptions for establishing
global justice that emphasize either its political dimensions or its requirement
of negative duties to avoid imposing harms or the rectification of structural
injustices.
Another aspect of a globalizing world is the problem of immigrants who
bring their own cultural identities and practices to Northern secular democ-
racies and raise questions of whether the nation state has a right to control
or prohibit their practices with the claim that these practices violate rights of
individuals within such groups. A glaring example is the practice of coercive
female clitorectomy practiced on girl children in many African societies, which
raises the moral and political question of whether girls and women fleeing
such practices have rights as immigrants to be protected against such practices.
Other examples include the practices of arranged marriages and polygamous
marriages; neither practice is legal in most Northern secular democracies.
From a cosmopolitan human rights perspective, such practices seem to vio-
late individuals’ freedom of choice and right to self-development if imposed by
their cultural group; and hence most thinkers have supported legal restrictions
against the continuance of these practices by immigrant groups. Other con-
cerns arise from practical contexts of integration of immigrant social groups
in some European cities. Máriam Martínez in “On immigration politics in the
context of European societies and the structural inequality model” (chapter 17)
engages with one of the major concerns of Young’s last writings about the nar-
rowing of multicultural conflicts to issues of nationality, ethnicity, and religion
by applying Young’s definition of social justice as “the institutional conditions
for promoting self-development and self-determination of society members”
(2000, p. 33) to strategies of immigration politics in Europe. She focuses espe-
cially on gender issues, where religion in some multicultural conflicts has
 introduction 19

gained more attention than relevant questions related to structural inequali-

ties such as the sexual division of labor or gendered processes of socialization.
Martínez argues that a structural power analysis of immigrant groups’ position-
ing should trump considerations of differences generated by ethnic, national,
and religious affiliations.
Finally, it is striking how Young’s work on the politics of difference, since
it was based on her activist work in U.S.-based social movements such as those
for women’s and gay rights, African-American, Native American, and Chicano
Civil Rights movements, and labor union rights supplements in a nonreductive
way her critique of capitalist democracy. Young’s Justice and the Politics of Dif-
ference (1990a) provides a complex analysis of the historical social formation of
U.S. white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist democracy that maintains a com-
plex of intersecting structures of oppression (exploitation, domination, mar-
ginalization, cultural imperialism, and violence). Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo
in “Women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression” (chapter 18) applies
Young’s idea of multiple oppressions to an empirical study of these different
types of oppression that white and black women workers encounter while com-
muting, depending on their racial and economic location. Such an applica-
tion is one of many that have been made using Young’s insightful analysis of
faces of oppression, as has already been observed in our discussion on animal
oppression by Lori Gruen (chapter 13) who uses this approach.
As we hope to have shown, the authors in this volume engage in a fruitful
exploration of the many facets of the work of Iris Marion Young, and in this
process, they show how important her ideas continue to be for contemporary
feminist phenomenology and political philosophy, particularly those concerned
with the analysis of gender and male domination, global and national justice,
democracy, and solidarity.
This page intentionally left blank
 2
4

When I Think about Myself as Politically

Engaged, I Think of Myself as a Citizen:
Interview with Iris Marion Young

Vlasta Jalušič and Mojca Pajnik

I (VJ) met Iris for the first time in Vienna, at the Institute of Human Sciences,
in 1998. There she gave an excellent lecture on inclusion and democracy. As
we spent time together in some of the Viennese cafes, I asked her whether
she’d be interested in coming to Slovenia to give a talk at the Peace Institute.
She liked the idea and promised to come. I kept sending her texts on Eastern
Europe and feminism, and she was very interested in the topic. Time passed,
however, and she had been obviously too busy. In 2004, when we exchanged
some articles, one on violence and Hannah Arendt among them, she asked
me if the invitation still held. But then she could still not come. In 2005, she
sent me an e-mail saying that she’d be traveling to Europe in spring 2006,
and that she’d love to come to Ljubljana before she traveled to a conference
in Prague.
We were really happy when she finally arrived in May 2006, yet she was
quite weak due to the severe illness. Notwithstanding, she dedicated us as
much time as she could: She was even so mindful that she brought with her the
new edition of Throwing Like a Girl—On Female Body Experience. Her lecture
on Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference was a success, especially
the way she was challenging some of the multiculturalist dealings with struc-
tural injustice (Parekh, Kymlicka etc.). While Mojca and I were taking Iris to
the Alpine part of Slovenia on a sunny May Day, we had a break in my garden
for a tea and she gave us the interview below. The next day she traveled to the
Prague conference on “Philosophy and social science” to talk about her essay
“Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model.” She sent me
two additional mails commenting on one of my texts. In early summer we
received the sad news that Iris had died, and we realized that we had most likely
recorded the last interview with her.
22 homage to iris marion young

While doing transcription and preparation of this interview for publishing,

we have made as little adaptation as possible. It seemed important to us to keep
Iris M. Young’s own words and the oral flavor of the exchange.
VJ My first question is connected with the recent debates around the
importance of the category of gender, which show an ongoing dispute
about its use and value. These debates give the impression of being
already for or against the category of gender. In the new introduction to
her book with Judith Butler, Feminists Theorize the Political (2000), even
Joan Scott spoke about the abolition of the use of gender as a concept.
Juliet Mitchell (2004) also published an article about this, a critique of
the gender category as a “totally inclusive” term that now even includes
biology but is at the same time, she claims, very particular and the trend
towards blurring the “sexual difference” that is much more universal.
And you wrote about the issue of gender and the lived body as well. You
took Toril Moi’s discussion on this and then made a difference between
the concept of the lived body as something that, as far as I understood it,
can be still something useful for the process of subjectivization, on the
one hand, at the level of the individual, as a question of corporeality, so to
speak. On the other hand, you consider gender as something that can be
used for, let’s say, for political mobilization, analysis, participation, and
so on. What do you think about these discussions in general, and how do
you see the future perspective of the category of gender?
IMY I’ll talk about two things: It’s true that in the last fifteen years or so,
at least in the United States, but I gather pretty much around the world
among those who are interested in feminist theory, there has been a lot of
debate about what gender as a category means, and whether it is useful.
And some of that has been because people have feared that gender defined
as the masculine, the feminine, is too gross a category and that it lumps
too many men together in one category who have lots of differences, too
many women together in one category that have lots of differences. At the
same time, in the United States at least, in the academic setting, the use of
the term gender has become more common to name programs, academic
programs, and there is a good reason for this, I think. In the 1970s and
1980s when academic programs having to do with issues of women’s
oppression and feminist visions were founded, almost all of them were
called Women’s Studies. And they were women’s studies. Some of the
theorizers of feminist theory began to see, though, that we should think in
terms not just of women as persons, but more importantly the relationship
that women as persons stand in to each other and to men. That the
relationships are more important to theorize than the particular attributes of
these being women. So gender has fulfilled that purpose of thinking about
relationships between people across the structures of power and interaction.
 interview with iris marion young 23

At the same time, the gay and lesbian movement, and then in the
beginning of the 1990s, the queer movement, gained a place in the
academic life. As with Women’s Studies initially, not too many years
following behind, there were academics, both male and female, who began
to research the history of same-sex relationships, and to do sociologies
of same-sex life, and social movements. And as a consequence, at least
in the United States, and I think it is also true in Australia, for example,
and I don’t really know about Europe in terms of academic programs,
but there came to be a point at which the question was: Shall we have
Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Women’s Studies? Politically, this is not
very smart. . . . And there’s a reason for these academic endeavors to be
allied with each other. And if they can be academically in a unit, then they
have more power in a university setting. But there are also intellectual
reasons to see them as allied. So there came to be debates about academic
programs in the United States as to whether to call them “gender studies,”
and usually that was understood as inclusive of gay and lesbian and
queer, eventually queer theorizing, as well as what historically had been
feminist theory and Women’s Studies. And I’d say that now the majority
of universities that I’m familiar with in the United States have made
this shift between an old way of thinking about this disciplinary issue of
women’s studies or feminist theory to naming it gender studies, where
that is explicitly including queer theory. The University of Chicago where
I am, I think actually when they founded it—it was founded before I came
there, which was late in the game as these things go—in the late 1980s
they had this debate and said: “No, it must be called gender studies.” So
it is kind of interesting, on the one hand there was a debate about the
usefulness of the category theoretically; at the same time, there was this
movement on the ground in academic life for a broadening, in a way, of
the academic enterprise of thinking about relations between men and
women and sexuality that needed the category of gender as a way to be
inclusive. So that’s the first point.
Then about my own effort to make a small contribution to the
debate about the meaning of gender as a category: we had in the 1980s
in the U.S. context, anyway, a debate about woman as a category as
being too unspecific, and also that when people would talk about the
attributes of a woman they would have a bias in the definition that
would often be toward those who were more privileged in the category.
So there was a big debate about whether white feminism was really
dominating the definition of woman, as distinct from Latino or black
feminism, black women and so on. Then Moi (1999) takes it up from
there and discusses Judith Butler’s important questioning of the category
of woman as necessary for a feminist movement. As I read it, Butler
argues that a movement doesn’t require a single category around which
24 homage to iris marion young

to rally and have banners, and Moi then traces debates about gender
and woman as becoming more and more abstract. Butler deconstructs
gender, deconstructs women; Moi reviews this and says: “The more we
deconstruct, the more abstract the debate becomes.” And she argues that
the critique is good, but ending up in the clouds isn’t good. She argues
that we could replace the category of gender with the category of the lived
body which she derives from Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.
First of all, one of Butler’s critiques was that the effort on the part of
feminism to distinguish sex, that is embodiment, from gender, that is
what is cultural, is problematic. So Moi accepts this and says: “This is one
good thing about the category of lived body. You can talk about culturally
inscribed material embodiment, so we can have sex and gender together.
And, another important element or function of the category of lived
body: it’s a category that most refers to experience, and how it is that you
describe the experience. And there is no reason then, with the category of
lived body, to generalize the experience of kinds of bodies to say that all
women have the same lived body experience, or all men do, so that it has
more plural possibilities descriptively for the variation in the experience
of living the body.” And I agree with all this. I found it though, that the
debate had been about how to think of individuals in the way they look
at the world; that is what I would say subjectivity means, and the debate
had turned away from thinking about positional relationships in social
structures.
And to understand our relations in all societies, and between all
groups, it is necessary to have a theoretical way of thinking about large-
scale social structures. So I argue, as far as the debates on lived body
vs. gender are concerned, that we should retain and reconceptualize
the category of gender in terms of social structure. And that means that
there are certain very simple definitions of social structure or variables
about social structure that position people and make understandable
the opportunities they face. And I argue that those are, I think I say
three: there is the gendered division of labor, normative heterosexuality
that affects everyone—people are located in different positions in
the structure of normative heterosexuality—and what Rob Connell1
calls hierarchies of power as gendered. And with those three we can
make more macro descriptions of the relationships between people
and explain, and give an account of power, opportunities, material
deprivations that continue and that are reproduced over time. And that
are still the problem, the set of problems that feminist theory has begun
questioning.

1 Robert Connell is now Raewyn Connell or R.W. Connell (editors' note).

 interview with iris marion young 25

VJ I have an additional subquestion, or rather a comment. While

thinking about the category of gender, and trying to trace it back—we
see that it actually evolved, as you mentioned before, out of the category
of woman. I was talking to Susan Brownmiller some years ago, here in
Slovenia as well, and I asked her how it was with this category of woman,
in her opinion. Because the women’s movement or let’s say feminist
movement in its very beginning strongly referred to it, at least in the
United States . . . , and she said something like: “being women, for us, was
distinguishing ourselves, it was a category which brought us to certain
stages in the public. We were chicks before, we were not women. Being a
woman meant to be something, to have an identity which was important.”
That made me think of the category of gender as something with “a
priori” inclusiveness, as an identity category, including women and men,
femininity and masculinity; then it goes for structures of sex and gender,
and then we have the issue of sexuality, homosexuality, etc. So, it’s been
evolving with some kind of adding on, and you were describing this process
in academia. By the end it seems as if it really encompasses so many, and
such complicated relationships that intersect with other structures and
problems that you can hardly figure out what gender is all about because it
is so much intersected with class, race, sexuality, etc. And one can easily say
that it’s becoming almost indistinguishable. Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi
(2005), while discussing this, propose to talk about “genderization” instead
of using the frozen noun “gender,” and thus to talk about the process
connected with experiences and with structures that are evolving.
In the European Union as in the United Nations, there exists a category
of gender mainstreaming—in the United States you don’t have this—which
has become a public policy issue. And it can be an empty signifier, so to
speak. It can be filled with anything. It’s usually filled with femininity
and masculinity. Politicians usually understand this kind of “gender” as
“women,” and policies as those where they “add” a bit of women. That is, it’s
interesting to see how the concept travels through structures and through
different countries and how its meanings are very much changing, although
feminist theorists fight hard to push forward a distinctive definition.
IMY I guess I’m not convinced that it has become so encompassing
that it has become meaningless, or tending to become meaningless,
which seems to me what your remark is suggesting. It seems to me
that it [gender] has two settings: the academic and the political. And
I don’t think there are particularly other settings for the use of the term.
It’s still a kind of specialized term. It’s not a term that affects much of
ordinary life. You wouldn’t go to the movies and say: “I want to see a
good gender film,” right? If we take that apart, as your remarks were,
in academic life, I do think that the function of the term is to be able to
26 homage to iris marion young

have a way of describing relationships across issues of sexual division of

labor, sexuality, and intimacy, and care relationships, and so on, that are
often between men and women, but also between women and women,
and men and men having to do with those issues. It is a category that
tries to describe those possibilities apart from class as a category or
race as a category. I think we need those distinct categories. If we don’t
have them then all we can talk about is individuals and their specificity.
And if we talk only about individuals and their specificity, then we can’t
give an account of why it is that some people are advantaged and others
disadvantaged.
So in the academic ground, I think it depends on how clear people
are, academically, in their research and theorizing about how they are
using the term and what function it is serving in their theorizing and
research. And that will vary, but that doesn’t have to do with the category
of gender. It has to do with how good academics they are. And then, in
the political sphere, it does seem to me that it is a victory for women’s
and gay and lesbian’s movements for politicians to think they have to
use the term at all. And, of course, it is an empty signifier. Just about
everything in politics is an empty signifier. It’s up to people who are
in the struggle for certain results to fill it with the meanings that they
think are most important. But I don’t see that as unique to gender as a
category. Democracy would have the same function. It means everything
to everyone. So how you feel the category of democracy depends on
the social movements and what they demand, how they try to struggle
together. For example in the World Bank there is a thing they call the
“gender desk.” Many people regard it as a little thing that was thrown
to feminists who demanded something, some attention to relations
between men and women in World Bank development projects. And it is
relatively empty, except when people try really to insist: “Hey, you have
to analyze it this way, not that way.” And here are the implications and
consequences, and I would say, the same goes for gender mainstreaming
in the European Union. We can’t ever rely on the politicians to do the
“right thing”; we have to make them do the right thing.

MP You mention the issue of democracy and I think we can see some
similarities in conceptualizing democracy in contemporary feminisms.
From the late 1990s and up to the present, books have been published by
feminist authors who fill in democracy as an empty signifier, for example,
with issues of migration, let’s say, Bonnie Honig in her book Democracy
and the Foreigner (2001), or Seyla Benhabib in The Rights of Others: Aliens,
Residents and Citizens (2004). I sense one trend in feminist theory that
goes from addressing gender to other categories and themes, migration
being one of them.
 interview with iris marion young 27

IMY In the examples you give, even though perhaps the authors have
contributed to feminist theory in their work prior to the books that you
are mentioning, and none of them would reject being called feminists:
I don’t see, for example, Bonnie Honig’s book Democracy and the
Foreigner (2001) or even in my own book Inclusion and Democracy (2000),
or, say, in Seyla Benhabib’s book The Claims of Culture (2002) or even
Anne Phillips’s book The Politics of Presence (1995); one could name a
whole list of books that are by women authors, who somewhere in the
course of their career, have made contributions to feminist theory—that
doesn’t mean that the books that they’ve written about democracy are
attempting to give a specifically feminist account of democracy. I don’t
see that any of those books are claiming to do so. Now, Anne Phillips
wrote a book in the early 1990s called Engendering Democracy (1991),
which is an attempt, but I wouldn’t say that that book offers a theory
of what democracy is that is going to be specifically feminist. But it
is a book that took democratic theory to task for not having attended
enough to gender difference, in both the history of political thought
and contemporary life. I think that all the books you mention are
contributions to theorizing democracy, that they are intended to be, if you
will, compatible with claims that feminists make in the public sphere but
they are not claiming to distinguish a feminist conception of democracy
from other possible conceptions.
MP Still, there are some similarities, for example, in addressing the
exclusion–inclusion elements in the concept of democracy.
IMY But you can have numbers of writers that aim to do that, who
don’t think of themselves as feminist, though they are probably not
against feminism, Will Kymlicka, for example. He supports feminism,
he is certainly interested in exclusion–inclusion, and one could name a
whole bunch of others, for example, James Bohman’s books Deliberative
Democracy (1997) and Public Deliberation (1996). I don’t think there is the
word “women” . . . well they might refer to women as an example, once or
twice in the book. But it’s all about, or significantly about, inclusion and
exclusion. What makes an issue feminist, in my view, is still that we’re
calling attention to specific oppressions of women who suffer because
of their social location. And if we start to extend the term feminist to
everything that’s challenging marginalization, then I think it loses its
meaning. And I also think that has happened to a significant degree,
more than it should, and so we risk that people will stop focusing on the
specific oppressions of women.
VJ Would you then say that gender theory is something that is not covering
itself, of course, with feminism necessarily, so the gender theory might
be—feminism might be a part of it—something that grows larger or . . .?
28 homage to iris marion young

IMY But I would also say that gender theory is not equivalent to
theories of marginalization.
VJ Of course. Because usually . . . there is a kind of opinion, that gender
theory and feminist theory are the same, in principle.
IMY They’re very close.
VJ Still close to this—you’ve been really fighting for the issue of women
as a social group, but can it be a category that is defensible in theoretical
terms or not? What I really liked when I was reading your work on this
issue was—as I understood it—your insistence on the fact that political
identity is not necessarily essentialist, or to a certain extent it must be
essentialist because to act politically you must make claims and if you
want to make claims you have to. . . .
IMY I actually don’t like thinking of politics in terms of identity. Most
people who write about my work say that I think about identity politics.
But I challenge them to find me theorizing identity. I think when I talk
about women as a social group—both in the essay that I wrote “Gender
as seriality” (Young 1994a) and the more recent essay that we’ve just
discussed, “Lived body vs. gender” (Young 2002)—I’m saying: It’s not
an identity. An identity is about . . . you can make a list of attributes that a
person has, and then you compare it—this is Aristotle, right—you compare
it with this other person, and the list of attributes, and if it all matches
up then they all have the same identity. But if you think of it structurally,
then it’s not about the attributes that a person has, as such. It’s about the
positioning of individuals within relationships. And that’s how I think
about women as a category and women as a group. And that’s why in
“Gender as seriality” I distinguished between the series and the group
where I argued that a group could be thought to have identity, but it’s
always going to be something much more specific than “women.” It will be
a specific group of women who do have something in common in addition
to being women. And that will be much smaller than the category woman.
VJ This is actually very much connected to the third question that I have
and that’s the issue of European identity you tackled in the article where
you were criticizing Habermas and European philosophers, where they
were stating that a European identity is necessary in order to balance the
U.S. unilateral position. You challenge them, ask them whether what one
has to talk about in these times is really a European identity, and whether
the public space that was opened with the antiwar demonstrations all
around the world before the attack on Iraq was a European public space
opening itself or a global public space. You claim that it was a global
public space, that it was not a European issue but a global issue and that
there were the same demonstrations in the United States and elsewhere,
 interview with iris marion young 29

as well. Against the claim for European identity and European public
space, you strive for a cosmopolitan democracy. You say that European
identity can only be something particularist and not universalist.
How do you see relationships between this growing European
attempt to build a kind of identity and the leftists and circles around,
let’s say, those who consider themselves progressive political theorists
and philosophers, who claim that it is exactly such an identity that is
going towards reformulating of the global order? Even within feminism
now there are these debates—in Undoing Gender (2004) Judith Butler is
replying to Rosi Braidotti, and there is a kind of transatlantic discussion
about gender there, whereby it seems that “gender” is increasingly seen
as mainly an American, U.S. category, and that European feminism
needs its own, not so much “traveled” categories.

IMY There are theorists of the European Union who have argued that
the European Union can evolve as a strong political entity only if, first
the individuals who are citizens of member countries of the European
Union can develop an identity as European. As I understand it, this
means the evolution of a kind of European nationalism. That’s what it’s
calling for. This assumes that you can only have a strong political entity
if you first have a political identity that’s like a nation. It seems to me that
this has always been problematic especially when we’re talking about the
possibilities of the European Union as a political entity. It’s especially
problematic here. It’s calling on members, citizens of the European
Union or citizens of member states of the European Union to say: “OK,
I’ve grown up Slovenian, or I’ve always thought of myself as German.
And maybe that in the course of my life, has gotten to be a more loose
understanding than it was for my parents, but even so. And I want now
to put that aside or let it shrink and develop a sense of myself as
European, which has the same weight as it used to have for me to be
German.” Such a project seems not likely to succeed, as far as I can tell,
and is not terribly desirable. It’s one of the resistances that we’ve seen
in recent months and years to the evolution of this political entity in the
form of resistance to the constitution.
I think that the European Union ought to become a stronger political
entity, that it would be good for the world if it does, that it’s evolving
with some of the best laws in the world, and also ways of dealing with
international relationships that are potentially very important for the
future. And that this evolution should continue. And there’s no reason
why the citizens of the member states need to evolve any conception
of European Union identity. That could be distinct from the existence
of European citizenship and is important, although it has its exclusive
characteristics.
30 homage to iris marion young

I want to address what you say, about my response to Habermas’s

particular intervention at the time of the invasion of Iraq by the United
States and the United Kingdom and a few other countries. In that short
essay of Habermas’s on May 31, which was cosigned by Jacques Derrida,
he calls upon Europe—I don’t remember that Habermas actually in
that essay calls for European identity or thinks that it is a requirement
of what he’s recommending. But he calls on Europe as an entity, as
a political entity to be strong, to be stronger, to serve as an important
counterweight to the hegemonic power of the United States in the world.
And he claims that Europe should, as a single political entity, develop
a foreign policy that can try to confront the United States hegemonic
power when it’s appropriate to do so, that is when it’s doing something
wrong, as he thought, and I think, that the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
And try to promote global justice. I think that Habermas was right about
that and is still right about that—the project that only Europe has the
economic wherewithal as an entity to be a counterweight to the United
States. Soon China will also be able to serve as such, and there are a lot
of international relations theorists who think that that’s where it’s going.
Because China is not shy to be military, and Europe is. So, I think that
Habermas was right to call upon Europe to take more responsibility for
global affairs as a single entity.
What I criticize that essay for was suggesting that the political, or
the public sphere in which international relations is being played out
is one in which there seems to be only the United States and Europe,
and the rest of the world is witness to it but not part of it. Now, this
is only by implication, in one little place in that essay where he says:
“We saw the existence of a European public sphere when people are
marching in the streets in London, and Paris, and Rome—and probably
Ljubljana”—and he just didn’t mention another single city outside
Europe, where there were on the same weekend hundreds and hundreds
of similar protests. Everyone in the world, in every place in the world
there were social movements: in Johannesburg, and Delhi, and all over,
in several places in Africa, Nairobi, Latin America, Buenos Aires, Rio and
so on—the list goes on. He says in his piece that Europe is the origin of
cosmopolitanism with the French Revolution. This is the place where
rights are born and the place that preserves rights. And that I found very
Eurocentric. It’s not true in the world today, and so I wanted to criticize
and claim: “No, we don’t have to wait for there to be a global public
sphere.” Sometimes it exists now, and it includes social movements,
very politically savvy, and where people from all over the global south
gather; the movement of the World Social Forum is probably the most
progressive and most interesting social movement in the world. And
people who joined it from the north generally understand themselves as
 interview with iris marion young 31

followers more than leaders, and properly so. So that is the point I was is
trying to make there.
VJ Here Habermas and Derrida are somehow entering the public space
as philosophers, for example, in the manner of those who are wise men
and who, so to speak, can speak the truth for us, so that we can “see”
what it is actually about. How do you see such jumps into politics by
philosophers, when they engage themselves? This was an engagement
in everyday politics—it was a strong claim, so to speak. How do you see
this jumping from, let’s say, from the sphere of thought to the sphere of
politics?
IMY If it’s done well it is not . . . philosophy when they do it, I would
say. It’s a political speech spoken from a position of fame, if you will. But
I don’t think it’s that different when Jacques Derrida makes a comment
than when Bono makes a comment. You have a celebrity, and we hope
that people will pay attention to what they say, and then you hope that
they are intelligent politically in what they say. In most cases Derrida
and Habermas, when they have spoken in public, as public intellectuals,
have been intelligent. And sometimes they’ve been wrong, but they’ve
been intelligent. And I think Habermas himself has always distinguished
between his newspaper columns and his philosophy. And it seems to
me that this is proper; there’s a different kind of discourse involved: you
have a purpose, you are partisan. There’s no point in speaking as a public
intellectual unless you are going to be partisan. As a theorist, there is also
nothing wrong with being a partisan, but there is a different way that you
might be an advocate. When I think about myself and my life as a theorist
and teacher, and then my life as someone who is sometimes politically
engaged as an activist or sometimes making political commentary,
I think of myself as behaving as a citizen when I do the latter.
MP In the context of your critique of Habermas for not extending his
argument beyond the European borders, what would you say about the
potentialities of the concept of the public sphere? Also, Habermas has
responded before to critique about [his] Eurocentism—taking him to
task for not mentioning the Indian context, for example, or the protest
of movements in Latin America, saying that, of course, the public sphere
is not only applicable to the European context and that he was using it as
an example. Isn’t it true that such criticism applies to Western philosophy
in general terms? In the sense that the concepts, for example, the public
sphere, inclusion–exclusion, democracy, always carry an implication
that they might be misused from a centralized European or American
perspective. And probably what actually has the potential to go beyond
this is what you’ve referred to before, i.e., transnational movements and
activities.
32 homage to iris marion young

IMY Certainly the concept of democracy has been taken over by people
all over the world and they think it’s theirs. They don’t think that the
Europeans have a monopoly on the concept of democracy. I think the
concept of the public sphere is similarly useful and unique. It is a concept
developed by Habermas, still not very well understood by most other
democratic theorists, except those who take up Habermas in one way
or another. And I think that, for example, in Between Facts and Norms
(1996) there is a further development of the idea of the public sphere
that is quite explicit, and owes a lot to what Andrew Arato and Jean
Cohen (1992) did in their book on civil society, where the uniqueness
of the concept is to name possibilities of speaking and being heard, and
criticizing as well as the formation of a generalized or widespread mass,
if you will, public opinion that isn’t of the sort that is manipulated by
public opinion polls, and where social movements help develop it, public
intellectuals can intervene and help develop it, and it takes place outside
state institutions, but in relation to them. I think this is a unique concept;
it is descriptively accurate of what sometimes happens in politics and—
it’s my understanding from reading Habermas, but even if I’m wrong
this is what I think—the public sphere is evanescence: it comes to be, it
surfaces and then it floats down. And it surfaces again, and then it sinks
down. And it would be unrealistic to expect that you have a permanent
public sphere. Maybe it would be great if it did exist, but . . . when you
do have public sphere emergence then you have a kind of promise of
accountability, answerability, and criticism for those in power, not only
government officials, but international organizations, for example, in
the contemporary context, or even multinationals, occasionally. As in the
early 2000s in the struggle about making anti-retroviral drugs available
to the poorest people of the world; this was a direct struggle with both
the World Trade Organization and the major drug companies who
manufactured drugs, and I think that was a moment when there was a
global public sphere, particularly in the south, but it was global because
you had connections between people in South Africa and people, say,
in the United States who wanted to raise this issue. And it made a huge
difference. I don’t think there is any other concept that helps describe
the phenomenon of social movement that exists across a large segment
of a mass society, raising issues and being able to call power structures
to account, and shifting public opinion. I think that’s what the concept
is about. Everyday politics isn’t usually like that, but there are moments,
not infrequent moments, when you see the public sphere. And it does
depend on civil society as a phenomenon and the freedom that the civil
society makes possible.
 3
4

Letter to Iris Young

Karsten J. Struhl

Dear Iris,

We have known each other for almost thirty years, but the last time I saw you
was at the World Philosophical Conference in Istanbul, which was in August
of 2003. I heard you give a talk entitled “Modest Reflections on Hegemony and
Democracy,” in which you argued, among other things, that human rights could
only be defended if there is a global system of democratic dialogue. Later that
week we had dinner at a restaurant some distance from the center of the city—
you, David, a friend of yours who lived in Istanbul, my wife Olga, and myself.
David, whom I had not seen for many years, had remarked to you earlier that
he wondered if he would recognize me, and you answered that I seemed very
much the same, only a little grayer. And in a very important sense you were
also the same, the same loving, argumentative spirit that I knew so well. You
had become a political superstar by then, but there was nothing in our conver-
sation that evening, or for that matter any other time that we were together,
which betrayed an air of self-importance. You were always the quintessential
exemplar of the dialogic ethos which you had analyzed so deftly in your writ-
ing on justice and democracy. We talked about many things that evening—the
political situation in Istanbul, banning the veil from public places, your invi-
tation to spend the next semester in Princeton working on your new project,
which was to be a critique of the mainstream concept of responsibility and
the construction of a new way to understand political responsibility. You were
very excited about this project. When we said goodbye, it was assumed that we
would see each other soon on the east coast. But it was not to be. How easy it
is for time to pass quickly with too many necessary commitments to fulfill. But
34 homage to iris marion young

I was not concerned. We would always, I assumed, meet at some conference.

But it was not to be.
We had spent considerable time together when you lived in Northampton.
That was when you were first beginning to formulate your thoughts on what
became your book on justice. That was when David was getting his PhD in eco-
nomics. That was before you moved to Pittsburgh. But we continued to see each
other at conferences, especially at Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) Con-
ferences. In 1998, we were both on a panel on Marcuse at a Radical Philosophy
Conference in San Francisco. I revisited Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism, which, for
me helped to explain not only why the main internal opposition to the Soviet
system did not take a socialist form but also why, when the first blush of Peros-
toika faded, the prevailing mood in Russia was one of cynicism. You revisited
Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and argued that today the one dimensionality
of the “happy consciousness” had been replaced in America by a cynical con-
sciousness. We had written our respective talks without conferring, but we had
reached similar conclusions about each of the two empires that had been the
poles of the cold war. Afterward, we spent some time talking about the problem
of cynical consciousness as a world phenomenon. In a number of ways your
life has been dedicated to confronting cynical consciousness and overcoming
it both in your theoretical work and in your political activity. I recently reread
some of the things you wrote. I had not fully appreciated the deep continuity
that permeates you writings, a continuity which in large part comes from the
political praxis in which you have been engaged. Your “Throwing like a girl”
came out of your deep commitment to feminist political practice. In that essay,
Merleau-Ponty’s “body subject” became a gendered body. The body-subject is
not simply a body subjectivity. As female, it is a subjectivity whose spatiality
and motility are constrained by the way that gender is constructed. Difference
is already present in the movements of the body and in the sense of identity
that is the body. Your understanding of difference also developed from your
activities with various political coalitions, and it informs all your work. Differ-
ence is often seen as a negative feature of a social situation. But in your Justice
and the Politics of Difference you insist that the recognition of group differences
is essential to our understanding of justice. As there can be no ideal model
of justice, which is abstracted from the concrete realities of domination and
oppression, the remedy for injustice requires the full inclusion of all groups
into the democratic polity. Thus, in your Inclusion and Democracy, you analyze
the way that lack of inclusion undermines democracy and promotes injustice.
As your work progressed, you turned to the problem of democracy on a global
scale and the way in which we share responsibility for the oppressive struc-
tures within which we participate. In an article which was published in the
Winter 2006 issue of Dissent, you applied your analysis of responsibility to
the effects and aftermath of Katrina. You wrote: “The events and discussions
around Katrina revealed shared responsibilities that existed long before—and
 letter to iris young 35

still exist. Rhetorics of blame can get in the way of taking action against struc-
tural injustices for which many of us share responsibility.” As always, your
theoretical reflections were aimed at allowing us to better understand our spe-
cific social reality and become agents for political intervention.
One of my most significant memories of you was at another RPA Confer-
ence in Chicago. When we met there, I was on my way to a panel that I had
particularly wanted to hear. You persuaded me that I could always go to one
more panel but that having time to reconnect with an old friend was far more
important. We talked for hours about our lives. You told me about your daugh-
ter, Morgan, who was now an activist for the Green Party. I remembered that
when Morgan was born, you sent out an announcement which said “another
socialist feminist has come into the world.” You had only recently become a
full professor in the political science department at the University of Chicago.
Your degrees were all in philosophy, but you explained how you had more
purposefully immersed yourself in the methods and the discourse of political
science. Your decision to do so, you said, had a conscious political intent—to
be able to talk to people in a discipline which was closer to the mechanisms of
governmental power and to spread your socialist feminist analysis to another
circle of academics. It was a natural move for you, as your work on political
theory has always crossed disciplines. We talked about arranging a special visit
to your home in Chicago, to have time to talk leisurely with you and David. But
it was not to be.
I had heard that you had cancer but that it was now in remission. Then,
very recently, I heard that the cancer had come back. In July, during a short
stopover in New York between conferences, I made a long list of things to do
when I returned from a conference I would soon attend in Mexico. The second
item on my list was “call Iris.” But on the very day that I returned from that
conference, I received an e-mail which announced your death. I was devas-
tated. I called David who told me that the cancer had spread so far that you
had decided to stop medical treatment, that you had left the hospital and gone
home. It was anticipated that you would live at home for some time in a hos-
pice situation. David said that when you were home you did not talk but simply
smiled sweetly. And then, suddenly, without warning, you were dead within
several days.
The item “call Iris” on my list of things to do now becomes a painful
reminder that I never said “goodbye.” I’m trying to say “goodbye” now, but
finding it very difficult. Here I am at another RPA Conference, and it is very
hard to accept that I won’t see you here. “Iris Young Presente!” That was the
original call for this plenary. “Iris Young Presente!” You are still with us.
You are part of our thinking about gender construction, about justice, about
democracy, about globalization, and about political responsibility. “Iris Young
Presente!” This room is filled with people who learned from you, who were
engaged in dialogue with you, who taught your books in their classes, and who
36 homage to iris marion young

love you. Your spirit is with us. But you who wrote “Throwing like a girl,”
know the importance of being embodied. Perhaps your spirit can live on in
our bodies, in our political practice. But is that enough? We can try a thought
experiment. Philosophers like to talk about other possible worlds. Quantum
physics suggests the possibility of parallel universes. Is there a parallel universe
where you are still alive? Perhaps in such a parallel universe, the United States
Congress did not vote to abolish habeas corpus and sanction torture. Perhaps
in such a parallel universe, George Bush never won the vote in Florida and,
therefore, never became President. Perhaps in this parallel universe, terrorism,
including state terrorism, is a rare phenomenon and the response to a terror-
ist attack is not war but, as you have urged, the implementation of the rules of
international law. Perhaps in this parallel universe the environmental pollut-
ants that provide the trigger for cancer have been greatly reduced, which is why
you are still alive. In this parallel universe groups negotiate their differences in
coalitions and in the body politic at large. How did all this come to pass? In this
parallel universe, people overcame their cynicism and accepted the idea that
another world is possible. Your writing and political activism have been, in that
universe, an important part of that process.
Now, let us return to this universe. The first step is the overcoming of
cynicism, and, as you, Iris, have taught us, the validation of difference. Still,
although you may exist in your embodied form in that parallel universe, here
your being present takes the forms of our memories, of our political activities,
and of our theoretical praxis. We can continue your work, drawing courage and
understanding from your example as well as from your writing. But we can
no longer ask you to further explain what you mean by something you have
written; we can no longer have those delicious arguments with you; we can
no longer see that wry smile. Simone de Beauvoir, at the funeral for Sartre, is
quoted as saying, “we will not meet again; that is the way of it.” And so Iris,
I must say goodbye to you, here among your colleagues, your comrades, and
your friends. “Iris Young Presente!” Yes, when I reread what you have written.
“Iris Young Presente!” Yes, whenever I come to this and future RPA Confer-
ences. But we will not meet again. That is, sadly, the way of it. There is no phi-
losopher’s heaven, and, even if there is a parallel universe, I can never enter it.
I feel your loss deeply. Goodbye, my teacher, my colleague, my comrade, and
my friend. Goodbye, sweet Iris.
P.S. September 11, 2007. Ten months later. Dear Iris, I am writing you
again on a day which has special significance in New York City, where I live.
The papers are full of discussions about what happened on this day in 2001 to
people in the Twin Towers, but I have not yet seen any mention of another Sep-
tember 11—September 11, 1973, when the American CIA intervened in Chile to
enable the military fascists to overthrow the democratically elected government
of Salvador Allende. Nor does it mention an earlier September 11—Septem-
ber 11, 1906, when Gandhi initiated his first nonviolent campaign in South
 letter to iris young 37

Africa. Your life has involved the aftermath of all three September elevenths.
You have been directly involved in organizing forms of nonviolent resistance to
the American Empire, as it destroys people’s lives both inside and abroad. Very
shortly after the most recent September 11, you wrote an article with Damiele
Archibugi which appeared in Dissent (Spring 2002) and which offered a rea-
soned alternative to the Bush administration’s open ended “war on terrorism.”
A year later you published an article in Signs, which analyzed the legal changes
as a manifestation of the logic of masculinist protection. What would you say
today as we watch the Bush administration openly destroying habeas corpus,
sanctioning torture, and continuing the war in Iraq which, as one documen-
tary puts it, has “no end in sight?” What would you say as over two-thirds of
the American public oppose this war and have voted in a democratic majority
in Congress who continues to fund the war? I think I know, but I’m not sure.
As I reread some of your articles, I am constantly aware of the subtle nuances
of your thinking, your willingness to challenge even the assumptions of those
with whom you ally yourself in struggle, your willingness to rethink your own
previous thinking. We can respond to your voice as it was then. But what would
it be now? I miss hearing that voice now.
I recently read for the first time something you had written in your Inter-
secting Voices (Young 1997). It was entitled “House and Home: Feminist Vari-
ations on a Theme.” In that article, you recognize the merit of the feminist
critiques of home but nonetheless insist that there are a core set of values
embodied in the creation and maintaining of a home, values which should
not be discarded and which can even provide a grounding for radical social
critique. Among those values is the recognition of homemaking as preserv-
ing personally significant objects and organizing space, endowing these things
with a living meaning that can help to support both personal and social iden-
tity, even as these identities are changing, and which can provide a material
anchor for a sense of agency. There is something remarkable about the way you
weave together the analyses of Irigaray, Beauvoir, Heidegger, Honig, etc., with
a set of reflections on women’s ordinary life at home and on your own life. But
it was the interlude in the middle of this article which especially moved me.
You present your own mother’s story as a housewife and with it your own story
growing up, a story which we had never discussed. After your family moved
from Queens to the suburbs of New Jersey, your father died. Your mother, both
out of her grief and her temperament, never maintained the physical appear-
ance of her home in the way that was expected of a suburban housewife. And
so, as a single Mom, she was arrested twice for neglect, and you were sent for
the first time to a teen-reform home and the second time to the foster care of
family friends. And yet, by your own account, she nonetheless did provide you
with some of the values of a home. Was this the beginning of your sense of
women’s oppression? Did the bureaucrats who had your mother arrested and
removed you from the home become the prototypes of the systematic injustice
38 homage to iris marion young

of our society? Did your mother’s being arrested because she did not fulfill
the standards of home cleanliness demanded by the suburbs, because she and
your family were different, begin the seeds of your affirmation of the value of
difference that so informs your own theorizing of justice? What did it mean to
the 12-year-old Iris to be twice taken from your home? I often sensed the vul-
nerability of that 12-year-old behind the intellectually developed, independent,
mature Iris, although I did not know then its source. I wish I could talk to you
about this now. Perhaps others can fill in some of the answers that go beyond
the theorizing that you do in this article. That is in part the point of a Festschrift.
As a community who knew you as a feminist political thinker and as a friend,
we can tell each other many of the things which we each as individuals never
knew about you. In so doing, we construct “Iris Young,” from your writings
and from our memories of you, even as we have lost you. But this construction,
which helps our collective mourning process, cannot replace the loss of your
living presence.
I began this letter with the idea of having last seen you at the World Philo-
sophical Conference in Istanbul. After I read this letter at the RPA Conference
ten months ago, I was reminded by a mutual friend that I was mistaken, that,
in fact, I did see you again at the RPA Conference in November 2004, which
took place at Howard University. Why did I not remember this last time? Per-
haps it was because we only had a chance to speak briefly with each other after
that conference. Perhaps I wanted my last memories of you to be the last time
we connected on a number of levels. Memory never gets it quite right. Even our
collective memory can never get it quite right.
I went back to my notes of that 2004 conference. You spoke then at a
plenary on ethics and international relations. The theme of your talk was the
way in which structural processes constrain our social interaction and produce
outcomes that are unjust beyond the borders of the nation-state. And you posed
the following questions. How can we recognize ourselves as agents within
those structures? What is our responsibility for producing those unjust out-
comes, and how can we transform those structures? These questions motivated
you throughout your theoretical and politically active life. They will continue
to haunt us, especially as we confront the injustices and ecological problems
at the planetary level. Your writings and your example will continue to inspire
us, and me, to ask these questions. Goodbye again, sweet Iris. I know that you
cannot respond to this letter. But I will write to you again.
4
PART II

EMBODIMENT,
PHENOMENOLOGY,
AND GENDER
This page intentionally left blank
 4
4

Iris Young and the Gendering

of Phenomenology

Sandra Lee Bartky

Western philosophers have until very lately assigned a lower ontological status
to the body than to those other aspects of the person which have the task of
holding this body, prone as it is to epistemological error and moral weakness,
in check; higher than the body, hence authorized to police it, have been nous,
mind, spirit, soul, rational intuition. Women, thought to be more in thrall to
the body than the mind, have been correspondingly depreciated.
The classical tradition in phenomenology has tried to rehabilitate the body
and embodied experience generally (Heidegger is an exception); insofar as phi-
losophy can be said to advance, this seems to be an advance. But phenomenolo-
gies of the body have regarded the body as if the body were one—surely an
example of the “logic of identity” of which Iris Young has been so critical—i.e.,
as if the bodies of men and women were identical. In fact, this “neutrality”
in regard to the sex of bodies has ignored the specificities of woman’s body:
the body of the sexually mature woman bleeds periodically; it has breasts,
it can become pregnant. Insofar as these specificities have been ignored, it
seems clear that the classical tradition has taken male embodiment covertly as
emblematic of embodiment per se. If this is so, then it too has recapitulated the
male bias that is endemic to the Western philosophical tradition.
It is now generally conceded that embodied experience is always socially
and historically mediated. Hence, to try to unearth, in the style of classical phe-
nomenology, the a priori necessary structures of any embodied consciousness
whatever, is a futility. Iris Young has been a leader in this transformation of
phenomenology. If she had done only this and not challenged the established
paradigms of theories of justice, her reputation would be secure. First, she has
ended the silence surrounding the specificities of female embodiment: Iris has
produced memorable essays on the breasted body, the pregnant body, and the
42 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

lived norms that have governed the style of movement and the relationship
both to space and to objects in space of the properly “feminine” body. Second,
recognizing the socially constructed character of embodied experience, Iris has
rejected the pretensions to universality of the older tradition. Her phenom-
enologies are situated, i.e., they search for structures of meaning embedded in
the experience of some group of embodied subjects, here and now. The careful
reader discovers that the claims made are not intended to extend to all women
everywhere. Nevertheless, in regard to the culture of the industrialized West,
the phenomenologies are meant to have a certain generality, if not in all cases
as descriptions, then as norms of female embodiment, “we are identified with
our breasts . . . should be with our breasts.”
I shall discuss three papers: “Breasted experience: The look and the feel-
ing,” “Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and alienation” (1984) and the much
anthologized “Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body com-
portment, motility and spatiality” (1980) (all published in Young 1990b). While
my principal aim in this discussion is let Iris’ voice to be heard and her ideas
expressed, I shall allow myself occasional comments, some critical, some reflec-
tive. I am continuing the philosophical discussions I had with her for many years,
discussions that matured my thought and helped me to grow philosophically.
First, “Breasted experience.” “The chest,” says Young, “is importantly the
center of a person’s being (1990b, p. 189).”1 When I point to myself, it is to the
chest I point, not the brain as the seat of consciousness. Most women’s chests
have breasts, hence our mode of embodiment as well as our sense of self is
quite different than that of men. Androcentric culture fetishizes breasts: the
best breasts “are like the phallus: high, hard and pointy” (p. 190). “They are
called boobs, knockers, in the total scheme of the objectification of women,
breasts are the primary things” (p. 190). This reification of breasts is at the
heart of the reification of women: we are identified without breasts (I’m an ass
man, says one; I’m a tits man, says another). “Breasts are the most visible sign
of a woman’s femininity; the signal of her sexuality” (p. 191). Young character-
izes briefly but eloquently the range of women’s responses to our breasts as
objects of the male gaze, responses that range from pride to shame; common
to all is the centrality of breasts to the female sense of self.
I myself developed quite young, a circumstance to which my parents
seemed oblivious and to which I was also oblivious until the day that a nice
boy, indeed a friend, made a jocular but by no means cruel remark about my
“boobs.” I realized, in a flash, that my breasts were clearly visible under my
t-shirt. I felt a powerful rush of rage and shame; I slapped the boy’s face so hard
that his head twisted about on his shoulders, then, weeping, I bicycled home
as fast as I could. I did not understand my reaction then, nor do I understand

1 Iris Young (1990b). Unless otherwise indicated, all page citations to this volume will appear in brackets in
the text.
 iris young and the gendering of phenomenology 43

it fully now. Did I know, at that age, the power that the male gaze was to have
in the continuing formation of my identity? Or was the shame a mark of the
shame that attached to virtually all things sexual in the repressive environment
in which I was raised?
Young’s treatment of the fetishization of the breasts suggests that since
most women fail to have the “best” breasts, the dominant response to this
fetishization is female anxiety. All kinds of exercises are recommended and
brassieres advertised to remedy these deficiencies; the proof of the enormous
social importance attached to women’s breasts is the willingness of tens of
thousands of women each year to go under the knife for breast reduction or,
more commonly, breast enhancement. In spite of the widely publicized dan-
gers of breast implants, the number of women who are willing, nay, eager to
undergo this surgery has not diminished.
But as Iris tells us in various introductions to collections of her work, she
wants to call attention not only to those aspects of female embodiment that
cause women pain and shame, but also to the pleasures that flow from female
embodiment as well. These pleasures are direct, i.e., they are not mediated by
the male gaze; often they stand outside the canon of acceptable pleasures and
so they have never been properly articulated, much less theorized. “Without a
bra, most women’s breasts do not have the high, hard, pointy look that phallic
culture posits as the norm. They droop and sag and gather their bulk at the
bottom . . . the ‘fluid’ being of breasts is more apparent. They change their shape
with body position. Many women’s breasts are much more like a fluid than a
solid; in movement, they sway, jiggle, bounce, ripple even when the movement
is small” (1990b, p. 195).
Young identifies the fetishized breast with a “metaphysics of solids,” of
self-identical objects, a patriarchal metaphysics that privileges sight over touch
and that prepares the way for the domination of nature, conceived as an object
sphere that one can act upon, and, of course, the domination of women. She
follows Irigaray in suggesting that the metaphysics of solids be replaced by
a metaphysics of fluids, that such a metaphysics is more reflective of female
sexuality and the female body and that the privileging of sight that accompa-
nies an experience of the world as a congeries of objects should give way to a
privileging of touch. Hence, the idea that phallocentrism has its own meta-
physics and epistemology is a prominent feature of her paper. I myself remain
unconvinced. I think that we can do the conceptual work her paper does with-
out recourse to metaphysics, nor do I see any necessary connection between
solids and sight or fluids and touch.
“For many women, breasts are a multiple and fluid zone of deep plea-
sure quite independent of intercourse, though sometimes not independent of
orgasm” (p. 194). For a phallic sexuality, this is a scandal. It is quite accept-
able for women to show cleavage, indeed, as much cleavage as possible, but
there is a taboo on the display of nipples. Nipples are indecent; nipples “show
44 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

the breasts to be active and independent zones of sensitivity and eroticism”

(p. 196). The taboo on the display of nipples reveals what, for patriarchy is
the worst scandal of all: the relationship of sexuality and motherhood. Indeed,
much of patriarchal culture is founded on the separation of motherhood and
sexuality—e.g., the double standard, the focus on female purity, the sanctity of
motherhood, the division of women into madonnas and whores.
There are two spheres in which women can have access to the pleasure of
breasted embodiment unmediated (in any direct way) by patriarchal taboos.
One is in certain lesbian spaces. In a context in which women are naked from
the waist up, a woman might at first stare—treating the breasts as objects.
But gradually, “in a woman space with many women walking around bare-
breasted, the variability and individuality of breasts becomes salient” (p. 196).
As fetishism recedes, the breasts become just another mode of the expressive-
ness of the female body.
The second sphere in which women can have access to the pleasure of
breasted embodiment is in the nursing of a child. Here the separation of sexual-
ity and motherhood falls away; hence the centuries-long silence on the eroticism
of breast-feeding. Young draws from her own experience of motherhood:
After some weeks, drowsy during the morning feeding, I went to bed
with my baby. I felt that I had crossed a forbidden river as I moved
toward the bed, stretched her legs out alongside my reclining torso,
me lying on my side like a cat or a mare while my baby suckled. This
was pleasure, not work. I lay there as she made love to me, snuggling
her legs up to my stomach, her hand stroking my breast, my chest.
She lay between me and my lover and she and I were a couple. From
then on I looked forward with happy pleasure to our early morning
intercourse, she sucking at my hard fullness, relieving and warming
me, while her father slept. (1990b, p. 199)
Young has here succeeded in deconstructing the opposition of motherhood
and sexuality. What the fusion of sexuality and maternity clearly threatens is
the idea that woman’s sexuality, and by extension, her loyalty and her service
belong to the man, and not to herself or even to her child. The woman “cannot
be perfectly giving if she is wanting or selfish” (p. 199).
Iris’s essay “Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” also
breaks new ground. Pregnancy: how could Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, etc.
not have noticed? As far as I know, this is the first phenomenological study of
pregnancy in the philosophical literature. What Iris chooses to make primary
in the pregnant woman’s experience of her own body is the way in which it
defies the positing of a unified subject: pregnancy, she claims, challenges the
assumption, so prominent, perhaps even definitive of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition, of a transparent unity of self. In pregnancy, a woman’s conscious-
ness is split, decentered or doubled, in a variety of ways: first, she experiences
 iris young and the gendering of phenomenology 45

her body as split between herself and what is not herself; second, the experience
of pregnancy blurs the distinction of transcendence and immanence; third,
the woman “can experience an innocent narcissism fed by recollection of her
mother’s body”; fourth, her bodily boundaries alter rapidly so that the pregnant
body-subject has difficulty locating her own boundaries and fifth, “pregnancy
has a unique temporality of process and growth in which the woman can expe-
rience herself as split between past and future” (p. 160).
“Pregnancy,” says Young, “challenges the integration of my body experi-
ence by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within myself and what
is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my
own body” (p. 163). The first movements of the fetus “produce this sense of the
splitting subject; the fetus” movements are its own, yet within me.” I have some
difficulty with this analysis: while it must be the case that early in pregnancy
one doesn’t know whether internal sensations are entirely one’s own or are
due to the developing fetus, surely this stage must pass into another in which
the movements of the fetus are clearly its own. Why describe this as a “split-
ting” of the pregnant woman’s consciousness? Early on, the pregnant woman
doesn’t know whether what she feels is herself or another; this seems to me to
be uncertainty, not splitting. Later it must be clear what motions are the fetus’
motions. Why isn’t the experience described in this way: there is something
or someone else living in my body? How does this “decenter” me? I am still
myself and this is still my body. Imagine the case of an unwanted pregnancy.
Here the “something within” is something alien, something she doesn’t want
there, indeed, a parasite living within her body. She wants it expelled. Nothing
as structural as “splitting” occurs within her consciousness: if the pregnancy
continues, this sense of housing an alien and unwelcome other might well
grow. The fetus is hers in a physiological sense, but not necessarily in a psy-
chological sense.
“The integrity of my body is undermined in pregnancy . . . by the fact that
the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. In pregnancy I literally do
not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins” (p. 163).
I find this perplexing too. Wouldn’t the pregnant woman know where her body
ends and the world begins when she bumps into a hard object, such as a door
or a table? Iris, in this essay, is clearly influenced by the poststructuralist char-
acterization of the subject as split or “decentered.” I have always felt that the
poststructuralist insistence on consciousness as multiple or “split” carries the
suggestion that we are all suffering from multiple personality disorder.
On transcendence and immanence: In the classic phenomenological lit-
erature, says Young, transcendence is associated with one’s projects: the body
is a transparent medium, an instrument for the enactment of these projects;
but when I am aware of the materiality of my body, its weight, massiveness,
and balance—its immanence—this awareness is understood for the most part
as cutting me off from the enactment of my projects. Iris takes issue with this
46 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

view. “Contrary to the mutually exclusive categorization between transcen-

dence and immanence that underlies some theories, the awareness of my
body in its bulk and weight does not impede the accomplishing of my aims”
(p. 165). Iris has here somewhat changed direction. In spite of earlier claims
about pregnancy splitting consciousness, she is here claiming that the duality
of transcendence and immanence is not a split that would in most ways keep
me from realizing my ends.
Pregnant women are given a certain precedence that women ordinarily
lack. This may contribute to a woman’s sense of power. Moreover, the “cul-
ture’s separation of pregnancy and sexuality can liberate her from the sexually
objectifying gaze that alienates and instrumentalizes her when in her nonpreg-
nant state” (pp. 166–67).
Young identifies what she takes to be still another split in the consciousness
of the pregnant woman: this has to do with the innocent narcissistic pleasure
with which she notices every change in her body. Here, Iris follows Kristeva in
speculating that this narcissism signals a renewed connection
“to the repressed, preconscious, presymbolic aspect of existence.
Instead of being a unified ego, the subject of the paternal symbolic
order, the pregnant subject straddles the spheres of language
and instinct. In this splitting of the subject, the pregnant woman
recollects primordial sexual continuity with the maternal body which
Kristeva calls ‘jouissance’ ” (p. 166).
I am skeptical of this claim too because I find it difficult to believe that an
adult woman or anyone can remember experiences which were preconscious
and presymbolic. It seems to me that more cognitive development is required
before anything like memory can occur; moreover, there are some observers
of neonatal life who have challenged the claim that the neonate has as its first
experience of life a primordial continuity with the maternal body. Furthermore,
it is worth noting that a woman who is unhappily pregnant (say, through rape)
will not experience the changes in her body with narcissistic pleasure. She may
well experience them with profound distaste.
Finally, the question of the temporality of pregnancy: Young’s description
of labor in general and especially its temporality is striking and moving. There
is in labor “the cessation of time. There is no intention, no activity, only a will to
endure. I only know that I have been lying in this pain, concentrating on stay-
ing above it, for a long time, because the hands of the clock say so or the sun on
the wall has moved to the other side of the room” (p. 168). But is there not an
experience of “the cessation of time” for those who experience prolonged, acute
pain, say, migraine sufferers?
Iris ends the essay with the “alienation” suffered by the pregnant woman.
The critique she offers is a locus classicus of the feminist critique of the medical-
ization of childbirth. A woman’s experience in pregnancy is often an experience
 iris young and the gendering of phenomenology 47

of alienation because her condition tends to be defined as a disorder, needing

medical intervention. So a process that is rightfully hers is taken away by a medi-
cal establishment. Sometimes her birth is scheduled for the convenience of the
doctor. The position in which she gives birth is not hers to choose; she must lie
flat, feet in stirrups, again for the convenience of the medical staff, even though
a half-sitting, half-reclining position would bring gravity to her aid. Tradition-
ally, no friend or family member could be with her, for the sake of “sanitation.”
This has recently somewhat altered. But for most hospital births, language tells
it all: the doctor, not the pregnant woman, is said to have “delivered” the baby.
I come now to my favorite of the phenomenological essays, “Throwing like
a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body-comportment, motility and spatial-
ity” ([1980] 1990b). This is one of the most widely read and frequently antholo-
gized papers of Second Wave feminist theory. Young does a phenomenology of
the basic modalities of women’s style of comportment and movement in space.
From some of the more ordinary ways in which women comport themselves in
the world, she will derive certain “structures” of feminine being-in-the-world,
namely inhibited intentionality, ambiguous transcendence and discontinuous
unity with the environment.
When a girl throws a ball, she doesn’t bring her whole body into the motion.
Unlike the boy, she does not “reach back, twist, move backwards, step out and
lean forward” (p. 145). Girls tend to remain somewhat immobile; they throw
with the arm, typically not even the whole arm, but just the forearm. Not only
is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical
style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like
a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and
directed motion, “rather, the motion is concentrated in one body part and sec-
ond, the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch and follow
through in the direction of her intention” (p. 146). These features can be seen
in other aspects of women’s movement; for example, in walking, the female
stride is shorter in proportion to her body size than is the male’s. He swings
his arms when he walks and is generally freer and looser in his whole manner
of moving. When sitting, women keep their legs together, their arms close to
the body, while men often take up all available space.
Women frequently do not perceive themselves as capable of lifting and car-
rying heavy objects, shoving something with significant force, pulling, squeez-
ing, grasping, or twisting with force. We do not put our whole bodies into
the doing of a physical task: “In lifting something women often fail to plant
themselves firmly and make their thighs carry the major portion of the weight”
(pp. 145–46). Often we experience our bodies as fragile burdens we need to
protect, rather than as instruments of our transcendence; hence our engage-
ment with things is often marked by timidity and hesitancy.
Female spatiality is complex. Young follows Merleau-Ponty in claiming
that the subject constitutes space: space is the organization of things that is
48 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

produced by human transcendence. But women’s spatiality is inhibited. “Fem-

inine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality which simultaneously
reaches toward a projected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily
commitment to that end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot’ ” (1990b, p. 150). A wom-
an’s inhibited intentionality disrupts what Young, following Merleau-Ponty,
believes should be the body’s unified and unifying being-in-the-world. The sub-
ject, in realizing its intentions reveals the world’s possibilities: they are coeval.
But too often, women are not subjects constitutive of space and spatial
relations, they are objects located in space. Hence, feminine transcendence is
ambiguous. Woman is not just a body-subject but an object as well; much more
so than men she is a target of judgments about her appearance. The male gaze
is often internalized, in which case women become objects for themselves.
“Feminine bodily existence is self-referred in that the woman takes herself
to be the object of motion (and attention) rather than its originator” (p. 150).
A woman’s spatiality is contradictory insofar as feminine bodily existence is
both constituting and spatially constituted.
Now none of this is biologically based: women are taught how and how not
to move. It is not only woman’s status as object but also her restricted inten-
tionality, i.e., her restricted freedom, that produces in us a sense that we are
confined within space. This is one of the most striking insights of the paper.
“For many women, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free
to move beyond” (p. 146). And again, “Feminine existence appears to posit an
existential enclosure between herself and the space surrounding her, in such a
way that the space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipu-
lation is constricted and this space beyond is not available to her movements”
(ibid.). This sense of constriction in space is overdetermined: women’s space is
frequently invaded by inappropriate touching, nor is any woman entirely free
of the threat of rape. In sum then, she argues:
Women in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as
we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition
that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited,
confined, positioned and objectified. As lived bodies we are not open
and unambiguous transcendences that move out to master a world
that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions and
projections. (1990b, p. 153)
In her introduction to the collection (1990b) that takes its name from this essay,
written ten years earlier about a period of time earlier still, Young concedes that
many things have changed for women and girls over the years. Many little girls
wear pants almost all the time: this makes for far freer motion than was possible
before. Due in large part to federal legislation that responded to prodding by the
women’s movement, girls’ and women’s participation in sports has expanded
enormously. Since the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments
 iris young and the gendering of phenomenology 49

Act, the number of U.S. high school girls who participate in sports has jumped
from one in twenty-seven, to one in three. “The effects are visible everywhere:
an explosion of female Olympic stars, college and professional women’s teams
playing to packed stadiums, new magazines aimed at female athletes” (Conniff,
1998, p. 26). Nevertheless, Young makes clear that she stands by what she has
written: “Many girls and women still live a confined and limited experience of
space and movement” (p. 15). I agree. The appearance of a woman’s body has
still substantially more cultural importance than what it can do.2
While Iris endorses the central claims of “Throwing like a girl” she is still,
in retrospect, highly critical of it.
In that paper I follow Beauvoir’s analysis of femininity as the
doubled experience of being an objectified subject. The analysis in
the paper thus assumes the humanist feminist framework that I later
criticized. It constructs femininity only as a liability, expresses female
experience only as victimization and implicitly assumes masculine
styles of comportment and movement as a norm. (1990b, p. 15)
Strongly influenced by French poststructuralism, an influence that begins in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, Iris understands humanism as positing a uni-
versal subject whose essence is not altered by gender differences between men
and women or differences among women. Moreover, humanists believe in
gender neutral standards of excellence. “I invoke the term ‘humanism’ in order
to side with postmodern critics of Enlightenment humanism . . . who regard
commitment to humanist ideals . . . of (say) the universal human community as
contributing to modern structures of domination” (p. 6). Existential phenom-
enology which also posits a universal subject, is subject to the same critique.
Flawed though it may be, Iris nevertheless, perhaps even paradoxically,
defends the project of the paper and thus, tacitly, its methodology. She offers
these essays as claiming some generality, though not universal validity “as
descriptions of femininely gendered or female sexed experiences and not just
reports of my own case” (p. 16). She continues:
Once philosophy climbs down from its universalist rationalism to
muck about in the ambiguities of the lived body, it would appear
natural to describe the specificities of the lived body . . . I have no
doubt that my descriptions are partial. In some ways they may express
only my experience; in others they probably express the experiences
specific to white Anglo heterosexual middle-class women like myself.
Yet I refuse to circumscribe these descriptions within this string of
identities. I believe that these descriptions can resonate, at least in
some aspects, with the experiences of differently identifying women
but I cannot know without their saying so. (1990b, p. 16)
2 See, e.g., Sandra Bartky (1990); see also Susan Bordo (1995).
50 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

What Iris seems to be saying is that while the language of some of these
essays appears to be humanist (in the sense defined above), their intention
is not.
I am strongly inclined to defend “Throwing like a girl” from some of Iris’
own charges against it, first that it construes women only as victims. Women
are, sad to say, often victimized, hence the need for a women’s politics of lib-
eration. One of the differences between feminism and the black liberation
movement is that women’s victimization is disguised, hence opaque to women
themselves, in a way that the victimization of Afro-Americans is not at all dis-
guised from Afro-Americans themselves. One of the ongoing tasks of feminist
theory is to reconfigure “nature,” “bad luck,” “individual failing,” or “neurosis”
as victimization. Feminist theory must sometimes “speak bitterness.” One is
not obliged in every essay, given the limitations of the genre, to sketch a politics
of liberation or to find a silver lining in every cloud. The pleasures of feminin-
ity, at least as mass culture configures them, can be seen in the magazines one
reads while waiting in line at the supermarket. The aim of feminist phenom-
enology as in feminist theory generally, is to show the things themselves, i.e.,
to reveal what has been distorted or suppressed. In addition to the raising of
consciousness, another quite legitimate aim of feminist writing is to generate
anger, a cleansing anger that will, in time, begin to invent alternatives to the
established order of domination.
Finally, on her charge that “Throwing like a girl” assumes implicitly the
superiority of masculine styles of movement: I do not draw this conclusion
from the paper at all. There is no endorsement here of masculine body lan-
guage simpliciter. One can decry women’s spatial restrictions without recom-
mending the tendency on the part of many men to monopolize the best chairs
in the household (Daddy’s chair), to have space in the home (Daddy’s study,
or workshop) to which children do not have automatic access even while they
have such access, whatever she is doing, to Mother’s space. Nor are we invited
to allow ourselves to sprawl into more than our share of space on public
conveyances.
There is much in this essay that is suggested but not developed. Whether
or not Young’s descriptions actually apply to all women in Western societ-
ies, they function very efficiently as norms. The “ladylike” woman whose
movements incorporate these norms is a privileged woman, a paradigmatic
woman of the upper classes; the “unladylike” woman, whose movements are
too “loose” or too masculine merits mostly disapproval. Hence, heterosex-
ism and the gender ideology of class society have been inscribed in our very
bodies.
I believe that Iris Young’s phenomenological essays can be defended
against poststructuralist claims that they are “humanist,” i.e., essentialist.
A historicized phenomenology of gender could, like psychoanalytic approaches,
see the gendered self as having been created by the bodily norms which bring
 iris young and the gendering of phenomenology 51

it into existence in early childhood. Thus, to the extent that industrial and
postindustrial societies have similar family structures which socialize chil-
dren in similar ways across class lines, Iris Young’s suggestion that there is
a historically specific feminine phenomenology of the body in our and other
similar societies is consistent with the poststructuralist rejection of the univer-
sal human subject. In any case, her work is valuable for having presented to
many women and girls a way to understand and hence to begin to refigure the
limiting and disempowering ways in which our bodily subjectivity has been
formed.
This page intentionally left blank
 5
4

Resonance and Dissonance: The Role

of Personal Experience in Iris Marion
Young’s Feminist Phenomenology

Michaele L. Ferguson

As a philosopher deeply influenced by phenomenology and by feminist con-

sciousness-raising activism, personal experience plays a very important role in
Iris Young’s feminist and democratic thinking. Even so, I find that reading her
very personal narratives makes me uncomfortable. In this essay, I use this dis-
comfort as an occasion to think more deeply about what role experience plays
in her philosophizing.
I have in mind two extraordinary personal stories that she tells. The first
is about her experiences of post-pregnancy embodiment and dreaming at a
philosophy conference. She opens her essay “Humanism, gynocentrism, and
feminist politics” (Young 1990b) with this story and revisits it in a later piece,
“Menstrual meditations” (Young 1990b). This story makes me uncomfortable
for several reasons. It recounts a very subjective set of experiences, without
attempting to speak to me as a reader who cannot possibly share in them.
Young never really explains what this story is doing in either essay, and it is at
odds with the detached philosophical prose that surrounds it. She is not obvi-
ously making any claim beyond, that “a woman named Iris Young had these
experiences.” But what are they to me? Why do I need to hear about her bodily
functions and her idiosyncratic dreams?
The second personal narrative is the deeply moving story of her childhood
experience of home in the middle of “House and home: Feminist variations on
a theme” (Young 1997a). It is a tragic story about the unexpected death of her
father, her mother’s struggle with grief and suburban isolation, her family’s
encounter with a bureaucratic welfare state that sought to protect Young and
her siblings by punishing their supposedly negligent mother and placing them
in foster care, and her brave confrontation with the authorities in an attempt
to hold onto some kind of home for her family. I find this story uncomfortable
54 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

to read for different reasons. It makes me angry at the suburban welfare state
bureaucracy that felt entitled to punish Young’s mother for failing to conform
to its expectations of proper maternal behavior, expectations that are shaped by
an unjust gendered division of labor.
These two stories have long stood out to me in Young’s work because of
how they made me feel. That drew me to ask: What are these very personal
narratives doing in her work? What can we learn about the role of experience
in Young’s philosophy by thinking about what role her own personal experi-
ences play in these essays? Within these three pieces, I argue that Young’s
personal narratives function as synecdoches—representing each essay’s larger
argument. Yet they also model a particular understanding of the role of per-
sonal experience in the practice of feminist theorizing: that the personal is an
important source of theorizing, that revisiting our past experiences deepens
our theoretical understanding, and that telling our personal histories is crucial
to cultivating identity and political agency.
Appeals to personal experience have long been important to feminist the-
ory and practice. In particular, the disjuncture between our lived experiences
of being women and the ideological messages we receive about what a woman
should be has been a significant source of critical analysis and calls for action.
Yet despite this usefulness, appeals to personal experience also have been sub-
ject to sharp criticisms. On the one hand, some feminists have been criticized
for making the unsubstantiated leap from individual accounts of personal
experience to generalized claims about the experiences of all women. On the
other hand, some feminists have been criticized for treating personal experi-
ence as a kind of trump card that has the power to single-handedly authorize
or de-authorize theoretical claims. In the aftermath of such criticisms, anyone
hoping to claim a role for experience in contemporary feminist politics has to
negotiate the tricky extremes of a false universalism (“all women share these
same experiences”) and a depoliticizing subjectivism (“each woman’s experi-
ences are unique”).
Among the most important contributions of Young’s work in feminist
theory is that she gives us an account of the political importance of personal
experience that avoids both of these extremes. Young suggests that personal
experiences become political when they resonate with others. Stories that res-
onate are not merely subjective—they sound familiar to us. Nor do they lay
claim to universal validity—we can only generalize from these experiences for
those with whom they resonate. Therefore, we make our idiosyncratic, per-
sonal experiences public in the hope that they will resonate with others, trig-
gering the energy to engage in political theorizing and action. This, I suggest in
conclusion, is an additional source of the discomfort I experience when I read
her work: stories that are meant to resonate with us—even when they fail to
do so—demand that we do more than read; they demand that we act to create
a more just world.
 resonance and dissonance 55

Personal Matters

Young frequently makes reference to her own personal experiences of embodi-

ment in her essays on female body experience. For instance, she notes that her
essay “Throwing like a girl” “arose from my experience of learning to play ten-
nis when I was in my mid-twenties” (Young 1990b, p. 15). Here, her personal
narrative affirms her choice of subject matter and lays bare her motivations for
pursuing a particular line of inquiry. Insofar as her experiences confirm the
validity of her theoretical claims, it is easy to treat these mentions of personal
experience as consistent with an approach to feminist theorizing that privileges
the epistemological value of experience for feminism: its ability to prove or dis-
prove generalized claims about women.
The cases that I want to look at more closely reveal the very important political
role of experience for Young.1 In these instances, her personal narratives disrupt
the style and conventions of traditional philosophical discourse and so command
our attention. Experience has a function in these stories that is not about proving
or disproving some theory.2 Rather, I argue that the personal experiences Young
relates in these cases function as a rhetorical appeal to potential political allies.
Their role, that is, is to build political community and generate collective action.
The first example I want to consider is the peculiar first-person narrative
with which Young opens her essay “Humanism, gynocentrism, and feminist
politics” (Young 1990b). It is a strikingly peculiar opening passage for a philo-
sophical essay. She writes:
December 1978. At a mostly male conference I hug, chat, eat, drink,
listen with my sisters in philosophy. My body avalanches from its
recent maternal swellings to the plateaus of a folded uterus, milkless
breasts. I left my baby daughter in Chicago, who used to suckle for
ninety minutes at a time while I read The Women’s Room. For the
first time in fifteen months that warm red flow moves through my
clitoral canals. No quiet transition, but a body revolution throbbing
my back and neck. Clouded in this private woman-state, I glide
around the chandeliered ballroom finding one woman’s face and
another and another. Fervently we converse about the day’s papers
and one another’s questions. We catch up on the news about one
another’s lovers or children or jobs.

1 Linda Zerilli (1998; 2005) has argued for shifting the focus of feminist theory from epistemological to
political questions in the context of debates about the category of women. My reading of Young suggests that the
two theorists share this move in common. Nonetheless, I believe that Young’s response to debates over the cat-
egory of women—the concept of gender as seriality—is importantly different from Zerilli’s insofar as it focuses
on structural commonalities rather than political claims (Young 1997a).
2 In one of her regrettably few moments of reflection on how she understands the term “experience,” Young
herself suggests that she does not use it to privilege a particular way of knowing (1990b, pp. 12–13).
56 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

That night in my restless sleep, I dream. A ballroom filled with

women, hundreds under the chandeliers, a reception after business
at the Society for Women in Philosophy. I flit from one group of
women to another in smiling comfort. As I turn to find another
friend I see her tall figure across the room, as though overlooking the
sisterly crowd: Simone de Beauvoir.—Then, just before I wake,
a single object, shimmering: a glass of milk. (Young 1990b, p. 73)
Right after this passage, the essay proceeds in a more distant academic voice
almost as if these deeply personal experiences of embodiment had not just
been articulated. Young never comes back to discuss this episode later in the
essay, and she makes no effort to connect this story to the more abstract reflec-
tions of the remainder of this piece. And it is a story—not a simple piece of
anecdotal evidence to prove or disprove a point, but an idiosyncratic set of lived
and dreamed experiences. Indeed, it is not entirely clear what it could prove
beyond that a person called Iris Young claims to have had these experiences.
So, what is it doing here? Why start an essay about the competing values of
humanist and gynocentric feminisms with such a personal story?
The most straightforward reading of this bizarre introduction would sug-
gest that it is a kind of synecdoche, a part standing for the whole of the argu-
ment of the essay. In this article, Young repudiates what she calls “humanist
feminism,” a position which she associates with Beauvoir among others.
Humanists hope to overcome the limitations of femininity and female bodies
in order to aspire to universal values, values which are mistakenly linked with
men and masculinity. Consequently, the aim of humanism is to eradicate gen-
der difference and enable women to participate along with men in traditionally
male pursuits. “The goal of liberation,” according to humanists, “is for all per-
sons to pursue self-development in those creative and intellectual activities that
distinguish human beings from the rest of nature” (p. 74).
Young’s deeply personal experiences of her undeniably female body call
into question the usefulness of a humanist feminism that wants to erase dif-
ferences between men and women, and to treat both sexes equally. She expe-
riences the physical and emotional changes in her body after pregnancy, she
experiences herself as a woman in contrast with the mostly male philosophers
attending the conference, and she experiences herself as a woman among
other women. Eliminating these lived differences would be not simply impos-
sible, but also undesirable. Her personal narrative suggests, then, why she her-
self has moved from a purely humanist to a more gynocentric approach to
feminism. Indeed, in the paragraph following her extraordinary introduction,
Young implies that Beauvoir’s own humanist stance is attributable in part to
her never having been pregnant and given birth (p. 73). Had Beauvoir only had
a child, she never could have written The Second Sex. The undeniable difference
of irreducibly female bodily experiences, it seems, would have undermined her
steadfast commitment to humanism.
 resonance and dissonance 57

However, just as in the opening story, Young in the essay does not reject
Beauvoir’s humanism altogether in favor of a gynocentric feminism that reval-
ues femininity and the particularities of women’s bodily experiences. Even
after a delightful gynocentric day, Young finds herself dreaming of Beauvoir,
the milk-giving mother. She cannot reject the dream of humanism altogether,
but must modify its aspirations to move beyond gender with an appreciation of
some of the positive values to be found in femininity and in female bodies. In
the conclusion, therefore, Young stakes out a middle ground between a purely
humanist feminism that would overcome bodily difference, and a gynocentric
feminism that risks reinforcing patriarchal inequalities by uncritically revalu-
ing femininity and female bodily experience (pp. 85–86).
Young’s opening narrative is doing more, however, than standing as a
summary of the whole piece. After all, she could have told any of a number of
stories to introduce this essay that could prefigure its larger argument—none
of which need involve her own personal experiences. She could have begun with
a more traditional statement of her thesis. Why then start with a story, and such
a very personal story?
I suggest that we also read this personal narrative as a kind of argument
in and of itself: an argument about the role of personal experience in the prac-
tice of feminist theorizing. The story’s position at the very beginning of the
essay models how personal experiences can be an important starting point
for theoretical reflections and innovations. Young suggests that Beauvoir’s
lack of experience with pregnancy and childbirth shaped Beauvoir’s theoreti-
cal vision. Similarly, Young’s own more embodied experience of herself as a
woman demands that she take a different philosophical path. Our personal
experiences, she suggests, have an impact on what we can imagine as feminist
theorists. We can and should use them as opportunities to reflect on, expand,
and criticize the theories we have inherited.

Periodic Returns

Peculiarly enough, this same very personal episode reappears in a later essay,
“Menstrual Meditations” (Young 2005a, p. 98).3 In this article, as in other arti-
cles examining female body experience, Young attempts two levels of analy-
sis (see 1990b, pp. 13–14). On the one hand, she argues that menstruation is
an occasion for women to feel alienated from their bodies, whether because
menstruation is treated as something about which we should feel ashamed,
or whether because it is a sign of a failed pregnancy (2005a, pp. 99–103). On
the other hand, she engages in the difficult task of recovering some positive
aspect of the periodic experience of menstruations. Drawing inspiration from

3 Suggesting a connection with my theme, the section heading under which the story reappears is entitled
“Experience: Beauvoir and contemporary feminism.”
58 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

Beauvoir’s writings about periods, Young suggests that the (more or less) punc-
tual return of our menstrual flows gives women a particular experience of their
own temporality. She writes:
Just because the event returns monthly, it affords an experienced
discontinuity that prompts gathering oneself to look back and
forward. The monthly flow mundanely organizes our everyday adult
memory. Without meaning to, I find myself remembering which
event occurred before which according to my last period. Sometimes
we feel we should schedule our appointments around anticipation
of our periods, or rather, their absence. I try not to meet that special
lover when I am menstruating. I arrange to travel to places where
managing menstrual secrecy is difficult during times when I hope
I will not be menstruating. (p. 121)
The repetition of periods orients women towards a kind of mundane self-
reflection on temporality. This makes possible a deeper kind of meditation (that
is available in principle to both men and women) focused on awareness of our
selves as beings with pasts, presents, and futures. The menstrual meditations
Young calls for in the title of the essay are self-conscious, periodic reflections
on how we have developed and will continue to develop as selves over time.
The episode that begins the earlier essay appears here as a periodic
reminder of a younger Iris Young that punctuates an essay already in progress.
Revisiting that essay is an occasion for Young to revisit herself, and to reflect
on how she has changed and developed since writing the earlier essay. She
notes that “Remembering her own younger bodily self and capacities as well
as a sedimented set of events of her life, the older person brings to her future
more layers of meaning than the younger” (p. 122). Older and wiser, the Iris
Young who writes “Menstrual Meditations” can read Beauvoir more evenhand-
edly, as a philosopher who is not a pure humanist, but who “describes the
embodied experience of being a girl, adult woman, and an old woman, with
unparalleled depth of detail and tenderness that continues to inspire young
and not-so-young women with recognition” (p. 99).4 Beauvoir is no longer the
mother to be overcome, but the mother to come home to after the youthful
urge to rebel has subsided (p. 99). Like a period, then, revisiting this personal
narrative serves as an occasion for Young to reflect on her own temporality as a
feminist thinker.5 Again, her narrative of personal experience here mirrors the
larger argument of the essay.

4 I problematize this language of recognition in the final section of this chapter.

5 Young’s three collections of essays in feminism also provide her readers with a similar opportunity. She
invites us to reflect on the changes in her thinking over time in the essays she collects, as for example in the
introduction to On Female Body Experience: “If nothing else, the collection exhibits a trajectory of thinking of one
idiosyncratic feminist critical theorist over several decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century; they
may also reflect an evolution in the way a number of theorists have approached themes of gender and sexual dif-
ference” (2005a, pp. 4–5).
 resonance and dissonance 59

Personal experience, this episode suggests, is not only a source for theo-
rizing in the present; insofar as it becomes a part of our self-narrative, it is
something we can periodically revisit and meditate on into the future. It is the
disjuncture between the younger Iris Young who wrote “Humanism, gyno-
centrism, and feminist politics” and the older Iris Young rereading this essay
twenty years later that generates the reflections about Beauvoir that form the
basis for much of “Menstrual meditations.”

Coming Home

The other personal narrative in Young’s work that I want to consider appears
in the middle of the essay, “House and home: Feminist variations on a theme”
(1997a, pp. 144–47). In the midst of a discussion of dwelling and being-in-the-
world, she interjects an “Interlude: My mother’s story.” This story is several
pages long, so I cannot include it in its entirety here. However, I know that my
attempt to reconstruct its main elements will necessarily undermine the power
of the narrative, so I encourage my readers to experience it for themselves.
This is the story of “one bad housekeeper”: Iris Young’s mother (p. 135).
Her mother did not work; she stayed home and read books, took correspon-
dence courses, and played with her children, but she did not keep house. As
an adult, Young “read her refusal to do housework as passive resistance” to a
gendered division of labor that confined her to the home (p. 145). Her family
moved from Flushing to the suburbs of New Jersey. “Then,” Young tells us,
“my daddy died—quickly, quietly, of a brain tumor” (ibid.).
Now a single mother consumed with grief and isolated in the suburbs,
Young’s mother’s refusal to do housework coupled with her drinking became
a matter of public concern. For “[a] woman alone with her children is no
longer a whole family, deserving like others of respectful distance” (p. 146).
From the perspective of the welfare state, her mother was not the caring,
loving mother that Young knew; but a deviant, failing to live up to its expecta-
tions of proper maternal behavior—narrowly understood in terms of keep-
ing house and maintaining sobriety. Her mother’s failure to conform to the
state’s norms of femininity authorized its intrusion into their home and the
breaking up of their family. Young and her siblings were taken away from
their mother and placed in a teen-reform home; their mother charged with
child neglect. Two months later, they were allowed to return home. Her
mother hired a 14-year old black girl as a maid to manage the housework; she
lasted only two weeks.
The family managed to escape further notice for a few months, until the
day when Young returned home from school to discover that there had been a
fire. “There was not much damage to the house, they had caught the fire early,
but when breaking in to douse it they had seen the papers strewn about and
dust on the floor and beer cans. My mother was arrested again” (p. 146). This
60 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

time, however, Young took the initiative to provide herself and her siblings
with a temporary home while her mother was in jail. “I used [a neighbor’s]
phone to call a family friend to come and get us kids—I wasn’t going to any
reform school again” (ibid.). A year later, the family was again reunited. “[M]y
mother wasted no time packing up and moving us all back to the safe indiffer-
ence of New York City” (p. 147).
This story encapsulates all the themes of the essay: the oppression of a
gendered division of labor that assigns the drudgery of housework primarily to
women, the differential privilege of an inviolate home assigned to some groups
over others, the disciplinary and invasive character of the welfare state, the
importance of home as a site for the support of identity and political agency,
and the value of a stable home. However, I think this story does more than pro-
vide yet another “feminist variation on a theme”—as the subtitle of the essay
suggests.
The story, after all, is a story about home: the home that Young’s family
made in the suburbs of New Jersey, the home that was declared unsuitable
because her mother “passively resisted” the gendered division of labor by fail-
ing to do the housework expected of her, the home that Young was deprived of
when sent to reform school, the intermediate home that she found with a fam-
ily friend, and finally the home that she found with her rehabilitated mother.
Home—fraught, incomplete, unstable, unkempt, but home nonetheless—is at
the heart of this essay, we might say. It is a resting point between the bookends
of theorizing in the first and second halves of the essay. Yet the home we stop
in is no idealized home, designed to give us comfort and release from the dif-
ficulties of thinking and acting in the outside world. This is a troubled, invaded
home that is simultaneously the site of love, relationships, and celebrations.
In the midst of her thinking, Young stops home for a bit, not in order to stop
thinking, but in order to remind herself of her complicated, lived experience
of home.
Personal experience, then, serves to ground the exercise of theorizing in
specific social situations. As we know from Justice and the Politics of Difference,
Young vehemently rejects grand theories that aim at producing universal,
atemporal truths. “If the theory is truly universal and independent,” she argues
in the Introduction, “presupposing no particular social situations, institutions,
or practices, then it is simply too abstract to be useful in evaluating actual insti-
tutions and practices” (1990a, p. 4). The periodic return to the home, to the
personal, to experience keeps our theoretical investigations grounded in the
here and now, where philosophy can be of use. She continues, “In order to be
a useful measure of actual justice and injustice, [theory] must contain some
substantive premises about social life, which are usually derived, explicitly or
implicitly, from the actual social context in which the theorizing takes place”
(p. 4). The return to her home in this essay, then, serves to expose the “actual
social context” that forms the basis for her theorizing.
 resonance and dissonance 61

That it should be specifically a story of home that plays this role in her work
should not surprise Young’s readers. In “House and home,” she defends a con-
ception of home that, while also the site of inequalities, is the site of material
support for the development of temporalized personal identity (pp. 149–50).
Home is therefore not just an actual social context in which theorizing takes
place; it is the actual social context that makes theorizing possible. While Young
agrees with other feminists that some housework is mere repetitive drudgery,
an impossible quest to rid the home of dirt, she also finds in certain kinds
of housework a more positive value. This is housework that involves preserva-
tion, which “entails not only keeping the physical objects of particular people
intact, but renewing their meaning in their lives. Thus preservation involves
preparing and staging commemorations and celebrations, where those who
dwell together among the things tell and retell stories of their particular lives,
and give and receive gifts that add to the dwelling world” (p. 153). Consequently,
“home carries a positive core meaning as the material anchor for a sense of
agency and a shifting and fluid identity” (p. 159). The relative permanence of
the things in our homes, the changing and periodic commemorations of the
meanings of these things, and of our relationship to them together provide a
kind of grounding for identity (albeit an identity that is always temporally situ-
ated and in flux). The preservation of things in the home gives us a sense of self
that makes it possible for us to act in the world. In other words, the materiality
of the home is what “make[s] the political possible” (p. 159). It is the experi-
ence of home, after all, that turned a young Iris Young into a kind of political
activist—resisting the invasive and patronizing welfare state to ensure a home
life for herself and her siblings. And it is precisely because home is so impor-
tant to a self with identity and agency that the older Young calls for a political
project of extending the ability of all people to have a home (1997a, pp. 160–64;
2005a, pp. 155–70).
But even if specific stories have the home-like function of grounding our
theoretical reflections in the here and now, why should it be important that the
story that provides the interlude in this essay is a personal one? Why make such
a personal story public? Her home is a site of political struggle over the gen-
dered division of labor, it is the site of so-called impartial bureaucratic intrusion
by the welfare state into the personal lives of a family, it is a space whose pres-
ervation propels a young girl into personal activism—ensuring that she and
her siblings have a home to go to when their mother is jailed for child neglect,
and it is the commemoration of these events of home that motivates Young
to engage in the theoretical reflections surrounding this narrative. Yet surely
Young is doing more in this moment than just laying bare for her readers what
her own personal motivations are in this essay.
As she describes it in the essay’s introduction, “The purpose of this ges-
ture is to commemorate”—a motivation which is deeply personal—“but also
to describe in concrete terms how disciplinary standards of orderly housework
62 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

and PTA motherhood continue to oppress women, especially single mothers”

(1997a, p. 135). Taking what would ordinarily be a private commemoration—
sharing stories of home with her family—and making it public turns this story
of home into a political claim. Young is suggesting that her story is neither
idiosyncratic, nor universal. She tells this story in the hopes that it will make
her abstract argument about the value of home concrete for her readers; but
she never entertains the thought that it will do so because her experience is
somehow typical of the experience of all women. Nor is her hope that we will
somehow come to feel particular concern for the individuals mentioned in her
story; she does not tell this story to arouse our compassion. Instead, she hopes
with this interlude to expose the “disciplinary standards of orderly housework
and PTA motherhood.” She tells her personal story here, then, in order to help
her readers to see these disciplinary standards at work. Yet we could only see
disciplinary standards for what they are if we are able to see in Young’s story
something more than simply a unique personal narrative. The purpose of tell-
ing the story, then, is neither to convey the particulars of her personal life, nor
to present her experiences as representative. Rather, it is to remind us—we
who have no personal memory of Young’s history of home—of the real, lived
experiences of our own homes. In reading her story, we might be reminded
of our own stories; or maybe we are struck by the dissimilarities between her
home and ours. And in thinking of our own stories, we perhaps may start to
see with her that our homes are similarly structured by the same disciplinary
standards.
As I argue in the next section, I believe she tells her personal stories
because she hopes that her story will move others. Her story moves us to think
of our stories—which will be different to be sure, but which may nonetheless
resonate with parts of her story and reveal these disciplinary standards at work
in our lives. She hopes then that our return to commemorate our own home
histories will motivate us to move from reflecting on our own personal experi-
ence to seeing structures that constrain and enable us differently, which in turn
calls on us to engage in collective political action.

Politics, Not Autobiography

When Young invokes personal experience—whether in these deeply personal

stories or in more general terms (such as when she describes her disorienta-
tion as her body changed during pregnancy (1990b, p. 164)—she does not
claim that her experiences of female embodiment or the constraints of femi-
ninity are in any way authentic experiences of femaleness and femininity. She
is always very careful to qualify any general claims she makes about female
body experience, for example, by pointing out that they may be rather lim-
ited in validity. In the cases I have just examined where she tells her personal
 resonance and dissonance 63

narratives, Young makes no claim that her experiences are typical, or somehow
have validity for anyone beyond herself at all. She just presents them as deeply
particular experiences.
Where Young has stopped to reflect explicitly on her phenomenological
method, she has given accounts in two different vocabularies of what she is
trying to accomplish. In On Female Body Experience, she explains that “One
of [the] purposes [of the essays in the book] is simply expressive: to give
words to meanings often unspoken, in ways that I hope evoke recognition
and even a little bit of pleasure” (2005a, p. 3).6 This language of recogni-
tion is repeated in “Menstrual mediations,” the newest essay included in
the book (p. 99). But in the earlier collection Throwing Like a Girl (1990b),
Young describes the goal of talking about experience in musical terms that
I believe are more apt. There she talks in terms of her writing resonating,
striking a chord, hitting a key with others. A characteristic passage that
captures the nature of the kind of claims she makes about experience is in
the essay “Women recovering our clothes.” There she argues that there are
“three pleasures we take in clothes: touch, bonding, and fantasy” (1990b, p.
182). But who is this “we”?
When I speak, then, for whom do I speak? For myself, of course.
But this is politics, not autobiography, and I speak from my own
experience, which I claim resonates with that of other women. My
own experience is particular and limited, and it is possible that it
most resonates among white, middle-class, heterosexual professional
women in late capitalist society. At least I can claim to speak only
for the experience of women like me. I believe that some of the
experience I express resonates with that of other women, but that is
for them to say. The differences among women do not circumscribe
us within exclusive categories, but the only way we can know our
similarities and differences is by each of us expressing our particular
experience. I offer, then, this expression of women’s pleasure in
clothes. (p. 182)
There are at least two ways we might read this passage. First, we might under-
stand her to be making a qualified epistemological argument about experience.
Perhaps she cannot claim to know how all women experience their clothes, but
she can make the more limited claim to know how all “white, middle-class,
heterosexual professional women in late capitalist society” experience their
clothes. As such, her claims about experience would not challenge the funda-
mental assumption that experience gives us access to knowledge. Her move to
particularize the knowledge claims she can authoritatively make on the basis

6 At the end of the Introduction, Young hopes that her essays “communicate with the thoughts and feel-
ings of readers” (p. 11). This is closer to the language of resonance, but still lacks its physical connotations.
64 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

of her own experience would then mirror the kind of move made by María
Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman in “Have we got a theory for you!” (1983):
instead of making imperialist claims about “women,” we can claim a more
limited validity for our claims by simply circumscribing the audience to which
they apply.
However, given Young’s vociferous critique of the use of experience to
claim authentic knowledge in the introduction to the volume containing this
essay, I find this reading implausible. Drawing on postmodern critiques of
the traditional subject of philosophy—who is figured as a self-transparent and
authentic source of knowledge—Young problematizes our ability to derive
knowledge directly from experience: “No experience or reality is unmediated
by language or symbols” (1990b, p. 13). Consequently, “Talk about experience
expresses subjectivity, describes the feelings, motives, and reactions of sub-
jects as they affect and are affected by the context in which they are situated”
(p. 13). When we share our experiences with one another, each of us does
not have access to any particular truth. We share our experiences with one
another, then, in order to see through that exchange whether we can identify
the context and the structures that shape our lives in related (although prob-
ably different) ways. Experience does not reveal truth; rather, the telling of
experience is a part of the process of revealing the structures that constrain
and constitute us as people who have certain experiences.7 This is what, in
her democratic theory, she calls the production of “social knowledge” (see
2000, p. 76).
This process of revealing the structures that shape our different expe-
riences of the world is political. While I believe that Young thinks there
is a right and a wrong answer about what these structures are, the fact of
the matter is we have no access to unmediated, authoritative, and objec-
tive knowledge of these structures. We only have access to them through
our mediated experience. Consequently, claims about their existence have
the features of political rather than epistemological claims. In the passage
cited above, Young claims that her comments about women’s experience of
clothes are valid for a certain group of women who are similarly structured
(being white, middle-class, heterosexual professional women in late capital-
ist society). Whether it has any broader relevance is “up for [other women]
to say.” Her claim has no independent validity. The test of the validity of
the claim is whether it resonates with others, whether they see it as valid in
their own experience (see 1990b, p. 16). Our knowledge of social structures
is not absolute, but is instead a function of consciousness-raising efforts to
get others to reflect on their own experiences and test the validity of claims
made about these structures.

7 This idea of structure receives its most mature formulation in her work in the essay “Gender as seriality”
(1997a, Ch. 1).
 resonance and dissonance 65

Resonance

Now I want to offer an argument in favor of the language of resonance to

describe what Young aims to accomplish with her stories of experience and her
theoretical offerings, and against the language of recognition that she used in
later essays included in On Female Body Experience (2005a). My concern here
is that her use of the language of recognition is likely to produce misreadings
of the role of experience in her work.8 The word recognition evokes cognition,
a kind thinking that need not be connected to any form of embodiment.9 Of
course, Young uses this language in the context of a phenomenological tradi-
tion that rethinks cognition as always already embodied (see, e.g., Kruks 2001,
pp. 159ff ). However, for readers unfamiliar with this tradition, this language
risks encouraging us to fall back into precisely the philosophical habits of
abstraction that Young’s body of work demands that we reject.
By contrast, the language of resonance is embodied. What is resonance?
It is literally resounding, the repetition of sound. One dictionary definition of
the word, however, draws attention to the embodiedness of this repetition: it
defines resonance as the “sympathetic vibration of air in certain cavities and
bony structures.”10 When a sound resonates in us, it triggers energy or move-
ment or vibration within our lived bodies.
Similarly, when I read Young’s descriptions of female body experience,
they trigger something in me: memories of my own experiences, experiences of
my female friends, related experiences of my male friends, stories I have read,
theoretical analyses I have come across, something in the news last week—the
movement here is not always one that can be described as recognition (“that’s
it!”), but is often one of thinking of my different experiences and the ways in
which my lived body does not quite map onto the ones that she describes. As
she indicates in the passage I quoted above, she is interested in provoking these
experiences of disjuncture as well as ones of recognition: this broader set of
responses, of fertile and creative thinking born from reading her accounts of
embodied experience, is better captured by the idea of resonance.

8 In a different context, Young herself notes the ambiguities of the language of recognition (2006, p. 95).
In this essay, however, she is critical specifically of the use of this language to characterize certain kinds of claims
about justice, e.g., that misrecognition or a failure of recognition is a form of injustice, or that justice requires
recognizing certain forms of group difference. In place of a language of recognition to describe these kinds of
harms, she recommends using the language instead of normalization. Her rejection of the language of recogni-
tion in this particular context should not be understood as a sign that she would reject the language of recognition
in all contexts.
9 Patchen Markell (2003, pp. 39–41) delineates two different senses of recognition: one he calls “cogni-
tive” and the other “constructive.” Both of these, he suggests, ultimately express an aspiration to sovereignty that
Markell finds troubling (and I think Young would, too). I would add that both of these senses of recognition are
not necessarily connected to embodiment, and so both risk encouraging abstraction.
10 Cf. www.dictionary.com.
66 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

However, the languages of recognition and resonance both seem to point

to an authentic origin—an original thought that is recognized, an original
sound that is resounded. This notion of the origin is at odds with Young’s own
postmodern commitments. Perhaps, then, we might say that both languages
are equally problematic to describe the phenomena she is after.
Yet we could also say that the idea of an original sound does capture some-
thing important in her work. There is a sense in which the point of sharing
experiences is to locate some common sound resonating in each of us. The
same sound waves will act differently in different contexts. A voice may echo
down an empty hallway, but will be dampened if that hallway is carpeted. Simi-
larly, the same structure—say a disciplinary standard of orderly housework—
will differently resonate in the lives of women of different classes, races, ages,
and nations. One of the political goals of sharing experience for Young is—we
could say—to triangulate: to locate in the vibrations in our different lives what
the sound is that we all hear. She writes, “I think of the description of experi-
ences as being like musical notation; it is the ‘same’ for each instance of its
performance. But the music exists only in the particulars, and the particular
performances vary in innumerable ways—in tempo, timbre, rhythm, phrasing,
dynamics” (1990b, p. 16). We work to characterize the structures that affect our
lives by thinking through how they reverberate in different circumstances.
Furthermore, even if it somewhat problematically implies an authentic
origin, I believe that the language of resonance better attunes us to attend to
dissonance, and so anticipates the fact of our plurality. What we cannot rec-
ognize we may miss entirely. But what does not resonate with us can gener-
ate dissonance. Dissonance, while often irritating, is hard to ignore altogether.
This musical language resonates with an observation Young makes in Justice
and the Politics of Difference: “The sense of justice arises not from looking, but
as Jean-Francois Lyotard says, from listening” (1990a, p. 4). In that book, she
calls on philosophers to listen in particular to the varied claims and voices—
and with Inclusion and Democracy (2000), ways of expressing meaning—of the
new social movements of the twentieth century. We might add that Young also
calls on us to listen to ourselves, to what our bodies tell us about the structures
that constrain us and about the overlooked sources of pleasures our embodi-
ment offers. When we listen to others, we hear commonalities and differences.
Listening is an activity that in its structure (if not always in its practice) main-
tains plurality, rather than collapsing it by assimilating other voices to my own.
Listening is not only about listening for resonance, but importantly for disso-
nances as well.
There is one final advantage of this language of resonance. When a sound
resonates, it generates vibrations, movement, and energy. This, too, is the goal
of recounting personal experience. When stories resonate with us, they gener-
ate movement in a localized way: They get us to reflect on our own stories.
Yet ideally these stories also move us in another way. When we come to see
 resonance and dissonance 67

through our sharing of experience the structures that constrain and enable us,
this moves us to engage in collective action. Young’s personal stories are, there-
fore, attempts at political persuasion: is it like this at all for you, too? Then let us
work together to fix the injustices and to celebrate the overlooked values we dis-
cover when we share our different, idiosyncratic experiences with one another.
Her hope goes beyond recognition: that we see something of ourselves in her
stories. She wants us to act.
Young’s personal stories are uncomfortable to read, I think, because they
make a persistent, inexorable demand upon us. If they resonate at all, they call
upon us to do more than feminist theory or democratic theory. They demand
that we engage in the world and act politically to change it for the better. That
call is one that many of us heard from her lived example of engaged scholar-
ship and activism. She set a very high bar for all of us. Let us hope that we can
do her justice.
This page intentionally left blank
 6
4

Throwing Like a Girl, Dancing Like

a Feminist Philosopher

Susan Leigh Foster

This chapter comments on the visionary insights articulated in Iris Marion

Young’s “Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body com-
portment, motility, and spatiality,” initially published in 1980.1 I argue that
Young’s theorization of a feminine physicality broke radical new ground in the
discipline of philosophy, and it also provided a strong foundation for emerging
studies in performance and corporeality. In that essay, Young offers an innova-
tive approach to the analysis of bodily motion, one that integrates movement
patterns with psychological orientations and social roles. Building on the work
of Simone de Beauvoir, she also proposes to consider the feminine as a set of
“structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman
in a particular society” (Young 1990b, p. 141). It was Young’s unique and per-
ceptive insight to consider movement patterns as part of those structures and
conditions that define the feminine.
In “Throwing like a girl” Young argues that feminine experience, marked
by a fundamental contradiction between subjectivity and being a mere object,
can be observed in woman’s distinctive engagement with spatiality. Composed
of both an apprehension of and response to space, this spatial awareness per-
meates female daily life, quotidian actions and cognitive calculations alike.
Young identifies three principal features of this engagement with space: first,
an ambiguous transcendence evidenced in the lack of forthrightness in wom-
en’s gait and stride, and in a smallness in extending toward the limits of their
reach; second, an inhibited intentionality, exemplified in a characteristic failure
to commit the whole body to a particular task; and third, a discontinuous unity
in which the feminine subject is unable to coordinate motions from different

1 Young’s essay was reprinted in 1990. All quotations are taken from this latter publication.
70 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

parts of the body toward a single intended action. In identifying these features
of spatial engagement, Young implements criteria of size—the length of the
stride—as well as of effort—the concentrated energy mobilized to execute a
task. And she distinguishes between the whole body’s interactivity with its sur-
roundings and the organization within the body of its various parts.
Citing Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is “the body in its orientation toward
and action upon and within its surroundings that constitutes the initial mean-
ing-giving act,” (p. 147) Young asserts that women are not given access to the
kind of an unambiguously purposeful sense of themselves in the world that
Merleau-Ponty claims as a universal given. Instead, it is the masculine subject
that actualizes as a fully confident and willful being who experiences the body
as a medium for the enactment or realization of aims, whereas the feminine
subject experiences the body as a “fragile encumbrance” (p. 147). Women,
she asserts, constantly vacillate between experiencing a primordial oneness
with the body and a sense of distance from the body, prompted by the feeling
that the body and its motions are “not entirely under her control” (p. 150). Fur-
thermore, they experience themselves as embedded within a system of spatial
coordinates that does not originate in their own intentionality.
According to Young, this “inhibited, confined, positioned and objectified”
sense of female identity is the direct outcome of sexist oppression in contem-
porary society. Such an identity is produced by girls’ sedentary play, the assimi-
lation of a feminine style of comportment in walking, standing, sitting, and
gesturing, and in the generalized timidity inculcated by being told not to get
dirty, not to get hurt, not to go too far from home, etc. It is equally the product
of society’s obsessive emphasis on female appearance, in which women learn
to mold, groom, and decorate their bodies in conformance with a patriarchal
standard of beauty.
In the same way that she de-centers Merleau-Ponty’s claims for a singular
relationship between body and consciousness, Young also insists on the histor-
ical specificity of the patriarchal authority that pressures women’s physicality.
She further grounds her observations in her own bodily experience, relating
two anecdotes about her own tentativeness in crossing a stream and her juve-
nile efforts to learn a feminine walk. These reflexive comments on her own
situatedness within the contemporary first-world patriarchy infuse her inquiry
with modest particularity and also a lively sense of curiosity about one’s own
life in relation to the world.

Locating “Throwing”

Young’s essay, from this early twenty-first century perspective, can now be
located in relation to a twentieth century lineage of studies in corporeality
prompted, in part, by sociological interrogations of the body in society, and in
 throwing like a girl 71

part, by phenomenological accounts of body. Where scholars such as Marcel

Mauss (1973) in his famous essay “Techniques of the Body” or Michel Fou-
cault’s study of the penal system (1977), Discipline and Punish, represent the
former strand of inquiry, studies of perception, such as those of Merleau-Ponty
represent the latter. Typically, these fields of inquiry are seen in opposition to
one another, yet Young’s visionary approach provides a model for synthesizing
these two distinctive forms of inquiry.2 In her analysis, she builds out from the
individual’s perceptual experience, while at the same time observing general
trends in socialization. By focusing on the body’s movement repertoires as a
kind of interface between perception and action, she is able to integrate the
external and internal structures through which identity is constructed.
Looking more specifically at the decades just prior to the essay’s publica-
tion, the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 70s gave new momentum
to studies of the body as did the emerging field of nonverbal communication.
Feminist scholarship instigated a profound new interest in the body, yet the
focus of most publications was to unearth repressed or neglected aspects of
female anatomy and sexuality, to celebrate women’s unique biological capaci-
ties, and to claim the rights to speak about the body publicly and without shame.
Feminist inquiries focused on women’s experience as a sexual and procreative
being, with much research interrogating the body’s status in intercourse, preg-
nancy, birth, motherhood, etc. The rest of woman’s repertoire of physical behav-
iors and movements received very little attention. Young was among the first to
investigate movement as one of the specific propensities of female physicality.
During these same years in the allied fields of psychology and sociol-
ogy, nonverbal communication studies identified various repertoires of ges-
ture and action as means for communicating. Typically, these repertories of
behavior were construed as manifestations of subliminal or unconscious needs
and desires. Researchers seldom conceptualized these repertoires as gender-
specific or as manifesting a style of execution that was allied with a particu-
lar gender. Furthermore, the body’s movement, always conceptualized as the
effect or execution of the psyche’s will, was never accorded agency. It remained
a mute and dumb thing, capable only of exhibiting the results of a person’s
thoughts or feelings.
In contrast to nonverbal communication studies, Young refrains from
assigning movement a purely mechanical function. Nor does she invoke the
binary that typically aligns speech with conscious, cognitive experience and
movement with the unconscious, the libidinal, or the emotional. She does not
enter into debates as to the conscious or unconscious valence of these move-
ment vocabularies. Instead, she recognizes them as simply a part of the social-
ization process.

2 Young expands on the complementarity between phenomenological and discursive analytic approaches
such as those of Foucault and Bourdieu in On Female Body Experience, pp. 7–9.
72 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

Catching “Throwing”

Focusing on the construction of gender, Young anticipates the work of three more
recent and influential philosophers concerned with corporeality, Sandra Bartky,
Susan Bordo, and Judith Butler. Writing a decade after Young’s essay, all three
scholars pursue the hypothesis that gender is constructed by sets of behaviors
which women assimilate and for which they are responsible. Yet none of them
focuses on movement repertoires with the analytic depth that Young does.
In Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, Sandra
Bartky (1990b) provides an impressive overview of society’s diverse mandates
for realizing proper femininity, connecting ways of moving to the grooming
and appearance of the body specified in a variety of social settings. She locates
these practices of femininity in the sinews of the social, arguing persuasively
that it is the system itself—the fashion and beauty industries, physical educa-
tion, the media, popular culture, and all those who participate in them—that
maintains and perpetuates the specifications of the feminine. In this regard
she strengthens Young’s assertion that socialization includes the assimilation
of movement practices. She does not, however, offer any categories for the
observation and analysis of movement.
Examining the pressures on women’s bodies to perform slim vitality, Susan
Bordo (1993) surveys the prevalence of anorexia and bulimia, especially in young
women. By analyzing advertising, merchandizing, and consumerist practices
within popular culture, Bordo elucidates the simultaneous pressures on the
female body to add and subtract, dramatically, from its physicality. She associates
these contradictory impulses of binging and abstinence with the anxieties per-
meating late capitalism. Bordo argues persuasively that it is women’s bodies that
bear the brunt of late capitalist inequities, within contemporary U.S. society and
more globally. Like Young, Bordo connects psychological pressures to achieve a
certain physical appearance with large-scale social pressures to perform as a good
consumer. Unlike Young, she looks to the shape of the body, its ideal size and
look, and at the set of behaviors that women learn in order to produce that size and
shape. Young, in contrast, envisions movement as inherently significant in and of
itself. It does not merely produce a discursive effect, but is itself a discourse.
Judith Butler (1990) establishes a persuasive case for gender as a set of
reiterative behaviors, whose repetition functions to create discourse. The gen-
dering of the subject occurs, she argues, through the performative acts that
signify maleness and femaleness. Butler, however, focuses almost exclusively
on speech and the status of the speaker in relation to utterances. She explores
only minimally the potential for movement to function as performative utter-
ance. Only in the case of drag, where gender is fabricated from the borrowed
vocabularies of the other sex, is movement examined as significant. And here it
functions tacitly, as a potential site of resistance to the normative.
 throwing like a girl 73

Young, in contrast, looks at daily, pedestrian motifs as the locus of gender

construction. These ordinary, recurring patterns, without specialized vocabu-
laries or uses, could conceivably be invoked for purposes of resistance, a claim
made by Michel de Certeau (1980, 1984) the same year that Young published
her essay. Young’s concern, however, is first to establish awareness of how
these patterns summon women into, and at the same time, provide the sense
of forging a gendered identity that serves the patriarchy. Like Foucault, she
finds it necessary to excavate the hegemonic structurings of power before theo-
rizing resistance to them.
Reflecting back on her essay twenty years later, Young (1998) takes issue
with the way that she associated women with lack or absence of skills. By invok-
ing de Beauvoir’s distinction between immanence and transcendence, Young
casts the feminine into a subordinate relationship with the masculine, one
that is defined only by its negation of the transcendent nature of male iden-
tity. Indeed, Young’s characterization of the feminine as “ambiguous,” “inhib-
ited,” and “discontinuous” depends upon the oppositional and “positive”
categories of straightforward, forthright, and integrated. Young verges on dis-
covering adjectival referents for feminine movement that do not negate the mas-
culine when she discusses psychological studies that explore spatial perception.
In summarizing these studies, she describes feminine perception as marked by a
tendency “to regard figures as embedded within and fixed by their surroundings”
(Young 1990b, p. 153). This apprehension of the relationality between self and
world casts feminine experience as distinct from masculine experience without
invoking positive–negative valence. By suggesting that her own observations might
be paired with these investigations to further elucidate the feminine, Young dem-
onstrates the hypothetical status of her own categories of analysis. She is searching
for ways to analyze movement, rather than asserting standardized or universal
categories within which all movements must be located. As she herself observes,
such an analysis “ . . . brings intelligibility and significance to certain observable and
rather ordinary ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves
and move differently from the ways that men do” (Young 1990b, p. 143).

Choreographing “Throwing”

For the emerging field of dance studies, it is the constructed and historically
specific status of Young’s claims about movement that is so theoretically per-
tinent. As early as the 1930s, movement analyst Rudolph von Laban identi-
fied primary features of movement, its directionality, speed, tensility, and
flow through which any and all motions could be analyzed and categorized
(Bartenieff 1980, pp. 58–59, 92–93). For Laban these features—its uni- or
multi-focused direction, its quick or slow speed, its light or bound tensility, and
its restrained or free flow—constituted universal attributes, self-evident in all
74 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

motion. Laban further asserted that maleness and femaleness could be identi-
fied according to their distinctive propensities to move according to these fea-
tures. Male movement for Laban is inherently uni-focused, quick, bound, and
restrained, whereas female movement is multi-focused, slow, light, and free.
Subsequent scholarship in dance studies has taken issue with Laban’s uni-
versalist claims, arguing that his framework exhibits a fundamentally Western
and modernist orientation toward movement. His assertions that masculine
and feminine attributes are tied to deep psychic structures of mind have been
called into question, yet his system of analyzing movement continues to be
implemented, often as a universal rubric within which all movements can be
analyzed and compared. A team of computer scientists and dance anthropolo-
gists, Golshani, Vissicaro, and Park (2004), is currently working to collate all
the world’s dances using criteria inspired by Laban to analyze motion capture
documentation of various performances. Where Young looks at the extent of
reach given a specific body’s capacity to extend itself, they are measuring the
height of the arm according to the degree of angle from the torso. Where Young
is concerned to assess how any given body organizes its movement smoothly
and coherently or with breaks and ruptures, they are comparing all bodies
according to standardized geometric shapes and forms.
Although Young may not have anticipated the intervention that her essay
would make in dance studies, her insistence on the historically constructed
circumstances of feminine movement contributes a crucial argument to schol-
arship that attempts to resist the “universal dance” and the universals in dance.
Furthermore, her willingness to report what she sees using vocabulary that
is available to her, rather than any specialized terminology, provides a crucial
counter-methodology to systematic efforts to establish a single framework to
account for all movement. And finally, although her analysis is specific to gen-
der and does not go so far as to identify other markers of social constituency
such as white, or middle-class, or heterosexual, her method does not preclude
such analysis. Indeed, much dance scholarship has gone on to analyze dance’s
significance along just these lines.3

Reading a Feminist Choreographer’s Dance

as a Feminist Philosopher Might

In her essay from 1998 reflecting back on “Throwing,” Young comments on

the massive changes in social behaviors that distinguish her generation from
that of her daughter. Able to wear jeans and take full advantage of athletic

3 See, for example, Albright (1997), Burt (1995 and 1998), Castaldi (2006), Chatterjea (2004), Daly
(1994), De Frantz (2001 and 2006), Desmond (1997), Foster (1998 and 2002), Franko (2002), Gere (2004),
Gottschild (1996 and 2005), Graff (1997), Jackson (2002), Manning (1993 and 2004), Martin (1998), Novack
(1990), O’Shea (2007), and Tomko (1999).
 throwing like a girl 75

opportunities, Young’s daughter and “her friends move and carry themselves
with more openness, more reach, more active confidence,” than many of
Young’s cohort (1998, p. 286). Yet, Young finds that her essay remains perti-
nent to a significant number of undergraduate readers. How might the femi-
nine have transformed so as to allow more “openness” yet still exercise the
oppressive influence that would make a new generation of feminists enthusi-
astic about Young’s critique? For one answer to this question, I turn not to the
everyday pedestrian events for signs of gender’s construction that Young ana-
lyzed, but to a highly staged event, Yippee!!!, a dance concert by British feminist
choreographer Lea Anderson. Choreographed in 2006, this dance provides a
provocative and deeply insightful critique of the status of the feminine today.4
In reading Anderson’s dance, I implement the kinds of analytic perspectives
that Young developed in her original essay.
The dancers traipse in, exuding a sultry glamour. Their arms poke at space
with such ennui. They stare at the audience with a practiced, bored blankness.
Striking a statuesque pose, they slouch along in parade, their long mink stoles
revealing a glimpse of a shoulder here, of a lower back there. Of course, any
frisson that we receive from such a glimpse is dripping with irony, since all
the bodies, male and female, are similarly naked—covered only with a translu-
cent unitard that holds delicately in place massive quantities of fake pubic and
underarm hair. They glide into ballroom couple poses and swirl gently around
the stage. As they exit, a solo male dancer bends coyly to display his naked
backside. Gingerly groping his way across the floor, his buttocks and thighs
become abstract shapes of sculptural interest, disassociated from any sexual
connotations. Other dancers pull on fur stockings and saunter in a circle. A
more lively group wiggles their way onstage in grid formation, their complex
rhythmic gyrations pulsing with fake euphoria.
By the time the dancers return with their arms thrust through the sleeves
of little blue Shirley Temple dresses, the genre of this masquerade becomes
identifiable: each scene is a takeoff on filmed production numbers from Broad-
way-style entertainments. The dancers execute versions of the original choruses
and follow their formations onstage, yet they break radically with the gender
codes of those early twentieth century productions. Male and female bodies,
sometimes indistinguishable with their slicked back hair and similarly muscled
physiques, both inhabit the same roles. In scenes where male and female danc-
ers would typically partner one another, men dance with men, women with
women, and women with men. In scenes where the traditional chorus line con-
sisted of all female dancers, both male and female dancers engage equally in

4 Anderson is an internationally recognized British choreographer who has achieved renown, in part,
through her salient analyses of gender. Maintaining two companies, the all-female Chomondeleys and the all-
male Featherstonhaughs, Anderson has launched a number of humorous and insightful critiques on traditional
gender roles in society and in dance. For a good overview of her earlier work, see Dodds (2001) and Briginshaw
(1995–96). And for a lucid analysis of her choreographic strategies, see Hargreaves (2002).
76 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

the same feminine repertoires: broad smiles, mincing steps, gracious displays
of the body, and daintily bound gestures.
The performance of such strongly gendered actions by both male and
female bodies offers up a powerful representation of the feminine as a gen-
dered construct. Anderson deepens this interrogation of the feminine through
her choreographic strategy of faithfully copying sections from film or photo-
graphs. Even though the dancers precisely execute eighty-year old choreogra-
phy, they lack the accoutrements of the filmic scene that would ensure their
reception as realistic actors. Either the movement sequences are not used in
their entirety and thereby disrupt with their glaring beginnings and endings.
Or they lack the setting that would give them narrative coherence. Or they are
cobbled together in an absurd sequence. Or they are repeated excessively such
that their staging of exaggerated happiness becomes a most uncomfortable
joke. All these choreographic manipulations deconstruct the feminine. They
take femininity’s parts apart.
In all the obsessive repetition that overflows from the performance, what
the dancers repeat most is the wiggle. They wiggle as their feet move from side
to side in parallel. They wiggle as they skip. They wiggle as they shrug away any
intimation of anxiety. Their wiggling is not quite naughty, not at all frenetic.
Instead, the body pulls back from completely stretching one way and then the
other. As a result, the figures look apathetic, even as they perform cheerfulness.
Both the quality of the wiggle and the way it directs motion to one side and
then the other signify a profound ambiguity. As in Young’s initial observations
about female comportment, these dancers can’t decide which way to go, and
even if they were to decide, so what?
From the beginning, the performance makes a convincing case for its arti-
fice. The main action takes place within a set of lights on movable poles that the
dancers rearrange for different sections of the piece. Outside the lights dancers
meander among racks of costumes, changing clothes, warming up, and watch-
ing the action. At one point, a seeming intermission, the dancers break to drink
deeply from bottles of water stored in the open wings. At another, a dancer’s
fake dentures, enforcing his grotesque smile, pop out, and he fumbles franti-
cally to reinsert them. Later, another dancer pauses to shake rocks out of her
shoe. Throughout, dancers stand in full view awaiting their entrances to the
“performance” inside the lights.
As they stand ready to make their entrances, each dancer’s body musters
all the concentration necessary to make the transition from “off” stage to “on,”
all the necessary energy that normally would explode with the vitality of “danc-
ing.” Yet instead, their onstage presence hails the viewer with an unbearable
lack of zeal. So soft and subdued, so precisely directed yet fully lackluster, each
gesture underscores its own failure to show the audience vigor, excitement, the
sheer joy and gusto of engaging with physicality. The driving rhythms of the
live band upstage emphasize even further this restrictedness of motion.
 throwing like a girl 77

How to describe this peculiar quality of restraint? Normally, restrained

movement signifies an internal struggle in which opposing motivations vie for
control over bodily expression. Restrained motion is full of tension and drama
as the body seems to proclaim simultaneously, “I will,” and “I won’t.” The
restraint evident in this performance does not suggest a willful subject. It is,
to use Young’s term, inhibited. These rubbery, resilient wigglers never extend
themselves fully either toward effortful exertion or lackadaisical relaxation. In
part, this inhibited exertion into space reproduces the qualities of effort evident
in the production numbers that Anderson has copied. Without the full cos-
tumes or bubbly music of the original performances, however, and in contrast
to the extreme exertion so prevalent on the concert stage today, these dancers
purvey a remarkably fettered physicality.
Anderson’s choreographic process of copying and then splicing together
movement sequences from other sources also produces Young’s third prin-
ciple of feminine movement—discontinuous unity. Because of the process of
copying the action, the dancers appear to wear the movement. Motions do not
originate in the body’s interiority, but instead get placed on the body’s surface.
The bodies execute the next action, as non-sequitur as it might be, without any
organic flow, any sense of movement’s purposefulness.
The second half of the performance turns darker. The happy jumping
becomes obsessive, meaningless—a kind of consumer frenzy on display. Now
wearing black unitards with silver tap shoes, the dancers’ formations become
more austere. A “Ballet Masteress” enters wearing a dark fur coat and using a
prosthetic foot as a cane. He rehearses the corps, adjusting posture, reposition-
ing the dancers, counting and drilling them, then pronouncing their execution
“nice.” Anderson’s critique of Tiller girls or Rockettes-type repetitive movement
grinds forward, implementing the tyranny of 8-count phrase. Even a pregnant
woman exercises: right, left, right, left, only a few more reps . . . keep going, you
can do it. This nightmarish alternation between emphatic carefreeness and
statuesque strutting summons up the underbelly of the beauty industry. Yes!
women have more access to athletic pursuits in this culture of nip and tuck,
where there is no gain without pain, and every repetition potentially enhances
one’s image. Yes! we can have our gain; it only takes a little pain.
Alternating between grid formations and the parade, the dancers never
touch one another. Only one couple, adorned with red velvet vaginas over their
noses and mouths, ever sustains physical contact. They perform failed versions
of gags, then reappear dancing to the sounds of a tap dance, making reference
to an African-American duo such as the Nicholas Brothers on film. Cavorting,
buffooning, they counterpoint the vacant monumentality of the larger produc-
tion numbers.
As if commenting on the checked-out status of the partying crowd, a single
dancer enters with a large black hole hung around her neck. She stares for-
lornly at the audience and the whole production stills for a minute or more.
78 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

Her bleak absence of a center comments on the mindless writhing throughout

the piece. In the next scene the hole shape returns, but this time held by two
dancers who use it to frame a third. They present a bizarre theatre of rhetorical
gestures as the urgent hand motions poke through the disc and its fun-house
mirror opening distorts facial expressions. The dancer behind the disc urgently
beckons to the audience then wrings his hands, as if the codes of interiority
themselves are being eviscerated.
For the finale, the dancers return to the ballroom, partnering up with par-
tial tuxedos and strap-on feather boas in a last parade. Their fanciful strutting
culminates in a single decorative tableau where all the dancers artfully drape
their bodies across the front of the stage. Yet this final image produces no
climax, no ta-da. As if to reassert, once again, the irony of the dance’s title, the
ending is as lame as the femininity which it celebrates is oppressive.
Yippee!—we can be any gender we want. Yippee!—it’s so much fun to play
with the codes. But the trope of the feminine, now uploaded into a sci-fi future
where hybrid creatures with prosthetic smiles roam across the stage, contin-
ues to be celebrated. Perpetuating itself on and through billboards, television
commercials, and each season’s fashions, this trope of the feminine, Anderson
seems to be claiming, is just as ambiguous, inhibited, and discontinuous as
anything Young ever observed. Yippee!—one episode of glamour after another,
each offering the consumer of gender construction a slightly different flavor of
the feminine.
Anderson’s pungent and incisive critique of the feminine in contemporary
society, like Young’s earlier analysis, integrates psychological and sociologi-
cal formations within the dancing body. Together, Young’s visionary insights
into movement and Anderson’s choreographic argument allow us to see how
gender is a performance, but one that these bodies are required and des-
tined to execute. Despite the many achievements of the Women’s Movement
since Young’s essay, Anderson shows how women’s experience of bodiliness
remains ambivalent in a male dominated world. Like the globally circulating
flow of capital, feminine corporeality, equally pervasive through commodities
and mediatized images, appears glamorous even as it pins the bodies who par-
ticipate in it within the constrained, dislocated ambivalence of having to throw
like a girl.
 7
4

Iris Marion Young: Between

Phenomenology and
Structural Injustice

Bonnie Mann

Opening

A few months before her death, I had the honor of hosting a visit by Iris
Marion Young to the University of Oregon. Young was focused, luminous,
and generous presenting two papers on the topic of structural injustice; and
annoyed by our department’s interest in her phenomenological work on
embodiment. I, in turn, was somewhat impatient with her annoyance. Many
of us considered her to have done more in her essays on female body experi-
ence than any other philosopher since Beauvoir to force open the question of
female embodiment.
Young was clearly more concerned with how her phenomenological work
might have contributed to a tendency that closed certain feminist questions.
There had been a narrowing of feminist interest, she worried, to “issues of
experience, identity, and subjectivity” (2005a, p. 19), to the exclusion of “theo-
rizing social structures and their implications for the freedom and well-being
of persons” (p. 19). Articulating her criticism through an analysis of the rejec-
tion of the notion of “gender” in favor of the “lived body” of phenomenology
(particularly in reference to Moi 1999), Young concluded that the concept of
gender does work that the lived body cannot “as a tool for theorizing structures
more than subjects” (p. 22).
Young was interested in “structures” in the big sense, in other words, in
the “large-scale systemic outcomes of the operations of many institutions and
practices which . . . constrain some people in specific ways at the same time that
they enable others” (2005a, p. 20). If gender is a way of describing something
important about these structures, rather than about identity, then “what it
means to say that individual persons are ‘gendered’ is that we all find ourselves
80 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

passively grouped according to these structural relations, in ways too impersonal

to ground identity” (my emphasis, p. 22). Such structures precede subjects; they
“are historically given and condition the action and consciousness of individual
persons” (p. 25); we experience aspects of these structures “as facticity” (p. 25).
At the end of her essay Young suggests that what we may need is to work much
harder to make political sense out of the ways that gendered macrostructures
like “the division of labor, hierarchies of power and norms of sexuality” are
“lived through individual bodies” (p. 26).
Time did not afford me the opportunity to argue when Young was still
with us, to say “but that is, in fact, just what you did.” Neither did I get the
chance to point out that it is strange to say both that gendered macrostructures
are lived through individual bodies and that these structures are impersonal.
Surely such strangeness calls for an explanation; how is it that “impersonal”
structures are so personally animated in identities? To my mind Young’s own
work on embodiment had already come closer to making sense of such ques-
tions than that of any other contemporary feminist thinker. But Young clearly
wanted more than that. She recognized that such accounts too easily feed
a tendency toward subjectivism that fails to tell the truth about our shared
political world. This is the feminist version of the longstanding worry that
phenomenology too readily devolves into a subjectivist enterprise that can-
not give a meaningful account of politics and power, of the unfreedoms that
structure our lives in heinous ways. Further, the poststructuralists argue, it
can’t give a meaningful account of the advent of the subject in the context of
the social.
Yet to give account of these structures without attention to how we live
them is to risk an equally abstract objectivism that can’t grasp the lived mean-
ings of structural injustice. But Young’s worries aren’t to be dismissed. I think
she is correct in saying that feminist theory, having become fascinated with
the question of the subject, has too often lost its footing in the social/political
world. The problem, I will argue, has to do with how we locate gender, so while
I support Young’s reclamation of “gender” from the phenomenological trash
bin, and I agree that the term is politically meaningful, I will not agree with
her effort to simply move gender outside the subject and attach it to external,
impersonal structures of power.

The Sex/Gender Distinction

Before I say why, I think a brief review of the debate about the sex/gender
distinction is in order, since it has been the ground on which the tension and
movement between subjectivist and objectivist accounts have played them-
selves out for feminists. Initially, it was a way of distinguishing psychologi-
cal gender from biological sex, and allowed feminists to claim that the first
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 81

was socially constructed while the latter was brute nature. “Gender” opened
up the freedom of the woman-subject, and infused a movement with hope in
women’s collective agency.1
The sex/gender distinction soon came under attack from several differ-
ent perspectives. First, French materialist feminists (Wittig 1992; Guillamin
1995) argued that what we understand to be biological sex is itself the product
of social relations of dominance and subordination between men and women,
of the appropriation of women’s physical, emotional, and sexual labor by men.
Inheriting some of the foundational assumptions from this group, feminist
poststructuralist Judith Butler claimed that sex was a function of gender, since
“sex” is discursively constituted as an imaginary pre-social realm at the same
time that “gender” is discursively constituted as a political/social product.
Here sex collapses into gender (Butler 1990, pp. 3–49). Feminist phenom-
enologists decried the distinction for other reasons, claiming that the mind/
body split was reorganized and redeployed through the notions of sex and gen-
der, and that nature and culture are dichotomized in ways that do not match
our lived experience. The “body” that is operative in such formulations is the
same old mechanistic, causally implicated, object-body of the naïve sciences
that phenomenology had long since recognized as an abstraction from the life-
world (Moi 1999, pp. 3–120; Heinämaa 1996; Mann 2006, pp. 113–129). These
feminists have insisted that the “lived-body” is what feminists need in order to
overcome the entrenched tendencies toward the objectification of the body, as
well as the poststructuralist’s inability to affirm a biological world that is nei-
ther mere social product, nor brute mechanism.

Where Is Gender?

Young formulates the project of feminist theory as: to “identify certain

wrongful harms or injustices, locate and explain their sources in institu-
tions and social relations, and propose directions for institutionally oriented
action to change them” (2005a, p. 20). Young suggests that we understand
terms like “caste, class, race, age, ethnicity, and, of course, gender” as names
for “axes of structural inequality” rather than subjective identities (p. 21).
Gender inhabits institutions and relations of power that situate the subject
externally.
My worry is that Young favors “gender” as a term for naming external
relations of power which precede subjective action and consciousness (2005a,
p. 25) to such an extent that she risks turning the subject into an impersonal
product of social/political forces. Influenced by poststructuralist treatments of

1 For a more complex account, see Heinämaa 1996.

82 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

the subject, she comes close to exchanging an idealized subjectivism for an

abstract objectivism.2
But as soon as we insist that gender is also lived, we are pressed up against
the old question of how what is outside gets inside, which has long been a
preoccupation of all liberatory movements. In response to Young, I want to
try to find another way of talking about gender that affirms the inner life of
the subject, defending a notion of situated freedom, and at the same time rec-
ognizes gender as a primary structure of the subject’s entanglement with the
unfreedoms of institutionalized power. Certainly gender is a deeply personal
structure of individual subjectivity, and, more certainly, it structures the mate-
rial relations of a culture, but most significantly it is one dimension of the very
structure of the relation between them. It continually mediates the distance and
the relation between the one who says “I” and her culture. While sometimes
having the quality of inside or outside, gender is more primarily in between the
subject and the social world, not in the manner of a boundary, but in the man-
ner of an aesthetic relation. Gender keys the subject into the social world even
as it animates culture in and through the lived commitments and practices of
individual subjects.
When I call this relation aesthetic, I am trading on an old definition of the
word. This is a relation that is sensual and sensory, affective and perceptual,
before it is thoughtful or considered. It is lived through the body first. It plays
an active role in how we make sense of things, what we commit ourselves to,
and who we understand ourselves to be. There is already a turn to the aesthetic
in Young’s descriptions of female body experience, which disclose an imagi-
nary domain that is the place of the relation between our living of gender and
gender’s life in the broader social and political apparati. It is in this domain that
the sensualities and passions of gender, the perceptions and bodily modalities
of gender, are first animated.

Young’s Imaginary Domain

In Young’s first and still most well-known phenomenological essay on female

body experience, she sets out to describe a “feminine style” of “body comport-
ment and . . . movement” particularly in actions like throwing a ball, which
require a very specific bodily intentionality aimed at a particular object (2005a,
p. 28). Her claim is that “there is a particular style of bodily comportment that
is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of
the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world” (p. 31).

2 Elsewhere I have argued that poststructuralist accounts like those of the early Judith Butler amount to
a kind of idealism (Mann 2006). Young’s account is dissimilar, in that she stresses institutional and material
conditions and practices, but similar in that “gender” is abstracted from our living of it.
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 83

Following Merleau-Ponty, she notes that “it is the ordinary purposive ori-
entation of the body as a whole toward things in its environment that initially
defines the relation of the subject to its world” (2005a, p. 30), so her descriptive
account of these modalities will reveal something important about women’s
situation and lived experience as a whole (p. 30). What they reveal, Young
claims, is that women’s particular situation, understood in Beauvoir’s sense of
the term, is at the root of the modalities of body comportment and motility that
we recognize as feminine. The most significant characteristic of this situation
is that a cultural requirement mandates that women’s very self-identification
as women requires us to take our bodies to be subjects and objects at the very
same time, i.e., that “for feminine existence the body frequently is both object
and subject for itself at the same time and in reference to the same act” (p. 38),
or in other words “feminine bodily existence is self-referred” (p. 38).
My claim is that Young’s account discloses what we might call a femi-
nine imaginary domain. By using this term I am, of course, placing myself
in the context of a complicated history. In existentialist thought, the imagina-
tion is taken to be a capacity of an individual person, what makes it possible
for her to live in relation to what does not yet exist, and thus hope for a future
different than this present (Sartre 2004). The imaginary, in psychoanalytic
accounts, is the force of the image of an individual in the mirror, or in the eyes
of others, which make it possible for her to imagine herself as a singular, uni-
fied “I” (Lacan 1996). But the imaginary is also understood to be a structure of
sociality in a grander sense, what enables us to imagine ourselves in relation
to others whom we have never met, yet with whom we stand together in some
particular way; (Anderson 1983; Taylor 2004).3 I will suggest that we should
understand these various accounts to disclose distinct dimensions of the same
relation between individual subjective experience, intersubjective entangle-
ments, and broad social identities. In the end, I will suggest that the imaginary
is the net which binds bodily awareness and social meaning, and the imagina-
tion is the acrobat that climbs back and forth between them.
To enliven my discussion of Young’s account, I will use examples from
my own recent experience as the volunteer coach of my 8-year old daughter’s
beginning volleyball team. These examples are anecdotal, but I hope (the read-
ers will decide) exemplary in some modest way. I had four girls and two boys
on my team, none of whom had ever stepped onto a volleyball court before.
Some parents had imagined volleyball would be an “easier” sport for less ath-
letic kids, but the ways of using one’s hands and arms for passing, setting, hit-
ting, and serving are more precise and less familiar than those required to play
a passable game of soccer or basketball. I found myself thinking of Young’s
early essay in practice after practice, as I tried to teach my six third-graders their
volleyball basics.

3 I am already leaving out other feminist uses of the term, see Le Doeuff 1989; Cornell 1995.
84 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

At the heart of Young’s account are certain “modalities” of feminine bodily

comportment and motility which she identifies and describes. Feminine motil-
ity is to be recognized in an action that “simultaneously reaches toward a pro-
jected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily commitment to that
end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot’ ” (2005a, p. 36). This inhibited intentionality is
evident when a girl projects “a [physical] aim to be enacted but at the same time
stiffen[s] against the task” (p. 37).
In serving practice, most of my players consistently leaned back or jumped
backwards as they attempted to hit the ball forward over the net, so while their
arms moved forward, the rest of their bodies’ energy very effectively counter-
acted any forward momentum. When they were able to consciously resist this
tendency the ball sailed easily over the net, but as soon as they lost focus and
leaned backward it fell far short. The behavior didn’t follow a neat gender line:
three out of four of the girls and one of the boys struggled with this throughout
the season. Yet even the boy looked like a girl when he served in this way.4 There
was something awkward, comical, and fragmented about the movement, as if
the body performing it related to itself in pieces, i.e., was strangely unaware of
itself as a whole body.
Since, following Merleau-Ponty, Young believes that bodily motion is “the
most primordial intentional act” (2005a, p. 35), which synthesizes a bodily unity
and a world at the very same time, she argues that the unity that is synthesized
in feminine motility is a discontinuous unity, while masculine bodily motility
will more simply organize the world as a unitary field of the “I can” (p. 37).
For these eight-year-olds, serving was only one skill in which this discon-
tinuous unity manifested itself. I had to convince them that they could move
decisively toward the ball. At first they stood stock still. Later the girls would
run toward the ball only to stop or hesitate just before they got there. When
I insisted they call out “mine” to claim the ball from their teammates, they
would start to say the word then almost swallow it, move toward the ball, then
turn away from it. “I want commitment!” I said over and over again, making the
good natured parents on the bench laugh. The first time I used this phrase,
one of the parents joked that the boys wouldn’t have any idea what it meant.
Yet when it came to having a bodily sense of “commitment” it was all four girls
who lagged behind. Soon both boys were all over the court, practically push-
ing their teammates out of the way and shouting “mine,” sliding dramatically
in their all-out efforts to get to the ball (even when they didn’t need to). The
first and only girl to really “get” what I meant in an embodied way, was my
own daughter, who again had more experience in athletics than the other three
(and whose latest nickname is “baby rhinoceros,” to give you an idea of her

4 “Like a girl,” is one of those phrases we wish didn’t make sense, and hope one day will not. We are, of
course, thoroughly schooled in the meaning of this attribution, which is why we can continue to apply it across
gender lines, instead of recognizing the behavior in question in more neutral terms. Any female athlete who
advances in a sport ceases to hit, run, throw, etc. “like a girl” very early on.
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 85

particular character). But even then, she did not blast her way into her team-
mates’ space on the court like the boys did.5
What I kept trying to figure out, as a first-time coach, was what was stopping
the girls? Those who were most stereotypically feminine in their body move-
ments seemed to have a set of invisible walls around them. If my toss required
even a step or two, they watched the ball fall, as if it simply had nothing to do
with them. My smallest player often seemed startled to see the ball coming to
her in a game. Her eyes would grow big; she would flinch and awkwardly allow
the ball to hit her rather than hit it, as if the volleyball were the agent and she
its object.
Young tells us that as the body-subject moves, she gathers the world
around her into lived relations of space (2005a, p. 39) and particular modalities
of feminine spatiality emerge. Following a study of boys’ and girls’ drawings by
Ericson, Young concludes that enclosure is one modality of feminine spatiality,
since the space of the “I can” for women tends to be gathered tightly and held
close, and is represented by girls as enclosed by high walls. Feminine space
is thus severed into a dual structure, in which a tightly drawn “here” is cut off
from a “yonder” into which the body-subject can see, but into which she cannot
move (p. 40). Whereas, in Merleau-Ponty’s account, the body is never posi-
tioned in space, because the body is the very power of positioning that effects
the “laying down of the first coordinates” which constitute phenomenal space
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 100, cited in Young 2005a, p. 41), feminine spatiality
is characterized by the positioning body-subject experiencing herself at one and
the same moment as a positioned body-object.
For Young, all of these modalities of feminine body experience are rooted
in femininity itself, which she defines as the entangled network of “structures
and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman marked by the
mandate to take oneself to be simultaneously object and subject” (2005a, p. 31).
In agreement with other feminist accounts, Young is asserting that feminin-
ity requires women to internalize a male gaze, which is to say to take up in the
imaginary the position and interests of the masculine gaze over and against an
objectified self.6 At the same time, she is noting that this being positioned in
space disrupts and disorganizes the “I can” that lays down the coordinates of
spatiality in a way that has deep consequences for the body-subject’s relation
to the lived world in general. What we recognize to be feminine styles of body
comportment are constituted in the midst of this disruption.
This splitting of the subject/object body and space is constituted in the imag-
inary. I imagine myself here, author of my perceptions, and yet over there,

5 Young argues that feminine body comportment is characterized by movements outward toward the
world that are disrupted or fragmented, so that the transcendence experienced in the self-world relations con-
stituted by these acts is an ambiguous transcendence. “Feminine bodily existence . . . is overlaid with immanence,”
Young claims, even in its most simple acts of transcendence (p. 36).
6 See Sandra Bartky’s (1990a) development and extension of Iris Young’s thinking on objectification.
86 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

looked at and judged by an alienated masculine gaze, which I myself co-author.7

I am the author of my movement in space but it is constrained to the “here”
I hold tightly around myself, self-constrained in a way that seems to be imposed
from the outside—as if my imagination binds itself close to home, leaving me
not free to move between here and yonder. In a key passage, Young makes
this explicit: “For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us
in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our
movement is a constricted space” (my emphasis 2005a, p. 33). Yet the space of
my little volleyball players, feet rooted to the floor, was not really restricted in
any way. I had no doubt at all that they were physically capable of getting to the
ball. But neither were they “making up” the restriction; it bound them physi-
cally.8 Today, perhaps even more than in 1977, woman-imagined-as-object lit-
erally saturates our social world and demands the same habitual self-reference
or self-objectification as it did at the time of Young’s essay.
The feminine imaginary domain is both related to and distinct from that
common condition which requires all persons to recognize themselves as
existing in a reversible relation with others, as the seer who is also seen, the
toucher who is also touched. As a preliminary definition, we might say that the
feminine imaginary domain is that materially and socially constituted matrix
of meanings that keys into and animates the imagination of those who would
be women, and demands engagement as a condition for the very possibility of
assuming such an identity. Though it is of course the case that there is a mas-
culine imaginary domain that demands such engagement of those who would
be men as well, it is even more certain that the meanings that circulate in
the two domains are not the same. These meanings are neither singular nor
unconstrainedly plural, neither fixed nor arbitrary; neither wholly determined
nor simply contingent; neither mandated with pure success, nor voluntary.

Imaginary Commitments: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis,

and Phenomenology

This preliminary descriptive encounter with the imaginary domain of gender

isn’t yet the account of gender as an aesthetic relation between lived experience
and social structure that Young’s work points toward. How is it that deeply held
personal commitments are put to work in the factory of structural injustice?
After providing a description of such commitments, I draw on three distinct

7 It seems to me that for those that resist more than affirm femininity as prescribed to women, it is pre-
cisely this co-authorship that is refused.
8 But to say that modalities of feminine body experience rely on structures that are constituted in the
imaginary domain is not to say that they are not rooted in the material realities of women’s situation. For many
girls an extensive process of re-habituation through continued practice is the only thing that is effective against
such imaginary barriers.
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 87

traditions—social theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology—to begin to fill

out an account of gender as an aesthetic relation between the subject and her
social world.
When we think of gender as structural injustice, we are hard-pressed to
give an account of why it is that the identities “man” and “woman” inspire such
deep-seated and personal loyalties in most of us. I have in mind the continued
visceral efficacy of gender slander in the lives of children and adults alike, so
that calling a boy or man a “bitch” or “pussy” or “fag” or “little girl” still seems
to inspire a deep fear of nonexistence that is constitutive of the experience of
coming to manhood for so many. Such misattributions need not be intentional
to evoke a powerful response. This phenomenon is often described and has, to
choose the most extreme example, been key to the actual legal use of, and also
analyses of, what is called the “homosexual panic defense.” Here men have
defended themselves against charges of hate-crimes against gay men, who
supposedly flirted with or propositioned them, by arguing that their sense of
their own gender identity was so severely threatened by the sexual attentions
of another man that the ensuing violence was, psychologically considered from
the perspective of the perpetrator, self-defense.
These examples show that the lived experience of gender involves com-
mitment, loyalties, even terror. Yet if gender is structural injustice, as Young
insists, feminists need to be able to articulate the relation and process between
macrostructures of gender and lived experiences of gender such as these. My
claim is that these relations and processes belong to the imaginary domain,
which is, like other aspects of our lives, saturated with gendered meanings that
function precisely to inspire such life-or-death loyalty.
Two social theorists, Benedict Anderson and Charles Taylor, have raised
just such life-or-death questions in regards to other sorts of loyalty. Ander-
son (1983) attempted to understand nationalism as a kind of viscerally lived
commitment animated by “an imagined community.” Taylor (2004) expanded
Anderson’s notion to talk about other kinds of commitments animated by a
more generally conceived “social imaginary.”
In Anderson’s classic definition of the nation as an “imagined political
community” (1983, p. 15), he sets out to explain how notions such as nation
and nationality “command such profound emotional legitimacy” (pp. 13–14),
why “these particular cultural artifacts have aroused such deep attachments”
(p. 14). Communities are distinguished by “the style in which they are imag-
ined” (1983, p. 15). He does not mean that nations are mere fictions, but rather
that nationalism and national identity depend on a process of imagining and
creating that also obfuscates actual structural inequalities. “The nation is always
conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship,” he argues, “a fraternity” (p. 16).
“Ultimately,” Anderson claims, “it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over
the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as
willingly to die,” in the interest of nationalism (p. 16).
88 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

Taylor’s “social imaginary” expands Anderson’s work on the nation to

include other kinds of imaginary formations which mobilize broad social
meanings. These meanings are carried in stories, images, and legends (2004,
p. 106). This “largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding” (p. 106)
is how we make sense of the practices of our society. The social imaginary
denotes “something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemas
people may entertain . . . I am thinking rather of the ways in which people imag-
ine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on
between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and
the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”
(p. 106). The social imaginary is responsible for a widely shared sense of legiti-
macy that makes our common practices possible. It gives us an “implicit grasp
of social space,” which allows us to orient ourselves in the social world without
consulting a map or rulebook (p. 26).
While Taylor calls the social imaginary “an inarticulate understanding,”
I’d like to suggest that it is not yet an understanding at all, but rather a deeply
felt sense of legitimacy, normalcy, rightness and their correlates, illegitimacy,
abnormality, wrongness—broadly, but not monolithically or seamlessly,
shared. Taylor is interested in the sense of moral order that emerges in the
social imaginary in modernity, while I am interested in the sense of sexual
order that animates our social lives. This felt sense is the seat of more or less
deeply held commitments that legitimate themselves through stories, images,
and everyday interactions. They also legitimate, too often, the structural injus-
tice that is gender, in which they arise and are situated. The social imaginary
that does this work does not do it in a distant, impersonal way. It relentlessly
animates deeply personal aspects of lived experience, which are, in turn, the
seat of its power.
To say how this “animation” occurs is another matter. By posing the ques-
tion, we have already, in some sense, stepped out of the domain of social theory
and into that of psychoanalysis. Particularly, we find ourselves asking a familiar
Lacanian question: what are the processes by which a relationship is cemented
between the inner world and the surrounding world, such that the very identity
of the individual is at stake in that relation? This was the question Lacan posed
in his 1949 address on the “mirror stage” of human development.
For Lacan there is no identity prior to the emergence of an imaginary rela-
tion to a specular image. He argues that the infant, beginning as early as 6
months of age, enters the “mirror stage” of development when she catches
sight of her image in the mirror and becomes fascinated by this. This experi-
ence “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in
a fictional direction” (Lacan 1996 p. 76). She misrecognizes herself in the image.
The moment of a splitting that ensues becomes decisive for the formation of
the subject. The baby in the mirror experiences himself from the inside as a
chaotic and fragmented existence, animated by “turbulent movements” (p. 76).
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 89

Seen from the outside he is something else entirely. Before him in the mirror
is a wonderfully autonomous creature.
But this is a familiar story by now. What I want to stress here is that the
infant is not only recognizing (misrecognizing) herself in the mirror, she is
also making a commitment. The advent of identity occurs in an imaginary for-
mation forged in the act of commitment that, if spoken, would take the form
of an impassioned declaration: “That is me!” This conviction will need to be
repeated, will require frequent reiteration in fact, and each reiteration is a
renewal of loyalty against a backdrop of betrayal: the body continues for some
time to be chaotic and uncontrolled, helplessly weak and dependent, at the
mercy of others for even the most basic needs. Her loyalty is passionate, not
only in what it affirms, but in what it expels as well; those fragmented, vulner-
able, chaotic nursling movements.9
For Lacan, gender comes afterwards. On the scaffolding that is put in place
during the mirror stage, the Oedipus complex builds its sexual identifications.
These secondary identifications, too, are forged in the fires of a conflagration of
desire and betrayal. They, too, have their moments of advent in acts of commit-
ment which are aesthetic in the sense that I use the term here: entangled with
perception, affective and sensual, rooted in the kinesthesia of the body.
A feminist account will insist on politicizing Lacan, recognizing that the
singular image the baby confronts in the mirror will be followed over the course
of a lifetime by millions of images. They will confront the subject in the mar-
ketplace; in the eyes of those she respects, despises, or loves; in the claims
made on her by her womanhood, her race, her class, and her nation; in the
situations carved out for her by structural injustice.
The phenomenologists will insist on this recognition: She acts as a sin-
gular and unique existence, and her action will come to characterize her in
ways that are particularly hers, called “style.” She will develop her own style of
being a woman, for example, that will be hers alone and yet collectively shared
at least to the extent that others (usually) will readily identify her as such. One
collectivity will be marked by others, race, religion, or profession, which she
will also commit to or refuse in her own way. This is to say that the claims
of such collectivities will be singularly lived, and that this singularity will not
reduce in the least the force of these claims as collective. Style is gesture from
the inside, as lived by the subject, and style is gesture from the outside as per-
ceived by others.10 Gesture is, in fact, the gateway between my lived cenesthesia
and your perception of me. Singer writes, “style emerges from and appears as

9 “The Urbild of this formation is alienating . . . by virtue of its capacity to render extraneous” (Boothby
1991, p. 58), but it is this capacity to keep the extraneous expelled that enables action that “mobilizes the most
primitive forms of intentionality” (Boothby, 1991, p. 65).
10 Singer tells us that the body “radiates significance” through style. For Merleau-Ponty, the “lived body is
unified in its style.” “I . . . have received with existence a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts
stand in relation to this structure” (p. 455).
90 embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

an expressive gesture, which is an extension of the body’s basic capacities to

intentionally intertwine with the world” (Singer 1993, p. 238). We learn from
our discussions of the “imagined community,” the “imago” and “style” that the
imaginary domain is a space of seduction and response. It collects and pools
passionate investments in certain places, around certain themes.
A feminist reading will insist that the energies that are put into play in this
process of seduction (which the psychoanalysts call instinctual but we prefer
to call passions, commitments, loyalties) are prepared for social usage.11 Here
we can make sense of a phenomenon like gender panic, in which the passions
which gather around the ideational element of our social world called “gender”
are threatened with unbinding or dissolution. Gender is at the heart of all such
passions, not as an impersonal structure of inequality or injustice, but as one
of the structures of my enmeshment in the world. My most passionate identity
commitments arise in the first place in the interface with the world—which is
to say, in the body. A phenomenology like Young’s discloses structural injus-
tice when it explores female body experience, whether or not this disclosure is
explicit, because such injustice is parasitic on the imaginary domain. Just as
the most successful parasite alters its host’s biology to make its own stay more
comfortable, structural injustice alters the imaginary domain by feeding on it,
often implanting just what it needs to nourish itself there.
If phenomenological accounts of female body experience have contributed
at times to a subjectivism that makes us inarticulate in the face of structural
injustice, we have not practiced phenomenology rigorously enough. Beauvoir
realized that in order to give an account of herself she had to begin by saying
“I am a woman”—and was catapulted into a socially engaged phenomenology
of oppression. Those of us who would continue her work can only do so if our
descriptions of female body experience and subjectivity move us to account for
the structure of their emergence.
Young’s essays on female body experience came first, after Beauvoir, in
providing such an account. For Young, the concrete situation she called, along
with Beauvoir, “femininity” both feeds on and produces an imaginary domain
which seduces the subject, and keys her into the social world. As she has
shown, the seductions of this domain are powerful enough to erect imaginary
walls that delineate spatial experience, reverse motion, and turn the kinesthesia
of a body-subject into that of a body-object.
The passions that gather around gender make it incongruous to talk about
gender as structural injustice, in the impersonal sense that Young advocates in
her late essay. Instead, gender is one of those structures that personalizes such

11 I am both following and distorting Boothby’s claim that “Binding appears to be the process by which
psychic energy becomes definitely attached to specific mental representations. The function of such binding of
energy with definite ideational elements is presumably to prepare instinctual energies for controlled discharge
(1991, p. 82).
 between phenomenology and structural injustice 91

injustice in the most radical sense, by entangling it with the very processes
associated with the advent of the self. Because identity emerges amidst desire
and betrayal, between the body-subject and the body-object, and because it con-
tinues to be seduced by the imagos of a culture obsessed with dichotomous
sexual difference, gender will tend to be lived as a matter of life and death. Such
passionate commitments will be reanimated in the social imaginary under
particular historical situations, when a nation needs soldiers, or mothers, for
example, in service to a cause. Only by understanding the depths of the aes-
thetic relation that keys the individual into various collectivities, will we begin
to give an account of what structural injustice means, rather than just how it
functions. By disclosing the feminine imaginary domain, Young didn’t distract
us from the project of thinking structural injustice, she led us into it.
This page intentionally left blank
4
PART III

THEORIZING THE STATE:

METHOD, VIOLENCE,
AND RESISTANCE
This page intentionally left blank
 8
4

L’Imagination au pouvoir: Comparing

John Rawls’s Method of Ideal Theory
with Iris Marion Young’s Method
of Critical Theory

Alison M. Jaggar

After Iris Marion Young’s untimely death, celebrations of her life and work
were organized by many philosophical communities of which she had been
a beloved member. At one celebration, organized by the Radical Philosophy
Association in November 2006, Kevin Graham observed that Young had come
of age in the philosophical world that Rawls had built but that her work had
transformed Rawls’s world. In this paper, I suggest that Young’s transforma-
tive contributions were made possible—though certainly not guaranteed—by
her method of critical theory.

Rawls’s Method of Ideal Theory

The 1971 publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice revived normative polit-
ical philosophy after a period in which it had been declared dead. In his land-
mark work, Rawls utilized a philosophical approach that he called ideal theory.
His theory not only advocated certain political ideals, as normative political
philosophy always does; it was also ideal in several interrelated methodological
senses. I will identify three of these senses, although I think that when Rawls
speaks of ideal theory he has in mind mainly the last sense.
First, Rawls took his primary philosophical task as that of developing pre-
scriptive principles of justice able to serve as a “standard” for assessing the basic

My thinking on this topic has been clarified by discussions with Hye-Ryoung Kang and with audiences at
the University of Colorado Center for Values and Social Policy and at the biennial conference of the association
for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST).
96 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

structures of existing societies. Rawls’s assertion that “the nature and aims of
a perfectly just society is the fundamental part of the theory of justice” lends
itself to the idea that philosophical reflection on real world injustices takes the
form of “applying” general principles to particular perceived wrongs (Rawls
1971, p. 9). Rawls certainly does not say that practice can be deduced from prin-
ciple; indeed, his method of reflective equilibrium, which tests the adequacy
of general principles by reference to their practical implications, denies the
primacy of principle over practice. Nevertheless, the philosophical priority that
Rawls gives to articulating general principles suggests that ideal precedes non-
ideal in the sense that particular injustices can be properly recognized only in
the light of a comprehensive conception of justice.
Rawls’s methodological approach is also ideal in the sense that he argues
from a hypothetical reasoning situation, which he calls the original position. In
this fictional situation, the reasoners or “parties” are imagined to be free, equal,
and motivated exclusively by rational self-interest. Their reflections occur behind
a “veil of ignorance,” which limits their information about the future society they
are planning and deprives them of all knowledge about their own positions in that
society. The original position is intended to ensure that the parties reason impar-
tially and that the obligations they undertake may be thought of as self-imposed or
autonomously assumed. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls asserts that the original posi-
tion provides “a conception that enables us to envision our objective from afar,”
(Rawls 1971, p. 22), setting up “an Archimedean point for judging the basic struc-
ture of society” (Rawls 1971, p. 584). Thus, just as Rawls’s principles of justice are
intended to provide an ideal standard against which the justice of real world insti-
tutions may be measured, so original position reasoning is intended to provide an
ideal standard of reasoning against which to measure real world reasoning.
Finally, Rawls’s methodological approach is ideal in the sense that his prin-
ciples of justice are designed for “a well-ordered society.” Like the original posi-
tion, a well-ordered society is a philosophical fiction characterized in terms of a
number of idealizing assumptions that bracket various problematic aspects of
the real world. For Rawls, “A society is well-ordered when it is not only designed
to advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a
public conception of justice. That is, it is a society in which (1) everyone accepts
and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic
social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these prin-
ciples” (Rawls 1971, pp. 4–5). Moreover, “(e)veryone is presumed to act justly
and to do his (sic) part in upholding just institutions” (Rawls 1971, p. 8). Rawls
also postulates, again counterfactually, a society “conceived as a closed system
isolated from other societies” (Rawls 1971, p. 8). Rawls is in no doubt that the
real world diverges from his imagined world in significant ways. He acknowl-
edges that “Existing societies are . . . seldom well-ordered” (Rawls 1971, p. 5) and
he also recognizes that “the problems of partial compliance theory are the press-
ing and urgent matters. These are the things that we are faced with in everyday
 l’imagination au pouvoir 97

life” (Rawls 1971, pp. 8–9). However, he asserts, “The reason for beginning with
ideal theory is that it provides, I believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp
of these more pressing problems” (Rawls 1971, p. 9).

Young’s Method of Critical Theory

Young’s overall philosophical project, like Rawls’s, is to provide overarching nor-

mative ideals capable of clarifying specific injustices and shaping the design of
real-world institutions. Like Rawls, she rejects particularism, which eschews all
general principles. Unlike Rawls, however, Young does not aim to develop a theory
of justice that “both stands independent of a given social context and yet measures
its justice” (Young 1990a, p. 4). In Young’s view, if a theory were truly universal
and freestanding, it would be too abstract to be useful in evaluating actual institu-
tions and practices. Thus, Young refuses Rawls’s aspiration, in his earlier work, to
develop a theory of justice that is analogous to a scientific theory. She aims instead
for a critical conception of justice. “Critical theory rejects as illusory the effort to con-
struct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society.” Instead,
it is “a normative reflection that is historically and socially contextualized” (Young
1990a, p. 5). As Young later expresses it, the goal of the political philosopher is to
articulate “normative ideals and moral arguments intended both to reveal moral
deficiencies in contemporary . . . societies and at the same time to envision trans-
formative possibilities in those societies” (Young 2000, pp. 8–9). So on Young’s
view, the political ideals developed by philosophers should not be imagined to be
universally applicable but instead should be tailored to specific social contexts.
Because ideal and critical theorists of justice conceive their philosophi-
cal projects differently, so their methods differ. Rather than reflecting on “the
nature and aims of a perfectly just society,” the critical theorist reflects “on
existing social relations and processes to identify what we experience as valu-
able in them, but as present only intermittently, partially, or potentially” (Young
2000, p. 10). Although Young does not explicitly characterize her method as
“nonideal,” it diverges from all three ideal aspects of Rawls’s method.
First, Young does not begin with a comprehensive normative vision offered
as a standard for recognizing particular injustices. Instead, and following the
example of thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx and Karl Popper, she begins by
reflecting on particular injustices. It would be wrong to read this difference
between Rawls and Young as a sharp contrast between methods that are,
respectively, deductive and inductive; neither philosopher’s approach is exclu-
sively deductive or exclusively inductive because both use the method of reflec-
tive equilibrium. Instead, this first methodological contrast between Rawls and
Young is better seen as a difference in philosophical priorities. Rawls focuses
on developing a general ideal of justice, confident that it will illuminate particu-
lar injustices, though he says relatively little about these. Young begins with
98 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

particular injustices and draws on her knowledge of these in developing her

general ideals. Thus, Rawls’s method of argumentation tends to be top-down,
in a logical sense, moving from general to particular; Young’s tends to move
from particular to general and so, in a logical sense, to be bottom-up.
A more clear-cut methodological contrast between Rawls and Young lies
in their respective attitudes toward the moral reasoning of real people. We have
seen that Rawls supports his principles of justice by reference to an imaginary
reasoning process involving imaginary reasoners in an imaginary situation.
It is important to notice that the reasoners, their situation, and their reason-
ing are not simply imagined or fictional; they are also idealized in the sense
that they could never be replicated in the real world. The original position is
not just hypothetical; it is impossible. However, because those whose thinking
most closely approximates original position reasoning are an intellectual elite
of philosophers, original position thinking might be thought of as top-down
also in a sociological sense. Whereas Rawls constructs an elaborate philosophi-
cal fiction intended to transcend the partial and imperfect reasoning of situated
individuals, Young’s books are full of references to the reasoning of real people
in actual political struggles, people whose thinking is readily acknowledged to
be partial and limited. She seeks “to express rigorously and reflectively some
of the claims about justice and injustice implicit in the politics” of the United
States new left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their contem-
porary successors (Young 1990a, p. 7). Thus Young does not abstract away
from differences in individuals’ perspectives and motivations; instead she pays
attention to them. She treats human difference not as an epistemic disability
but rather as an epistemic resource.
Finally, Young’s philosophical ideals are designed not for a nonexistent and
even impossible world but rather for the real world of structural inequality and
cultural exclusion. Although Young makes simplifying assumptions, as all theo-
rists must do, she does not postulate counterfactual and even impossible condi-
tions or bracket empirical information that she regards as relevant to injustice.
She thinks about justice for a world in which coercion, threats, and structural
inequalities are the norm rather than the exception (Young 2000, p. 17).
To sum up, Young develops her political ideals not by imagining what
nonhuman—even inhuman—beings in an impossible situation might recom-
mend for a world that could never exist. Instead, she reflects on what is actually
valued by real people struggling with specific existing injustices.

Some Advantages of Young’s Critical Method

Just as the proof of a pudding is in its eating, so the value of a philosophical method
is assessed by the value of the philosophy that it enables us to produce. Philosoph-
ical methods are good if and only if they enable us to do good philosophy.
 l’imagination au pouvoir 99

How can we determine which philosophy is good? People disagree about

the merits of conceptions of justice even more passionately than they disagree
about the merits of theories in many other fields. Nevertheless, it is possible
to identify some nonarbitrary and substantively neutral conditions that any
good account of justice must meet. In addition to internal consistency, which
is a necessary condition for all rational theories, the conditions I have in mind
are comprehensiveness, relevance, and substantive acceptability. I do not sug-
gest that this list is complete, so that together the conditions are sufficient for
theoretical adequacy, nor am I sure that the conditions are completely inde-
pendent of each other. However, I do think that these minimum conditions
must be met by any conception of justice that purports to provide guidance for
the real world. I do not attempt here to assess thoroughly how far Rawls’s and
Young’s respective accounts of justice meet these conditions, but I will offer
some examples of how such an assessment might be undertaken.
When I speak of an account’s comprehensiveness, I refer to its relative suc-
cess in explaining the available data. Of course, no theoretical account explains
all data. Moreover, theories themselves partially determine the data that need to
be explained, and what counts as a good explanation is contestable. This is true
in all fields but especially in ethics and politics. Nevertheless, many people would
agree that Young’s account of justice is more comprehensive than Rawls’s. For
instance, Young directly challenges the limits of Rawls’s distributive paradigm
of justice, pointing to the need to challenge additionally issues of decision-mak-
ing powers and procedures, divisions of labor, and culture. Moreover, Young’s
account of the five faces of oppression covers many issues of justice beyond the
economic distribution on which Rawls focuses (Young 1990a, p. 40).
When I speak of a conception of justice being relevant, I refer to that
conception’s ability to address the most significant issues of justice facing a
given society. A number of critics have noted that Rawls’s theory of justice
neglects many urgent contemporary problems. For instance, Charles Mills
observes that direct consideration of racial justice is “endlessly deferred”
by Rawls and his followers, who fail to acknowledge that they are “living in
one of the most race-conscious societies in the world, with a history of hun-
dreds of years of white supremacy” (Mills 2004, pp. 177, 198). In addition
to neglecting some issues, Rawls deliberately deprives his theory of the con-
ceptual resources necessary to address others. For instance, by conceiving
societies as closed and isolated systems, Rawls constructs a theory that not
only fails to illuminate issues such as justice for immigrants but is actually
incapable of doing so. By contrast, Young, who defines justice in terms of the
institutional conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise their
capacities and participate in determining their action and the conditions of
their action, addresses many important contemporary concerns of oppression
and domination (Young 1990a, p. 37). For instance, Young addresses exploi-
tation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. In
100 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

her last work, she addressed consumers’ political responsibility for the foreign
sweatshop conditions in which many of their products were manufactured.
Thus, Young’s work is far more relevant than Rawls’s to many pressing injus-
tices. The greater relevance of Young’s account may well be connected with its
greater comprehensiveness.
Last and most important, normative philosophical accounts must be sub-
stantively acceptable. A good conception of justice should not obscure or ratio-
nalize significant injustices, just as a good conception of democracy should not
obscure or rationalize significant political exclusions. Among other problem-
atic features, Rawls’s theory of justice is vulnerable to serious feminist criti-
cism. For instance, Susan Okin has argued that Rawls does not simply ignore
but even rationalizes gendered injustice in the family and Eva Kittay has argued
that he not simply ignores but even rationalizes injustice to dependents and
dependency workers. (Okin 1989; Kittay 1999) Young’s conception of justice
may well be inadequate in some respects but at least it does not rationalize
these gendered injustices.
These brief comments certainly do not provide a thorough assessment of
the respective merits of Rawls’s and Young’s theories of justice but I hope they
show how Young’s work is at least arguably more comprehensive, relevant,
and normatively acceptable than Rawls’s. If this is so, then it likely offers better
political guidance in the real world characterized by deep structural injustices,
including racism, imperialism, and male dominance.
One reason why Young seems better able than Rawls to address real peo-
ple’s concerns about real injustices may be that she uses the method of critical
theory rather than ideal theory. Once these two methods are unpacked and
compared, it seems to stand to reason that critical method is likely to produce
more reliable conclusions. As some critics have noted, the methodological
device of the original position simply provides an illusion of dialogue conceal-
ing reasoning that is essentially monological, even though multiple heads are
usually better than one (Benhabib 1992; Jaggar 1993). As for Rawls’s counter-
factual assumptions, Charles Mills has observed dryly that it is not at all clear
why ignoring facts about real-world injustices should be thought helpful in
developing a prescriptive theory of justice for an attainable future (Mills 2004).
As Young deploys her method of critical theory, she demonstrates how philoso-
phers with partial knowledge and limited capacities may nevertheless engage
in useful philosophical reflection about justice in a world that at present is still
discouragingly unjust.

The Limits of Method or “L’imagination au pouvoir”

Although Young’s use of a critical nonidealizing method helps in understand-

ing her ability to make powerful philosophical contributions, it certainly does
 l’imagination au pouvoir 101

not provide a full explanation. Philosophical methods are not decision proce-
dures that guarantee correct outcomes; instead, they are hand tools that are
only as good as the people who use them. Many political philosophers relying
on a supposedly critical method have produced deeply problematic theories—
just as supposedly scientific methods have often been invoked to produce con-
clusions that are quite mistaken.
An additional factor enabling Young’s philosophical contributions may
well have been her experience as a woman in a world of male dominance and
in a discipline where women’s voices have been generally muted. “Actually
existing” philosophers are neither disembodied nor dislocated, although many
have devised ingenious strategies for disguising the particular perspectives
from which they speak. For instance, philosophers have pretended to occupy
an Archimedean point, to take the perspective of an ideal observer or an arch-
angel, to regard the world from nowhere or everywhere, even to take a god’s
eye view (Walker 1998). Young rejected such pretensions. She asserted that
“the social critic is engaged in and committed to the society he or she criticizes.
She did not take a detached point of view toward the society and its institu-
tions, though she does stand apart from its ruling powers” (Young 1990a, p. 6).
Young was explicit that, for her as for other philosophers, her own particular
but socially conditioned experiences affected which philosophical topics she
chose to address and the way she chose to treat them.
Yet even though philosophical insight may be facilitated by using an appro-
priate method and occupying a particular social location, in the end neither of
these is either necessary or sufficient. Many women scholars never notice male
bias in the philosophical canon or prejudice in academic life—and increasing
numbers of men are able to recognize these. Young was a woman but she
was also white, heterosexual, and American—and she still produced insightful
analyses of racism, heterosexism, and imperialism. Since most philosophers
are privileged in a variety of ways, it is encouraging to have evidence that injus-
tices can be recognized even by those who do not endure them personally.
However, just as the existence of injustice is unlikely to be recognized by those
who lack compassion, so remedies for injustice are unlikely to be envisioned
by those who lack imagination.1 As Young asserts, “Imagination is the fac-
ulty of transforming the experience of what is into a projection of what could
be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and norms” (Young 1990a,
p. 6). When we realize how much of Young’s philosophical contribution was
possible only because of her compassion for those suffering injustice, coupled
with her soaring imagination, it is even more heartbreaking to remember the
irreplaceable individual we have loved and lost.

1 The slogan “l’imagination au pouvoir” (all power to the imagination) was scrawled on the walls of Paris
during the uprising of May 1968, and became an emblem of the European new left.
This page intentionally left blank
 9
4

Between Democracy and Violence and

the Problem of Military Humanitarian
Interventions

Bat-Ami Bar On

In “Power, Violence, and Legitimacy: A Reading of Hannah Arendt in an Age of

Police Brutality and Humanitarian Intervention,” Iris Marion Young notes that
in 1999, while completing Inclusion and Democracy, she was unable to continue
her work on the book since “[w]ith NATO bombs raining on Yugoslavia, reflec-
tion on the essentially nonviolent values of democracy felt irrelevant at best and
arrogantly privileged at worst” (Young 2007 p. 79). Young then turned to think
about violence and wrote “Power, Violence and Legitimacy” (2001, republished
in 2007). Young devoted some of her time to thinking about violence again
after the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, and the George W. Bush administration’s quick response
with a declaration of a “War on Terror.” She did so in two essays, “Envisioning
a Global Rule of Law,” which she coauthored with Daniele Archibugi (2002,
republished in 2007), and “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on
the Current Security State” (2003, republished in 2007). What all three essays
share is a very critical view of what Young comes to call “official violence”—the
violence “perpetrated by agents of the state as means to achieve their mission
of law enforcement” (2007, p. 95) either domestically or internationally—and
of the rhetoric that is deployed to mobilize support for official violence. The
criticism, Young points out, is motivated by a “hope for a regime of perpetual
peace” (2007, p. 3) that Young believes must never be abandoned, a hope that
given Young’s commitments and other work, I read as one for a global version
of a socioeconomically just liberal-democracy with accountable transnational
institutions and an active public sphere.

I am grateful to Lisa Tessman, Ann Ferguson, and Mecke Nagel for their helpful comments on this essay.
104 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

I think that Young’s criticisms of “official violence” are insightful and

cohere with similar criticisms developed on the Left. But, I also think that Young
does not offer a way to think productively about violence when it may be a jus-
tifiable means to acceptable ends as in the case of some military humanitarian
interventions.1 In order to both bring out the value of Young’s insights and
examine the problems with her approach, I first offer an analysis of Young’s
three essays on violence that brings out the main lines of her position. I fol-
low this analysis with a comparison between Young and Jürgen Habermas.
Like Young, Habermas is committed to the possibility of “perpetual peace” and
understands it along similar lines. But, while like Young, Habermas is critical
of the United States’ militarized “war on terror,” unlike Young Habermas sup-
ported the military humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia. I dis-
cuss this difference, which, I believe, helps clarify some of the utopian aspects
of Young’s position. Young’s position, though, can be modified and I end by
building on Young’s insights and modifying them in light of the comparison
with Habermas to offer a more productive view of the possibility of a justifiable
kind of violence that Habermas recognizes.

Young on Violence (and Arendt)

Young was a democratic theorist and not a political theorist of violence. In this
respect she was not very different from many political theorists, which she
herself notes in agreement with observations that Hannah Arendt made about
forty years earlier in On Violence, which is that most political theorists “have
neglected systematic reflections on violence in public affairs” (Young 2007,
p. 80).2 Young turned to thinking about violence in public affairs when she felt
compelled to respond to current violent events and the suffering accompany-
ing them since they were interfering with her thinking about democracy. When
she began to theorize about current violent events, Young consulted Arendt’s
On Violence (1969)3 along with a few additional texts by Arendt that helped her
clarify some of Arendt’s claims with regard to violence.
What Young finds useful in On Violence is the Arendtian distinction between
violence and power. While suggesting that Arendt’s claims with regards to both
violence and power are abstract and obscure, Young nonetheless determines

1 I am using the phrase “military humanitarian intervention” for the sake of precision. I do not mean
for “military” to be strongly associated with the “state” but rather to a wide variety of organized armed forces
whose tasks can go beyond the immediate threat and use of violence. I do mean for “humanitarian” to reflect
a claimed justificatory connection to a humanitarian crisis that is understood roughly in terms of violations of
human rights.
2 I am not sure why, but Young does not explicitly include herself among the majority of political theorists
who have not been reflecting on violence since Arendt.
3 Young invokes some of the criticisms of Arendt as an “arrogant conservative” (Young 2007a, p. 81) but
seems to believe that Arendt’s insights are not contaminated by either her “arrogance” or her “conservatism.”
 between democracy and violence 105

that there is enough in On Violence to hold on to for her own purposes. Of spe-
cial importance to her is Arendt’s rejection of a common belief among political
theorists that “violence is the basis of power” (Young 2007, p. 93). This belief,
Arendt suggests and Young concurs, presupposes an understanding of political
power as “the rule of some over others, the exercise of command and success-
ful obedience” (p. 85). This understanding of political power is undemocratic.
It disregards the free and reciprocal assent to rule by those ruled, which can be
interpreted in participatory terms. Interpreted in this way, it is a cornerstone
of the modern understanding of the very concept of democracy and one that
Young takes very seriously.4 The attractiveness of Arendt’s conceptualization
of power to Young follows from the fact that Arendt offers an alternative that
attempts to capture the importance of people coming together in order to act
politically as the source of political power. The Arendtian conception of politi-
cal power coheres much better with democratic ideals.
According to Young, Arendt, recognizing that political power conceived as
she suggests is fleeting and unstable, looks to the covenantal founding of demo-
cratic political institutions as the means to stabilize power over time. The look at
covenantal founding is a “backward” look. And Young suggests that this is the
best way to understand Arendt’s differentiation between the justification of vio-
lence and legitimation of power. The legitimation of power is “backward looking”
since it must refer to “founding promises” and necessarily “involves the renewal
of the power that came to play in the original process” (Young 2007, p. 93). In
the United States, for example, legitimation may involve an appeal to founding
and canonized documents such as the Declaration of Independence or the Con-
stitution since they are associated with “founding promises.” It may, in addition,
involve an attempt to clarify an intent at the time of founding that relies on other
documents, such as correspondence among or the journals of those involved in
the founding. And, because legitimation, even though backwards looking, has
a bearing on the present and the futures that might issue from it, it may also
involve questions about the currency of the founding documents and the pos-
sible intent of those involved in the founding, for the present and the future.5
Legitimation is profoundly different from justification. The need for jus-
tification arises when there is a suspicion regarding the value of an action.
The value of any violent action is necessarily suspect because it is unavoidably
destructive. Violent action is, therefore, in need of justification. The justifica-
tion of violent action is “forward looking,” due to “the instrumental character
of violence” (Young 2007, p. 94). Young emphasizes, after Arendt, an aspect
of the justification of violence that is very significant to her own thinking about
violence, which is that “each act of violence must be justified on its own, on a

4 Young develops a strong argument for maximizing participation in her work on democracy (2000).
5 A concrete example of work revolving around legitimation is the work of Arthur Schlesinger on the
imperial presidency (2004).
106 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

case by case basis” (p. 95). For Young, one of the most important implications
of this is that threats and uses of violence by even a legitimate state appear legiti-
mate since when threats or uses of violence are official, they are delivered by
people who are authorized to make such threats or use the violence whose use
is entrusted to them. And yet, these threats or uses of violence are questionable
because they are threats and uses of violence and thus have to be justified on a case
by case basis. The justification itself should not invoke legitimacy, for example,
the legal authorization of this or that office or political body to use threats of or
actual violence, but rather has to look at and analyze consequences, both those
that might have already occurred as well as predictable ones.
In many cases, according to Young, the justifications of threats and planned
or already undertaken acts of violence fail. Young illustrates this with analyses
of several cases of threats and uses of violence by legitimate enough states.
They include police brutality in the United States, humanitarian interventions
by Western coalitions, the United States-led “war on terror” in its military man-
ifestation as wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. threats of war against a
few other countries that are construed as supporters of terrorism such as Syria
and Iran, and the United States’ tightening of internal security as part of the
“war on terror,” which have led to its becoming more and more of a “security
state.” Translating Arendt’s only guideline for the justification of violence as a
“forward looking” consequentialist justification into a guideline regarding the
relation of means and ends, Young questions the fitness of the two in each of
the cases that she analyzes. According to her, the justification of the threats or
uses of violence in each one of the cases does not succeed due to a lack of fit-
ness between means and ends.
The first case that Young analyzes is police brutality. It serves her as a
paradigmatic case, in part because Arendt herself offers an analysis of police
brutality in On Violence. Police brutality, according to Young, is not justifiable
since the violence involved exceeds the level of coercion needed to assure that
a legitimate legal order is maintained. Coercion, Young believes, “is an inevi-
table and proper aspect of legal regulation” but “successful coercion is usually
more a result of power than violence” and where violence is resorted to, its
scope must be limited and its effects must be “immediate and contained” and
the harm it prevents must be “worse than the one inflicted” (Young 2007,
p. 99). Limitations on the scope of violence, immediacy, and containment of
effects, and the balancing of harms inflicted and harms prevented are com-
mon criteria for the assessment of violence. In her application Young, like
Arendt, adheres to an established practice. What Young learns from Arendt
that is different and adds to the mix is a sense that before one even moves to
applying these criteria, one ought to examine whether there are not just any
alternatives to violence but especially alternatives that may generate, renew,
augment, or institutionally stabilize power and, thereby, reduce the need to
resort to violence altogether.
 between democracy and violence 107

The consideration of alternatives to violence is part of the standard pack-

age of criteria used in the assessment of violence. In the case of self-defense,
for example, before one examines the appropriateness of the specific use of
violence and thus looks at the scope, immediacy, and extent of effects, as well
as the balance of harms involved, one asks about the availability of alternatives
to the deployment of violence. Whether the defender could escape without the
use of violence, is, for example, a very standard question a defender is expected
to ask. The same kind of question arises in the case of war where the query is
about whether diplomatic efforts have been exhausted before a war is started
and engaged in seriously. The Arendtian twist on this criterion that Young
articulates even more clearly than Arendt and relies on herself offers a specific
political interpretation of the alternatives and thus the question about the pos-
sibility that they serve to generate, renew, augment, or institutionally stabilize
power. While not necessarily appropriate for individual cases of self-defense,6
the political understanding of the question of alternatives is appropriate for
the kind of violence that is in question for Young, namely “official violence.”
Young makes this very clear in her examination of NATO’s military humanitar-
ian intervention in the former Yugoslavia as a means of enforcing the evolving
human rights regime where she suggests that it calls attention to “impotence,”
or as I prefer to think of it, “power deficit”7 in the international arena. And,
though Young does not make connections between her Arendtian based theo-
retical reflection on violence in public affairs and her analyses of other cases of
violence, her response to the militarized “war on terror” that has been engaged
in by the United States in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001 can
easily be read as suggesting that the United States did not consider at all the
possibility of generating, renewing, augmenting, or stabilizing power at the
international level as an alternative to war.8
Young’s analysis of the “security state,” which is the most directly femi-
nist of her analyses of specific cases of violence, can also be read through the
9

lens of her Arendtian based theoretical reflection on violence though, as in the

case of her analysis of the militarized “war on terror,” she herself did not situ-
ate the analysis in this way. However, since the analysis of the “security state”

6 If one situates self-defense politically, issues of power as an alternative to violence immediately come up.
Thus, for example, one can suggest that the building of community relations and forms of responsibility among
neighbors can reduce the opportunities for self-defense by creating power.
7 Young uses the term “impotence” (2007a, p. 103). The term “power deficit” is mine. I use it as a parallel
to the term “democratic deficit” that is used by Chantal Mouffe (2000, 4) since I think that the two are related.
Mouffe herself borrows the term from criticisms of the European Union that invoked it to call attention to ques-
tions of popular sovereignty and the equality of self-governing people.
8 One could read Young’s “Envisioning a global rule of law” (2007b) differently of course, and thus as
basically repeating, reaffirming, and developing comments made about the “global rule of law” as an alternative
to the militarized “war on terror” by many on the liberal-left and especially those with a cosmopolitan agenda
such as David Held (2002).
9 I take Young as a feminist theoretician even when she does not attend to gender relations or invoke
feminist analyses.
108 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

enables Young to demonstrate how the “security state” undermines democratic

politics and since such an undermining contributes to the production of a
“power deficit,” the connections between her feminist analysis of the “security
state” and her Arendtian based theoretical reflections on violence seem concep-
tually straight forward.
Young’s analysis of the “security state” relies on early second wave feminist
work in the United States that suggested that one of the sources of patriarchal
power is a construction of gender that, by feminizing women in specific ways,
also creates a need for their protection the tools for which, especially violence,
are entrusted to men, and this forms an important factor in men’s masculin-
ization. Using this analysis to offer a reading of Hobbes as arguing for the
understanding and construction of the state as a vehicle for protection, Young
suggests that the state is masculinized along similar lines that men are and that
citizens are feminized along the same lines as women.10 The “security state” is
according to this analysis a generalized form of a “male protection racket” that
disempowers not only women but all of its citizens, a conclusion that Young
believes can be empirically demonstrated by examining the internal transfor-
mation of the United States. Between the growths of secrecy in government,
the passage of the “Patriot Act,” and the spying on citizens, Young asserts, the
United States has moved a long way on the continuum toward its restructuring
as a “security state” with a citizenry that is disempowered. According to Young,
no alternatives that take into account this enormous cost to democracy with its
far-reaching consequences to the legitimacy of the state have been seriously
considered in the wake of September 11.

Engaging Habermas on Intervention (and Kant)

Jürgen Habermas is less of a populist than Young and, as is implied by Young’s

criticisms of some of his ideas, is somewhat less sensitive than she is to the
political effects of socioeconomic disparities, let alone to his complicity in Euro-
centricm (Young 2005). Still, Habermas, who is responsive to criticisms like
Young’s, is no less concerned than Young with the political empowerment of
people, as the demos or demoi of new political constellations.11 Like Young, he
too has commented on NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 and later
on the United States’ “war on terror” and its militarized manifestations, espe-
cially in the war in Iraq, which was initiated by the George W. Bush-led United
States in 2003. Unlike Young, Habermas finds the two to be different from
each other in some significant ways.

10 I find it interesting that while developing this part of her argument Young does not invoke socialist-
feminist analyses of the state such as that of Carol Brown (1981) or Ann Ferguson (1989).
11 James Bohman’s work (2005) on the concept of the demos and its developments in Habermas and
Habermasians clarifies the importance of the distinction between a “people” and the “demos” or “demoi.”
 between democracy and violence 109

In his 1999 “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legal-
ity and Morality,” Habermas cautiously yet unequivocally defends NATO’s
intervention in Yugoslavia. NATO began bombing Serb targets on March 24,
1999 after the failure of the United States envoy, Richard Holbrooke’s, last visit
to Belgrade, where he attempted to convince Slobodan Milosevic, President of
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to agree to NATO’s terms with regard to
Kosovo. NATO was ready to intervene in Kosovo since September 24, 1998
after the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1199 calling for
cessation of hostilities on all sides. Hostilities did not stop and for the next six
months NATO threatened the Serbs with intervention while the war between the
Serbs and the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo was resulting in a humanitarian cri-
sis as the Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing, both massacring ethnic Albanians
and expelling them from Kosovo. On March 15 the ethnic Albanians agreed to
a ceasefire and autonomy within a confederation with the Serbs, which would
be protected by NATO forces. On March 22 the Serbs escalated the war with
the shelling of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, from which later in March the Serbs
expelled more than 100,000 people.12 NATO ended its bombing campaign on
June 11, 1999. As of the time of this writing, NATO forces are still active in
Kosovo, which declared its independence on February 17, 2008.13
Objections to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo were quite common, espe-
cially on the Left, which in the United States and elsewhere was and has tended
to remain suspicious of NATO’s interventions anywhere as a possible cover for
self-interested Western deployment of military forces intended, for example, to
project force in order to secure the expropriation of other people’s resources.
The Left has also been critical of the legality and morality of NATO’s action
when taken as independent of possible machinations by the United States.14
Habermas attends to a specific version of the debates about Kosovo as they
were developing in the Federal Republic of Germany, the parties to which he
classifies as “pacifists by conviction” and “legal pacifists” (Habermas 1999,
p. 264). According to Habermas, these debates resemble those elsewhere in
West European countries and in some sense are internal to the Left since at
stake in these debates is which version of the two main Leftist kinds of paci-
fisms should prevail in the international arena.
German “pacifists by conviction” opposed NATO’s intervention in Kosovo
on principle. German “legal pacifists” supported NATO’s intervention in
Kosovo and the sending of German troops as part of a NATO force (KFOR)

12 The Serb attack on Pristina constituted an escalation in a war between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs
that began with the growing Serb oppression of Kosovar Albanians in 1987.
13 Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia ending talks about its status that began in
2006. The UN Security Council is adjusting its presence in Kosovo to the facts on the ground. NATO’s Kosovo
Force (KFOR) is still empowered by the UN to operate in Kosovo.
14 See Johnstone (2002, 2008) for a discussion of the United States and European stakes in Kosovo and
from a different perspective that affirms questions of legality see Rodely and Çali (2007).
110 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

to intervene in Kosovo.15 Habermas aligns himself with the “legal pacifists.”

“Legal pacifism” is a position whose ancestry Habermas traces to Immanuel
Kant and the project of “perpetual peace,” which, according to Habermas, Kant
predicates on the legalization of international affairs. For Kant, the legaliza-
tion in question is different from the one achieved by classical international
law, which has left states in at least a semi if not total “state of nature” with
respect to each other, hence in a perpetual state of war, which, if not actual,
then is always around the corner and waiting to erupt.16 What the legalization
of international affairs is supposed to achieve is the elimination of the interna-
tional “state of nature” and the establishment of perpetual peace and, Haber-
mas claims as a result, that the Kantian account of international law is intended
to defend a cosmopolitan order that results from states coming together into a
permanent federation. For Kant, Habermas believes, it is the coming together
into a permanent affiliation that secures perpetual peace.
Kant, according to Habermas, does not explain how the permanence of
the federation of states on which perpetual peace depends, “can be guaranteed
without the legally binding character of an institution analogous to a state con-
stitution” (Habermas 1998, p. 169). He then moves to amend Kant and asserts
that “cosmopolitan law must be institutionalized in such a way that it is bind-
ing on the individual governments” (1998, p. 179). For Habermas this ensures
compliance with the agreements that states enter as they form a cosmopoli-
tan order because with law comes the threat of sanctions. The UN Charter,
Habermas suggests, exemplifies an agreement that at once forms a common
organization of states, all agreeing to the outlawing of offensive violence and to
law-bound imposition of sanctions, including, if needed, the initiation of mili-
tary action, when the peace that the member states of the UN constitute with
their agreement with each other is breached or even just threatened.
Habermas amends Kant’s ideas in yet another way. Kant did not think of
individuals as subjects of cosmopolitan law. According to Habermas, however,
cosmopolitan law grants individuals an “unmediated membership in the asso-
ciation of free and equal world citizens” (1998, p. 181). The upshot of this is that
individual rights get protected by cosmopolitan law, and Habermas again finds
steps by the UN that exemplify at least a striving toward the goal of protecting
individual human rights, such as the UN Charter’s imposition on member
states to promote and respect human rights.

15 According to KFOR documents, in April 2008, 2374 German troops were serving as part of the KFOR
multinational force. This is a considerably smaller number than that of KFOR German troops in 1999, which
according to gobalsecurity.org was 8500. Globalsecurity.org notes that the 1999 Kosovar involvement of the
German military was the first time after WWII that so many German troops were deployed outside of Germany.
After 1999, Germany continued to send troops to act militarily outside Germany. Thus, German troops are part
of the NATO forces in Afghanistan. Though the United States requested German troops for its 2003-led Iraq
war, it was refused and there are no German troops in Iraq.
16 This is a Hobbesian reading. Habermas does, however, point out that Kant was a careful reader of
Hobbes (Habermas 2004, 110).
 between democracy and violence 111

With his two amendments of Kant, Habermas revises and updates Kan-
tian “legal pacifism” in such a way that it allows him to discriminate between
kinds of military actions that are initiated by states that claim to act to protect
the peace or on behalf of human rights. The United States-led 2003 invasion
of Iraq fails to meet Habermas’s criteria while NATO’s military humanitarian
intervention in Kosovo in 1999 meets them. Habermas is aware that the times
are “transitional” and there is no “cosmopolitan order” proper since there are
not enough agreements and not enough legislation that can be thought of
as part of “cosmopolitan law” and there are only a handful of transnational
institutions that fit together to form the needed institutional framework of a
“cosmopolitan order.” The spottiness of the “cosmopolitan order” complicates
the assessment of military actions independently of the rhetoric used to justify
them. Nonetheless, Habermas claims, under the current conditions in which
one has “to act as though there were already a fully institutionalized global
civil society, the very promotion of which is the intention of the action” one
is not forced “to accept the maxim that victims are to be left at the mercy of
thugs” (1999, pp. 270–271). Invoking necessity in Kosovo due to the transfor-
mation of the local civil war into one in which ethnic cleansing is becoming
common, Habermas asserts that “[w]hen nothing else is possible, neighbor-
ing democratic states should be allowed to rush to provide emergency help as
legitimated by international law” (1999, p. 271).
Habermas carefully warns against the generalization of NATO’s self-
authorization. Cases should be examined in their historical specificity. Whether
or not one can invoke “necessity” to justify military action in other cases remains
an open question. A historically specific analysis of Iraq in 2003 and the kind
of threat it posed points out that the preponderance of the evidence suggests
that the invocation of “necessity” fails in the case of Iraq. This is because in the
case of Iraq, the United States has been playing the role of a hegemon as well as
acting in violation of international law since “[t]here was neither an appropriate
resolution of the Security Council, nor was an attack imminent on the part of
Iraq” (Habermas 2004, p. 102).

Junctions and Distinctions

Habermas’s and Young’s positions are not as far apart from each other as
they may seem at first glance. They both set “perpetual peace” as their hori-
zon. They are both cosmopolitan, at least in the sense that they both believe in
the need for transnational cooperation, transnational institutions, and trans-
national law. They both also see some international treaties and institutions,
such as the UN Charter and the UN as buds of a possible future cosmopolitan
organization of the world’s peoples. All of this is important since it means
that Young’s and Habermas’s sense of how nonideal the political environment
112 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

within which violence is currently deployed in public affairs is similar, though

the specific vocabularies that they use differ from each other. And yet, Young
and Habermas disagree about NATO’s military humanitarian intervention in
Kosovo. For me the importance of the disagreement is that it points at what
I think are utopian elements in Young’s thinking.
Young’s and Habermas’s disagreement concerns the justification of
NATO’s intervention. Habermas appeals to “legal pacifism” as a realistic though
still utopian possibility and so takes the lack of a properly functional “cosmo-
politan order” seriously. For him there is a compelling need to act nonetheless
and respond to a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo that, given Serbia’s conduct
in Bosnia Herzegovina, could be expected to get worse, at the same time that
one could not expect Serbia to respond to any sanctions that did not involve
the deployment of violence. Young appeals primarily to the consequences of
NATO’s military humanitarian intervention and finds them too costly in terms
of human life and suffering, long-term damage to infrastructure, and envi-
ronmental contamination. She concludes that, “despite its allegedly noble pur-
poses . . . the NATO war was wrong” (2007, p. 104).
Young’s opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo involves suspicions
of the kind that Habermas tries to displace by positioning NATO’s intervention
in the context of a developing “cosmopolitan order.” But even if his move fails
and her suspicion is warranted, there is still the question of a response to a devel-
oping humanitarian crisis—to what ought to be done when, to use Habermas’s
phrase, “thugs” take over. Young’s appeal to only the consequences of NATO’s
military humanitarian intervention is surprising when considering this ques-
tion. She claims that she does so given what she learned from Arendt. But,
she learned from Arendt to ask about alternatives to a turn to violence and ask
about them in terms of their relation to power—its generation, renewal, aug-
mentation, or institutional stabilization. Young does say that NATO’s turn to
violence indicates an “impotence” or, to use my preferred expression, “power
deficit” because power is effective on its own terms. What she does not do is
ask whether in the situation that unfolded in Kosovo by 1999, it was possible
for anyone to intervene nonviolently and effectively and generate the kind of
power that would have successfully stopped the Serbs from continuing with
their “ethnic cleansing.”
I believe that were Young to have asked the question that she did not ask,
she could not have condemned NATO’s military humanitarian intervention
in Kosovo, though its costs were quite high. In part this is because there is a
parallel between this question and the one Habermas poses since at issue for
him is the quality of the response to a crisis and the learning that takes place
when democracies come together to respond to a humanitarian crisis, a learn-
ing that he believes moves them one step closer to the kind of cooperation that
marks a “cosmopolitan order.” Were Young to have asked the question her
way, she would have had to return to Arendt and On Violence where Arendt
 between democracy and violence 113

endorses the use of violence when power is threatened by violence because

Arendt recognized that power cannot resist violence but will be crushed by it.
“Violence,” says Arendt, “can always destroy power” and “[i]n a head-on clash
between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt” (Arendt 1969,
p. 53) More generally, Arendt endorses the use of violence against violence.
Young is, of course, right, and Arendt’s endorsement is qualified and requires
that one assess whether there are alternatives to, as well as ask about the scope
and the consequences of, violence. Yet, Arendt does not exclude a turn to vio-
lence merely because the costs in life and suffering are high.
Young could have asked the question equipped with her feminist analysis
of protection. Was NATO’s military humanitarian intervention in Kosovo femi-
nizing? Of course if the suspicion that NATO was the United States’ proxy is
right, then Habermas too would have to object to it, even if not thinking like a
feminist, since as a hegemon the United States is projecting force when offer-
ing protection and force-based protection can disempower those protected. But,
the suspicion is wrong, at least in part. The United States is a declining hege-
mon and cannot cause NATO countries to simply implement its will. NATO
could not have acted if NATO member countries did not agree to the action. All
of the member countries are democracies where the action was debated openly.
NATO’s action, in this respect, represents a deployment of violence by power
that is justified by the compelling importance of intervening with violence and
in Kosovo’s case, a violence of a particularly pernicious kind.
Still, given Young’s analysis of the “security state,” and the threat of a gen-
eralized disempowering feminization, one cannot not wonder about the kind of
protection that NATO could even offer via its military humanitarian interven-
tion in Kosovo. As long as the “cosmopolitan order” that Habermas envisions
is so spotty and as long as the transnational “impotence” or “power deficit” that
Young is concerned with is extensive, no protective use of violence in the inter-
national arena, no matter how strong its justification, can be accepted without
deep worries about its disempowering effects.
I am, however, not sure that one could claim that NATO’s presence in
Kosovo has had mostly disempowering effects. Indeed, at the face of it, given
its many and quite different kinds of tasks since 1999, NATO’s presence in
Kosovo seems to have had mostly positive effects. NATO, as I pointed out ear-
lier, is still deployed in Kosovo. KFOR has 16,000 soldiers operating out of
multiple bases and constituting the military/police force in Kosovo. But the
projection of a credible threat of violence is not all that NATO does in Kosovo.
As described by KFOR, KFOR tasks:

have included assistance with the return or relocation of displaced

persons and refugees; reconstruction and de-mining; medical
assistance; security and public order; security of ethnic minorities;
protection of patrimonial sites; border security; interdiction of
114 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

cross-border weapons smuggling; implementation of a Kosovo-wide

weapons, ammunition and explosives amnesty program; weapons
destruction; and support for the establishment of civilian institutions,
law and order, the judicial and penal system, the electoral process
and other aspects of the political, economic and social life of the
province. Special attention continues to be paid to the protection
of minorities; this includes regular patrols near minority enclaves,
checkpoints, escorts for minority groups, protection of heritage sites
such as monasteries, and donations including food, clothes and
school supplies. (KFOR 2008)
KFOR tasks have this far remained unchanged by Kosovo’s declaration of inde-
pendence in February 2008.

Cautious Justifications

By including KFOR’s post-bombing presence in Kosovo as part of what I am

taking as NATO’s military humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, I am creating
the possibility of expanding on the consequences that are considered when
analyzing the justificatory trajectory of a military humanitarian intervention.
With Young and Habermas, I too believe that current military humanitarian
interventions of the kind that took and are still taking place in Kosovo, occur
in a nonideal world with a large international “power deficit” but, nonetheless,
a world that is not merely in an anarchic “state of nature.” As imperfect as
the UN, The African Union, Arab League, ASEAN, EU, NATO, The Shang-
hai Cooperation Organization, and other regional governance and security
organizations and their charters and treaties may be, and as imperfect as their
members are, they offer a limited way to mount some military humanitarian
interventions in some humanitarian crises.
A military humanitarian intervention can be conceived very narrowly as
beginning and ending with the actual uses of violence by the military forces
engaging in the intervention in question. I am recommending a wider under-
standing that includes what a military does after its major direct uses of vio-
lence17 during a military humanitarian intervention. A military humanitarian
intervention has a temporal dimension that stretches beyond the cessation of
major violent action and could even be conceived as beginning before major
violent action begins, say when the threat of a military humanitarian interven-
tion becomes credible enough.

17 As loath as I am to use a phrase resembling President George W. Bush announcement about the end of
“major hostilities” in Iraq in April 2003, whoever thought the phrase up was quite insightful, if what they aimed
to capture is the simple fact on the ground that in the new conditions of war, at least for a while even a successful
military is unable to bring to a complete cessation of violence.
 between democracy and violence 115

A wider understanding of what counts as a military humanitarian interven-

tion means the conception of its consequences must change accordingly and
such consequences go beyond the calculus of foreseeable suffering and harm
that are prevented and caused when a major violent action takes place. This
means that jus post bellum, postwar justice, is as important when considering a
military humanitarian intervention as is jus ad bellum, the justice of engaging
in war, and jus in bello, the justice of the conduct of a war.
Concerns about jus post bellum have entered the discourse of just war of
late, though as Brian Orend (2004) argues, Immanuel Kant had them in mind
when writing Perpetual Peace. Orend also offers several jus post bellum principles
that call for a fair and public settlement of violent conflicts, the vindication of
violated rights, appropriate punishment of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and rights
violations, restitution, and rehabilitation (2002). What I think one can add to
Orend’s list is a Young-inspired question about the extent to which the meet-
ing of the principles he suggests also empowers in the strong Arendtian sense,
thus a question about the generation, renewal, augmentation, and stabilization
of people’s power, that Young relies on. Jus post bellum principles should be this
demanding rather than minimalist in their interpretation.
It is, I think, Young’s unique contribution to the discussion of military
humanitarian intervention that she situates it squarely in relation to the Arend-
tian distinction between power and violence and so opens a space to rethink
it in terms of a justificatory trajectory that includes questions about the rela-
tion of violence and power among the consequential considerations that are
taken into account when assessing a military humanitarian intervention. As
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work (2000, 2004) suggests, if one does
not take the question of empowerment seriously, when approving of a mili-
tary humanitarian intervention, one may be contributing to the formation of
an imperial sovereignty that is maintained and expanded among other ways
through apparently justifiable military humanitarian interventions.18 Impe-
rial sovereignty is easily confused with cosmopolitan law and order. However,
where cosmopolitan law and order, understood in Habermasian terms that are
filtered through and modified by Arendtian-inspired Youngian terms, stabilize
power, imperial law and order undermine it. Hardt and Negri are formulaically
optimistic19, believing that because people are the source of their own power,
they do and will continue to generate forms of power through their resistance
to imperial sovereignty. Young too is optimistic but she is much more cau-
tious than Hardt and Negri. For her resistance as such is not enough and the

18 I think Hardt and Negri oversimplify the current conjecture. However, their work is useful nonetheless
since it provides a way to think about the abuses of “law and order” by authorities and elites beyond the national
boundaries to which work on the United State’s imperial presidency (for example, Schlesinger 2004; Savage
2008) is confined.
19 I refer to Hardt and Negri’s optimism regarding people’s power as “formulaic” since it seems to reflect
in very modified form the Marxist hopes for a proletariat revolution.
116 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

mark of a democratic power generating resistance is the resistors taking of

responsibility for justice. While I agree with her on this point, I also, unlike
her, argue that sometimes military humanitarian interventions are required,
as in the case of NATO and Yugoslavia, provided that there is jus post bellum in
the military occupation that follows that allows citizens who resisted the former
government a way to democratically empower themselves in the government
which follows.
 10
4

Engendering [In]Security and Terror:

On the “Protection Racket” of Security
States

Margaret Denike

Animating Iris Marion Young’s writings on social justice are questions con-
cerning power—questions such as what power is; what forms it takes; how it
operates in different contexts; how it produces or modifies behaviors; how it
works in ways that limit individuals’ actions and capacities; and generally, how
it organizes the structural injustices lived by members of social groups in con-
temporary Western societies. They guide her critical assessment of mainstream
concepts of injustice, and her efforts to sketch frameworks for social policy and
law reform initiatives that such concepts inform. Collectively, her essays pro-
vide multifaceted theoretical frameworks and practical approaches to relations
of power and justice that are invaluable as a resource for theories of sexual,
racial, socioeconomic, and other forms of differentiation, discrimination, and
domination, as well as for strategies of progressive social policy reform.
Drawing on several writings that span her career, and focusing on her
recent publications on the modalities of power that operate in post-9/11
“security states,”1 and particularly in the United States, this chapter elu-
cidates her efforts to think of power relations as a matter of justice/injus-
tice, formulated in terms of relations of domination and subordination,
organized structurally and systematically in patterns that sustain norma-
tive relations and gender and other group-based hierarchies and systems
of exclusion and marginalization. Specifically, I trace her interest in, and
application of, what she refers to as Michel Foucault’s “paradigm shifting”
accounts of productive and disciplinary power, that is, of the approach that

1 Young defines a “security state” as one “whose rulers subordinate citizens to ad hoc surveillance, search,
or detention and suppress criticism of such arbitrary power, justifying such measures as within the prerogative
of those authorities whose primary duty is to maintain security and protect the people” (2003, p. 8).
118 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

has reverberated widely in feminist and queer theories on the nature of

the normative—and especially heteronormative—institutional, disciplinary
practices that engender the body’s movements, comportment, desires, and
that shape, manage, and determine behavior in accordance with certain het-
erosexual norms.
In the first part of this chapter, I trace Young’s similar considerations
before exploring how these analyses play out in her later work on the institu-
tions and public policies of states that talk incessantly about terror, that mobi-
lize fear, that make monsters out of its alleged enemies, and that promise
protection from the danger they create. For Young, these tactics of “mascu-
linist protectionism” are heteronormative apparatuses that organize rela-
tions between men, women, and children; and among others, between docile
patriots and imagined enemies. In reflecting on her analysis of the machi-
nations of security states, such as these, I briefly consider its application to
different moments and expressions of antiterrorist discourses and policies,
dancing through contemporary scenes and attending to recursive effects of
the proliferation of “terror” within them. To extend the reach of Young’s
paradigm of the protectionist, disciplinary power of security states in these
scenes, and to complicate an account of their effects, I draw on other cultural,
legal, and policy analyses of terrorism discourses, and particularly that of
Jasbir Puar (2007) on the racist, imperialist, Islamophobic, and “homonor-
mative” (Duggan 2002, cited in Puar 2007, p. 21) demarcations of “terrorist
assemblages.”

Moving Beyond the Distributive Paradigm

Throughout her work, Young returns to Michel Foucault’s critical approach to

technologies of modern disciplinary power, which inflect her concern with the
restrictive ways that power is, and has been, theorized, be it in terms of distri-
bution (Young 1990a) or as force/domination (Young 2003). Guiding such
inquiries is a commitment to social justice and legal reform, and to formulat-
ing practical approaches and policy alternatives to identifying, articulating, and
remedying the injustices that certain forms of power exacerbate. This entails
exposing how we conceive of and metaphorize injustice—often as the acts of
an individual perpetrator or as the unethical distribution of goods—impedes
our ability to see the faces of oppression or get a sense of our complicity in
producing them, much less find a way, through strategies of legal and policy
reform, to advance social equality in a contemporary political climate and insti-
tutional context that has been eroding them.
As Young argues in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a), the prin-
ciples of justice that dominate contemporary political philosophy are typically
 engendering [in]security and terror 119

construed within a “distributive paradigm,” which tends to dwell on the alloca-

tion and distribution of material goods and, in doing so, to reify the substan-
tive elements of social justice and ignore the social and institutional contexts
that determine the patterns and processes of distribution in the first instance
(Young 1990a, p. 15). These institutional designs, we might add, are built on
exclusions, such that the possessions and entitlements provided for some peo-
ple at once legitimize the exclusion, marginalization, and expulsion of others,
and notably, as I discuss below, sexual and racial minorities who are “disidenti-
fied” (Puar 2007) with nationhood and citizenship. We’ve seen this in West-
ern imperialist states that are preoccupied with terror: with the pursuit of the
security of some comes heightened racism, institutionalized racial profiling;
heightened restrictions for immigrants and refugees; a proliferation of excep-
tional justifications for the use of military force; detainments and extraordi-
nary renditions of “suspects”; and the suspension of human rights protections.
To get at those contexts and conditions of the institutionalization of such pat-
terns and their impact on the autonomy, opportunities, freedoms, and capaci-
ties of members of different social groups, distribution is not a useful starting
point (Young 1990a, pp. 25–26).
To capture the conditions and causes of social inequality, Young’s Justice
and the Politics of Difference (1990a) gives us what amounts to a composite defi-
nition of power as relations of domination and subordination between agents
and among actions (Wartenburg 1989), organized structurally and operating
systemically (Hartsock 1983), through economic, social, and cultural institu-
tions (Frye 1983) to form social hierarchies, or to exclude or constrain people—
paradigmatically women—from making decisions or determining their own
actions (Gould 1988), and expressed through exploitation, marginalization,
powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (Young 1990a). Moreover,
power “circulates,” as Foucault characterized it, through a “productive network
which runs through the whole social body,” constituting forms of knowledge,
producing subjects and discourses, and inducing pleasure (Foucault 1980,
p. 119; cited in Young 1990a). It is this productive, disciplinary apparatus of
power that guides Young’s exposure of injustices of gender formations and
hierarchies that are produced through the institutions and practices of security
states, and in which “we” are often complicit.
A decade later, in “Lived Body vs. Gender” ([2002] 2005a), with attention
to “complicity” of different actors in producing relations of domination, Young
further argues that a structural account of power is needed to explain what it
is that effects different opportunities and privileges, when and where it turns
on axes of gender, and “how and why certain patterns in the allocation of tasks
or status recognition remain persistent in ways that limit the options of many
women and most people whose sexual and intimate choices deviate from het-
erosexual norms” ([2002] 2005a, p. 22). She focuses this analysis on how the
120 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

body “lives out” its positioning in social structures and hierarchies of power;
how it lives the division of labor, relations of desire, norms of sexuality, and
hierarchies of power ([2002] 2005a, pp. 25–26); and how and where it encoun-
ters differences in opportunities and access to resources. Such a framework
and focal point bring into view the “institutional valuations” ([2002] 2005a,
p. 24) that are reflected in and reinforced by discriminatory norms, laws, and
policies that foster and privilege heterosexual relations through the allocation
of obligations and entitlements, such as to insurance, inheritance, custody or
access to children, or even citizenship, on the basis of marital status and/or
sexual orientation. For Young, such measures condition heteronormative hier-
archies of power that limit the capacities and constrain the decision-making
and actions of women and sexual minorities. These relations and processes are
fostered and sustained by predictable and unanticipated complicities, includ-
ing, for instance, our participation in punitive approaches to those who fare
badly against invariably racialized ideals of appropriate care-giving, such as
drug-addicted mothers, or in the formal equality marriage campaigns of gay
and lesbian organizations that emulate this traditionally heterosexual institu-
tion and seek entitlement to “the same” cultural practices. In her discussion
and analysis of how such operations make manifest “protectionist” forms of
patriarchal power, Young further addresses the complicities of different indi-
viduals—the saviors and those who are grateful to be saved—in organizing and
sustaining such heteronormative relations of power. I take up this question in
the following section.

The Machinations of the “Security State”

As with her earlier analyses of various issues of justice, Young’s recent work on
the protectionism of security states aims to expose the modalities and relations
of heteronormative disciplinary power that have proliferated since 9/11 and
that find men and women complicit in sustaining gender and racial hierarchies
and practices of exclusion and marginalization. In her 2003 essay on the sub-
ject, Young’s exploration into what she calls the “masculinist protection racket”
of states that are preoccupied with “security” follows a line of inquiry that is
in keeping with her longstanding interest in coming to terms with variations
of how power and injustice are organized in different contexts. She describes
the “protectionist racket” exemplified by the United States since the Fall of
2001, which promises to pursue justice and provide security against the “ene-
mies” that it locates both outside the state’s borders and within them. There
is a certain colonizing, “gendered logic” (2003, p. 2) at work in the discourses
and practices of state security, which deploys fear through tales of imminent
threats; trades the promise of protection for fear-ridden gratitude; mobilizes
military force against its mythic enemies; normalizes legal exceptionalism and
 engendering [in]security and terror 121

authoritarian power over its citizens; and produces docile subjects and good
patriots, subordinate and obedient women and children, ideally kept in the safe
haven of the home (Young 2003, pp. 3–4).
Such forms of protectionist power, Young remarked in 2003, had received
comparatively little attention in feminist analyses, which, in the context of inter-
national justice claims, often finds masculine power metaphorized through
the trope of sexual predator or tyrant of the sort that enslaves and brutalizes
women.2 Against such figures, current security regimes enlist that of the coura-
geous, responsible, virtuous protector of the home and homeland (2003, p. 4).
Under the “masculinist protection racket,” she notes, “good” men who
make clear their allegiance to the nation and its imperialist or cosmopolitan
military initiatives and economic objectives are readied for the call to save
the weak and vulnerable (i.e., women and children) from tyranny and terror
(i.e., Islamic fundamentalist “regimes”). Their benevolence is constituted in
relation to the evil other and the threat that they pose to “homeland security.”
In this logic, as Young argues, “virtuous masculinity depends on its constitutive
relation to the presumption of the evil of the others” (2003, p. 13), while at once
constituting what even counts as virtue, and who does and does not get to have it.
This is facilitated by state-authored discourses, media coverage, and campaigns
of often well-intentioned NGOs that talk incessantly about the enemy threats
that exist within the state and beyond its borders, or about the greater sexism
and homophobia of Islamic cultures, the injustices of Muslim law, and their
willingness to resort to torture and execution for the slightest offences.3

The Enemy Outside: Justifying the Use of Force

Exemplified by the U.S.-led “war on terror,” the security state, as Young char-
acterized it, constitutes itself in relation to “an unpredictable aggressor against
which the state needs vigilant defense.” Faced with its enemy, “it organizes
political and economic capacities around the accumulation of weapons and the
mobilization of a military to respond to this outside threat” (2003, p. 8). It finds
expression in the fear-mongering tough talk of the enemies’ “weapons of mass
destruction,” postulations of vast and hidden international terrorist networks that
extend well beyond the mythic “axis of evil” and that pose a “grave and growing
danger” to “good citizens” and more obtusely, to “freedom.”4 This paternalistic

2 Since 2003, there has been a remarkable proliferation of feminist analysis of terrorism discourses and
the tactics and policies of security states. See, for example, Orford (2003), Hawthorne and Winter (2003), Spivak
(2004), Razak (2004), Chinkin, Wright, and Charlesworth (2005), Engle (2004; 2005), Powell (2005), Kapur
(2006), Puar (2007), and Schueller (2007).
3 See, for example, the campaigns of the Feminist Majority in the United States, for the treatment of
women in Afghanistan, and those of the U.K. GLBT organization, Outrage!, on the treatment of gays in Iran.
4 State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, President Bush notoriously claimed: “States like these
[Iraq, Iran, North Korea] constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world.” At http://www.
whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129- 11.html.
122 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

state power, Young suggests, “gets its support partly from the unity a threat
produces and our gratitude for protection” (Young 2003, 2). Moreover, the talk
of such threats, including the prospect of imminent terrorist attacks by these
enemies, and the political and military response to them, have effectively inau-
gurated a “state of emergency” and legal exceptionalism (Agamben 2005)—a
circumstance that, as Giorgio Agamben has argued, is hardly exceptional at
all, considering that legal exceptionalism has invariably been the operative
paradigm and norm of modern capitalist governments that aim to circumvent
democratic accountability. Consider for example “exceptional measures,” such
as President Bush’s Military Order,5 sweepingly suspension of humanitarian
and human rights laws and norms in the name of enhancing security; where
the “Commander and Chief” of the so-called “war” and members of its admin-
istration, offer moral justifications (such as fighting “evil”) for the unauthorized
armed invasions of sovereign states and for the treatment of their detainees and
prisoners. The creation and deployment of terrorist threats and promises of
protection have worked to normalize countless reversals to pre-existing social
justice policies and practices, and to target, criminalize, demonize, disenfran-
chise, detain, and deport Muslim and Arabic immigrants and refugees. In the
space of lawlessness, new legal regimes and chilling policies have emerged,
such as those that have legitimized racial profiling; substantiated draconian
reforms to immigration law; and established detention camps outside of the
jurisdiction of U.S. constitutional protections. Not surprisingly, these develop-
ments have confirmed for several contemporary commentators that violence,
and particularly war, is the “father of law,” the “foundation of most state sover-
eigns and their legal systems” (Douzinas 2002, p. 24), the modus operandi of
imperialism, since so much of it is written in its blood.6
Consider, for example, how the very talk of such life-annihilating threats
have conjured support, even among human rights organizations, for the inno-
vative policy of the “preemptive” use of force against states that allegedly “har-
bor” terrorists, as was introduced in Bush’s National Security Strategy (2002b),
however much such a policy directly contravenes the explicit prohibitions on
such force under international law and convention.7 Dressed in the rhetoric of
self-defense, that is, in the only terms accepted under the Charter of the United
Nations as a justification for states to resort to armed force against others, it
feigns to represent its violation of the global prohibition on military aggression

5 Military Order of 13 November 2001, Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the
War against Terrorism, 66 Fed. Reg. 57,833 (2001).
6 For various contemporary articulations of this thesis of Carl Schmitt, see Derrida (1992); Balibar (2002);
Douzinas (2002), Anghie (2004), and Agamben (2005).
7 Article 1(1) of the Charter of the United Nations (1945) states that the primary purpose of the United
Nations is to “maintain international peace and security.” Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter states that,
“(a)ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the
United Nations.”
 engendering [in]security and terror 123

as a response to an act of war (which never occurred); in doing so it masquerades

its military aggression as an act of freedom and justice while deflecting its own
violence onto its target population. Paternalist protectionism is most effective
in garnering gratitude when its own violent origins and imperial motivations
are somewhat concealed.
Although Young didn’t have much to say on the historical reverberations
of these expressions of antiterrorism, the protection racket employs time-
honored tactics of Western imperialism, including its cultural, economic, and
legal colonization through its promise to tame the savage/terrorist and to liber-
ate its victims. As Anthony Anghie has observed, it is principally through the
ethos of racism and the language of self-defense that “the ‘other’ is constructed,
excluded from the realm of law, attacked, liberated, defeated, and transformed”
(2004, p. 278). The war on terror is illustrative of a “dynamic of difference”
that historically characterizes the “making of international law” (Anghie 2004,
p. 274), created through the confrontation of Western European states with the
“barbarians”: the imperialist initiatives locate, sanction, and transform these
enemy others, set aside existing laws, thus generating new doctrines, typically
on sovereignty and the use of force. The consequences are so far-reaching as to
effectively inaugurate a “dramatic shift in the character of law,” a new interna-
tional jurisprudence of “national security” that “recreates the sort of Hobbesian
universe whose defining character is fear, and which will be based on the right
of the world’s one superpower, the U.S., to wage unilateral, preemptive war,
rather than the system of the U.N.” (Anghie 2004, p. 301).
As an example of the effects of the exceptionalism of the protection racket
and its imperial self-interest, consider the Bush Administration’s approach
to the treatment of what they have dubbed “enemy combatants,” named as
such to distinguish them from the “prisoners of war” that they are, i.e., from
those persons detained in the context of an armed conflict whose treatment
is explicitly governed by the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. In his
notorious 2002 memo to President Bush, Alberto Gonzales reasoned that
such international conventions are obsolete and should not apply to prison-
ers held at Guantanamo Bay, since doing so would “impose strict limitations
on questioning [i.e., of torture] of enemy prisoners” (Gonzales [2002] 2004,
pp. 122–123). After all, this “new” war, Gonzales reasoned, is not the “traditional
clash between nations adhering to the laws of war that formed the backdrop of
the Geneva Convention for Prisoners of War” (p. 123). It is, rather, as Presi-
dent Bush described it in the U.S. National Security Strategy (2002b) a “battle
for civilization.”8 As both the U.S. and Australian governments persisted in
arguing through to the U.S. Supreme Court in the first challenges brought by
the prisoners detained under Bush’s so-called “Executive Order,” basic human
rights, such as the right to be apprised of the reasons for arrest and detention,

8 George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Sept. 17, 2002).
124 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

to legal counsel, or to a public hearing do not apply.9 The enemy is so threaten-

ing that there is no time for law, no room for human rights protections.
It is by constructing these monsters out of Muslim men and teens, demon-
izing these “terrible threats to the civilized world” (Bush 2002b) in such hyper-
bolic terms, and trading on racist fear and hatred, that the security state can
introduce the most regressive and draconian measures to reverse social policy
while making the magnitude of such regression less apparent by casting itself
in protectionist terms “on the side of freedom,” prepared to save civilization
and to liberate those victims suffering the brutality of “rogue regimes.”
In creating its evil/enemy other the protection racket has tapped the cam-
paigns and taken on the rhetoric of feminist and human rights organiza-
tions to recast its objectives of economic imperialism as a mission to liberate
the innocents of the repressive regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq. Visions of
women suffering under Taliban rule and Muslim law, typically cribbed from
feminist human rights campaigns, have been an effective tactic of projecting
barbaric cruelty onto a culture of savages while preserving tropes of “fight-
ing the good fight” of “humanitarian” war for the military action of Western
states (Chandler 2002, p. 158). Generally speaking, this dynamic of West-
ern “humanitarianism,” and its protectionist posturing, as Anne Orford has
noted, masks their role in contributing to their plight, and works to erase the
violence of intervening states or the “international community” and to divert
attention from the fact that, despite using such women as a justification for
war, the reforms to immigration policies that tighten the nation’s borders
and create new obstacles for refugee claims, prevent the very Muslim women
who symbolize the nobility and integrity of the cause of the war, from seeking
asylum as refugees (Orford 2003, pp. 187–190).
The engendered colonization of the Muslim women’s “docile bodies” is
instrumental to the racism of protectionist logic: representations and stereo-
types of women as subjugated victims of Muslim tyrants are part and parcel
of the benevolent posturing of protectionist power, as much as they are of
the demonization of the enemy/oppressor from whom the victims need to be
saved. As many feminist writers have noted, the liberation of Muslim women
was frequently touted as a justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and the
eradication of the Taliban regime. The deployment of stereotypical imagery

9 Two U.S. citizens who were alleged to have been involved in terrorism were labeled “enemy combat-
ants,” detained, not charged with any crime, and denied access to counsel. See Padilla v. Rumsfeld, 352 F.3d 695
(2d Cir. 2003), cert. granted, 124 S. Ct. 1353 (2004); Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 316 F.3d 450 (2d Cir. 2003), cert. granted,
124 S. Ct. 981 (2004). The Executive Branch also held uncharged combatants arrested in Afghanistan in indefinite
detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While the Bush Administration held that the rights granted to U.S. citizens
to be apprised of the reasons for detention and entitled to legal counsel did not extend to the extra-territorial sites
like Cuba, the U.S. Supreme Court did not agree: much to the seeming surprise of the government, in the sum-
mer of 2004, in Rasul v. Bush the United States Supreme Court decided 6:3 that the habeus corpus jurisdiction of
the Federal Courts extended to those detained at Guantanamo Bay. See Roach and Trotter (2005, p. 1012).
 engendering [in]security and terror 125

of the helpless Muslim women, oppressed by a cruel and backward culture,

typically veiled, languishing in silence, was quick to become an icon of the
enemy’s evil, and a moral justification for the protectionist actions of their law-
less Western saviors.10
And while the “protection racket” turns heroes out of the masculine saviors
of these women, all the talk of their liberation and of their first taste of freedom
diverts attention from the damage that the devastation of armed conflict does to
their security: faces and voices that speak of material reality of the terror of the
U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are silenced by all of the talk of how
much better off they are once they are “saved.” As we know, women are eco-
nomically devastated by armed conflict, through the imposition of sanctions
and diversion of resources into the war, the loss of homes through the sale
or destruction of property; and the shortage of food and water supplies, shel-
ter, healthcare, and sanitation (Gardam and Jarvis 2000, p. 32). Women also
shoulder the burden of caring for the casualties of war, including abandoned or
orphaned children, typically in female-headed households, despite the fact that
women’s lack of education and training make it difficult for them to support
themselves and their families (p. 30). Such impacts are part and parcel of what
Young describes as the structural relations that operate along axes of gender,
that exacerbate social inequality in all patriarchal cultures, including those of
Western security states, that deprive women of the means to fully exercise their
capacities. The effects of the norms and policies that engender such work are
compounded and exacerbated by protectionism’s glorification of military vio-
lence, and the patriotism, nationalism, and racism that is produced by it.

The Enemy Within: Racial Profiling

The security state is characterized by Young to be preoccupied as well with
“the enemy within,” an enemy that is hidden among us, requiring vigilance
and collaboration in surveillance, scrutiny, reporting of “abnormal behavior,”
especially in public space and institutions, and, we might add, particularly when
they involve Islamic subjects, whether loners or participants in organized oppo-
sition or vocalized dissent to imperialist foreign policies. The prospect of hid-
den conspiracies and/or terrorists in our midst is a common narrative that, in
mobilizing fear of a local and immediate threat, enlists the assistance of all good
patriots, and relies on their complicity to function effectively as a “racket.”
Narratives of the hidden enemy, popularized through dominant media,
have been instrumental in the revitalization of racial profiling and its work in

10 So too were they made the measure of the success of the invasions: as President Bush put it in his
White House speech of March 12, 2004, “We’re seeing women take their rightful place in societies that were
once incredibly oppressive and closed. We’re seeing the power and appeal of liberty in every single culture. And
we’re proud once again–this nation is proud–to advance the cause of human rights and human freedom (cited
in Engle 2005, pp. 429–30).
126 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

targeting, investigating, attacking, detaining, and expelling those “aliens” and

others among us who “look like” terrorists. Because the enemy is hidden, one
needs to attend to characteristic features to identify him, invariably marked
through categories of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and political opin-
ion. A certain homogenization of the racialized monster has been necessary
for the codification of racial profiling in several areas of law,11 fostering sup-
port for discriminatory treatment against visible minorities. Racial profiling, as
Reem Bahdi puts it, entails the use of race as a “proxy for risk” (2003, p. 295);
as the state’s “primary weapon of choice” in the war on terror, it was imme-
diately brought to bear on those who had no connection to terrorism or so-
called “terrorist networks” (Ahmad 2004, p. 1268), but who inhabited the risk
of race. While just before September 2001, the U.S. government was poised to
approve a legislative ban on racial profiling, with over 80% of Americans sup-
porting this initiative (Ahmad 2004, p. 1268), after 9/11, the Act was quickly
shelved, and in its place was introduced the 2003 Guidance Regarding the Use
of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies. This new policy makes an excep-
tion for all “law enforcement activities involving threats to national security or
the integrity of the nation’s borders,”12 authorizing federal law enforcement
officials, including airport screeners and border personnel, to consider race
and ethnicity in the course of “matters of national security, border integrity or
the possible catastrophic loss of life,” and suggesting that selective prosecution
of the laws based on alienage would be permissible (Guidance 2003).13 As has
been documented by the Office of the Inspector General, this “national security
exception” was used to authorize the detentions and immediate deportation of
hundreds of Arab, Muslim, and Asian noncitizens within a few months after
9/11,14 even though none of the putative terrorist detainees or deportees in this
period had been charged with terrorist activity. The process was simply used
for targeting and deporting detainees for minor immigration infringements, to
circumvent the due process rights of those who “looked like terrorists” (Ahmad
2004, p. 1269).
Antiterrorism laws and policies, introduced in almost all Western states
in the past decade, have also contributed to false arrests and wrongful con-
victions, the practices of which have disproportionately impacted racial and
ethnic minorities (Roach and Trotter 2005). Consider, for example, the effect

11 See Roach and Trotter (2005) for an overview of the extensive reforms to immigration and refugee law
and criminal law and policy that have been introduced since 9/11. See also Banks (2005) for a discussion of the
policies introduce as a response to 9/11.
12 U.S. Department of Justice, Guidance Regarding the Use of Race By Federal Law Enforcement
Agencies (June 2003), available at: http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/split/documents/guidance_on_race.htm. Cited in
Ahmad, at 1269.
13 See Johnson (2003) and Ahmad (2004) for a discussion of this.
14 Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, The September 11 Detainees: A Review of
the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11
Attacks (June 2003), available at http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0306/full.pdf. Cited in Ahmad, at 1269, n. 22.
 engendering [in]security and terror 127

on judicial processes by provisions in the U.K.’s Terrorism Act (2000) and Anti-
Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), which, respectively, lowers the burden
of proof normally placed on the prosecution for crimes associated with state
security, and explicitly derogates from fair trial rights for the first time in Brit-
ish history (Roach and Trotter 2005, p. 995); and the U.S. Patriot Act, which
allows for the detention of both foreign nationals and American citizens as
“enemy combatants.” There is also the use of material witness warrants, by
which those suspected of simply knowing about terrorist plots can be indefi-
nitely detained; “security certificates,” which allow for the indefinite detention
of suspected terrorists until they can be deported, if, as is set out in the Anti-
Terrorism Crime and Security Act (2001) there is a “reasonable” cause to believe
that the person’s presence is “a threat to national security” (cited in Roach and
Trotter 2005, p. 971); or the public interest immunity provisions of Canada’s
Terrorism Act, which restricts the disclosure of evidence to the accused in the
interests of “national security” (ibid, p. 980).15 Fostering the complicity of
docile patriots [“us”] in targeting racialized groups [“them”], the discrimina-
tory policies of security states, have less to do with producing security than
with exacerbating race-based domination and conflict. Their effect, rather, is
to expand the legislative and institutional means to profile, arrest, detain, and
deport those associated, for whatever reason, with being a threat, such that the
promise of security for us turns on the heightened insecurity of the racialized
others that are vulnerable to these tactics.
One of the reasons that new draconian policies of the heightened surveil-
lance of security regimes have been acceptable to, and supported by, citizens
who are clamoring from protection, as Young observed, is that they think that
such measures apply only to others (2003, p. 15). “Anxious for protection,” she
adds, the duly patriotic citizens lose sight of the fact that it is not only the dis-
posable humans that stand to lose in this war on terror. Security will always
elude us, as Mary Robinson puts it, in addressing the presumed dichotomy
between rights and security, at least “until we can tackle the root causes of the
humiliation, anger, and frustration that can be manipulated to draw recruits
for terrorist action” (Robinson 2003, p. 309).

Conclusion

As Puar and Rai describe it, there is a “double movement of power” to the pro-
cesses of disciplining or expelling enemies, as it is in these processes and against
these enemies that “docile patriots” are constituted: in the name of patriotism
we quarantine the monsters “whose psyches offend the norms of domesticity,
of the properly masculine or feminine.” Through their very example, they add,

15 See Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act.

128 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

such enemies “provide patriotism with its own pedagogies of normalization,”

which also create, on the other hand, the “space of the national family, inhab-
ited by a plurality of subjects who find their proper being in the heterosexual
home of the nation” (Puar and Rai 2002, p. 136). By exposing security states’
tactics of creating and engaging with their enemies, and the operative logic of
their protectionist racket, as Young similarly urges us to do, we can reveal the
patterns of disciplinary and biopolitical power behind them and the policies
and practices that facilitate them, as they work to profile, scrutinize, manage,
arrest, and deport its internal enemies; justify armed attacks on its external
enemies; and constitute the subordinated and obedient roles for vulnerable
“women and children,” who trade their quiet gratitude for protection.
But as Young herself has reminded us, we need to constantly reassess
our conceptual tools and tropes for whether or not—and to what extent—they
adequately capture the modalities of power and related injustices that operate
structurally and systematically in social and political relations, such as those
produced through the protectionist racket of security states. It is this very con-
sideration that demands, in turn, further critical reflection on Young’s analy-
ses. Despite her sensitivity to many of the human costs of protectionist power,
we could do further justice to Young’s approach by fleshing out the haunting
details that lurk in the background of her quick snapshot of security states, and
by taking care to trace the varying racial and sexual demarcations and implica-
tions that permeate constructs of terrorist threats and terrorist bodies. For it is
in these details that we see how some bodies—our enemies’ bodies and those
who look like them—are marked, not for being lived, but for imminent death
(Puar 2007, p. xxiv). The dictum of the Bush administration that “you’re either
with us or against us,” compounded by the tropes of perversion through which
they are represented, as Puar argues, “serves to rearticulate the devitalization
of one population sequestered for dying—Iraqi detainees accused of terrorist
affiliations—in the secularization and revitialization of another population, the
American citizenry” (Puar 2007, p. 5). In pitting “us” (good citizens and “good
aliens” [Engle 2004]) against “them”; and our protectable and mournable lives
against their torturable, invadable, and expendable forms, the protectionist
racket of the security states exposes the darker, insidious side of its benevo-
lence, and of what exactly those who are “anxious for security” are complicit in,
and grateful for.
As the above cursory overview of the various tactics of the protection-
ist racket make clear, the very possibility of finding grateful women among
the disciplined “docile patriots” of the nation and among the “victims” of the
other’s “tyrannical regimes,” is conditioned on the racial and sexual demoniza-
tion of Muslim and Arabic men through terrorist constructs. What needs to
be brought into the purview of our analyses of the protection racket is the pro-
cesses by which fostering some lives as protectable prepares public acceptance
for the death of those who threaten them; that is to say, the processes by which
 engendering [in]security and terror 129

a “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2003, cited in Puar 2007, p. 96) looms in the bio-
political fostering and management of life.
Jasbir Puar’s recent critical analyses of the multiple assemblages of terror-
ist and security discourse and the complicity of Western feminist, GLBT, and
human rights organizations in proliferating them, make clear that the machi-
nations of security states cannot be contained by familiar paradigms of heter-
onormativity that Young’s formulation of protectionism frames. Puar notes
that in contemporary discourses and disciplines of terrorism and security, “the
terrorist” and terrorist bodies are typically produced through “colonial fanta-
sies of Orientalist sexual excess, perversity and pedophilia” (Puar 2007, p. 14),
which inform assumptions about “properly queer” subjects (xiii), not unlike
they do of properly heterosexual familial subjects, such as docile and grateful
women. This production is imbued with racial formations that plague repre-
sentations of South Asian, Arab American, and Muslim sexualities. Examining
a vast assemblage of government counterterrorism texts, film documentaries,
print media, organization campaign materials, ethnographic data, among other
sources, she shows how the perverse sexuality of the terrorist is pivotal to its
racist demonization: globally disseminated images of a Muslim Arabic mascu-
linity as “failed and perverse, virile yet emasculated” (always with femininity as
“reference point of malfunction”) is “metonymically tied to all sorts of patholo-
gies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and
disease” (Puar 2007, p. xxiv).
It is by assimilating public discomfort with these perversions, that security
states produce “new normativities,” including those that embrace a properly,
and invariably patriotic, queer and/or Muslim subject. The regulatory effects of
the new normativities mark the difference between “good” and “bad” Muslims.
So too do they mark the difference between the perverse sexuality of the ter-
rorist, and the acceptable queerness of nation-loving patriots, such as the now-
iconic Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player who died on ill-fated Flight 93 (“the
flight that fought back”16), embraced as an “American hero,” a good son and
team player, “rehabilitated” by protectionism’s tolerance and brought into the
“spatial-temporal domain” of “homonationalism” (Puar 2007, p. 38). The emer-
gence of a national homosexuality, or homonationalism, operates tangentially
to the heteronationalism of the protection racket as a “regulatory script not only
of normative gayness, queerness or homosexuality, but also of the racial and
national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects” (Puar 2007, p. 2).
The broad strokes of Young’s preliminary sketch of forms and effects of
heteronormative disciplinary power that are deployed by security states obscure
the nuances of the shifting allegiances, lines of flight, and unanticipated

16 See Ramon Johnson (2008). “The Flight that Fought Back: Mark Bingham and the Heroes of Flight
93,” http://gaylife.about.com/od/moviestheatre/fr/flight93.htm for one of many blogs and Web sites that cel-
ebrate Mark as a gay national hero.
130 theorizing the state: method, violence, and resistance

complicities by which new regulatory normative apparatuses—and related

rules, laws, and practices—are created out of the states of exception, especially
in the face of crisis. A consideration of these shifts in normative targets, throws
into relief the mobility and facility of protectionist technologies of power, and,
in this instance, how their work in protecting life imbricates a politics of death,
and particularly the death of the individuals and groups that are actively excluded
from the purview of protection by virtue of its racist logic. These finer details
are revealing of the systemic forms of power and structural injustices that don’t
seem to shift all that much (such as consistent patterns in historical and colo-
nial fantasies of the “uncivilized” of dark and exotic continents); Western eco-
nomic domination and the expansion of corporate markets; the persistence of
gender hierarchies that, even in the context of emergent “homonationalism,”
find femininity aligned with passivity and dependence, helplessness, and mal-
function; and the glorification of male violence in renewed justifications for
attacks against evil others and “alien” threats. Attention to both the shifting
forms and more permanent structures that protectionist power takes—and to
who benefits and who pays the price for them—brings into view the funda-
mental operations of the racist conditions and relations of a racket that can so
readily take life in the name of protecting it.
It is crucial to attend to these forms and effects, to rethink the tropes and
frameworks that make them more visible, if we are to expose the injustices of
the policies and practices of “security,” organized in relation to “our” enemies.
Following and articulating the “logic” of protectionist power and its varying
complicities, as Young urges us to do, is necessary for devising strategies of
reform to the laws and policies that sustain it, including lobbying initiatives
and legal challenges to the “exceptional” and blatantly unconstitutional laws
and policies that are born from and tarry with these mythic enemies. And for
conjuring wider recognition of, and active resistance to, the many injustices of
an illegal war and its fundamental violation of the principles of justice we must
demand states to be responsible to uphold.
4
PART IV

JUSTICE: ETHICS AND

RESPONSIBILITY
This page intentionally left blank
 11
4

Iris Young’s Last Thoughts on

Responsibility for Global Justice

Martha C. Nussbaum

At her untimely death, Iris Young left the manuscript of a mostly completed
book, called Responsibility for Justice. I am extremely grateful to Dave Alexander
for allowing me to read the manuscript. I feel privileged for having been able
to see this book so early in its career. It is a major book, one of her very best
things. Iris did not have time to complete it as she would have wished. Many
footnotes remain to be filled in. One crucial chapter still takes the form of an
independent paper on Hannah Arendt, and it was Iris’s plan to integrate the
argument of that paper fully into the book, with a consequently diminished
focus on the exegesis of Arendt’s ideas. But it is clear that she intended some
version of the paper to be the third chapter of the book. A separate paper on
Fanon on historic injustice, which discusses the question of reparations for
slavery, remains less clearly placed in the project as a whole. It discusses simi-
lar questions in a similar way, but it does not contribute a missing piece to the
argument, and thus it may in the end function as an Appendix rather than a
chapter. Finally, Dave tells me that in revising Iris always attended to clarity,
rewriting a good deal to make her ideas more accessible and transparent to her
readers. I find the existing manuscript extremely clear, but Dave feels that she
would have worked even further on that aspect.1
What I hope to do in this chapter is, first, to give you an overall idea of how
Iris argues in the book, and of the contribution of each of its chapters; second,
to describe in more detail the book’s key argument concerning the distinction

1 Because the manuscript is incomplete in this way, I shall not try to guess what texts Iris would have
cited in footnotes. Most of the footnotes have the form “Cite,” or “Cite Arendt,” etc. It will be best for a graduate
student or colleague who knows Iris’s work very well to fill in those notes, and therefore I use footnotes in this
paper only where I myself have introduced the reference in my own commentary. In an earlier draft, I cited page
numbers of Young’s manuscript. Since the manuscript is not a pdf, however, these page numbers would not be
good guides to whatever version someone else might print out, so I also have omitted those here. When the book
appears, as I hope it will in a year or two, I shall update this paper by filling in those page references.
134 justice: ethics and responsibility

between guilt and responsibility; and finally, third, to puzzle over that distinc-
tion and to suggest an alternative formulation, since I think that the best way to
honor Iris’s daring and provocative contribution is to wrestle with it. My main
aim throughout, however, is to allow you all to hear Iris’s voice.

The Argument

Responsibility for Justice begins with a focus on economic inequality within the
United States. (Later the scope of the argument will be extended to take in
global inequalities.) Young notes that there has been a shift in the way in which
government officials, journalists, and the public think and talk about poverty:
the primary causes of being poor, instead of being seen as social, are currently
understood as personal. “On this account,” she writes, “the social segments
that tend to be poor do not take responsibility for their lives as much as mem-
bers of other groups, and too often they engage in deviant or self-destructive
behavior. Public assistance programs only add to the problem by allowing these
deviant segments to expect hand outs in return for which they need do noth-
ing.” The purpose of the first chapter of the book, entitled “From Personal
to Political Responsibility,” is to look critically at some assumptions that lie
behind this shift in thinking.
Focusing on the writings of Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, Young
finds three assumptions embedded in their analysis. First, they assume that we
have to choose, in describing poverty, between an account focused on personal
responsibility and one invoking structural causation; a single coherent account
cannot involve both. Second, by assuming that poor people can improve their
lot by effort and will, Mead and Murray assume that background conditions are
basically fair, are not unfairly stacked against the poor. Third, they assume that
the only problem of personal responsibility that needs attention is the personal
responsibility of poor people: it is implicitly suggested that all other people
properly discharge their responsibilities.
Young argues that, although this mode of thinking is most prominent on
the right, it also underlies some prominent analyses on the left, particularly
that of Ronald Dworkin. And she notes that this idea of personal responsibility
has displaced an older shared understanding, perhaps most prominent in the
welfare states of Europe, but now threatened there as well, that “the members
of a whole society collectively bear responsibility for taking care of one anoth-
er’s old age, health care, support for children, and keeping us out of poverty.”
It is this older understanding that the book intends to revive, with new argu-
ments and a fresh perspective on its contributions.
Concerning the first assumption, Young argues that there is no need to think
that we have a binary choice between a focus on the personal and a focus on the
structural. In the end, in her view, all responsibility is at some level personal, in
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 135

the sense that the individual is the central locus of ethical responsibility. None-
theless, one must recognize the crucial role of structures in producing injustice,
even in cases where individual actors may be going about their business in a
normal way and not intending to do any harm. A good analysis will attend, then,
both to personal and to structural factors in the genesis of poverty.
Concerning the second assumption, Young announces her intend to argue
that there are indeed serious structural problems in the background conditions
in our current U.S. situation that make it difficult if not impossible for poor
people to better their lot.
Concerning the third assumption, Young notes that pinning blame on the
poor has had, in the arguments she criticizes, the consequence of deflecting
attention from the possibly questionable behavior of others. This “absolving
function,” as she calls it, is one of the main attractions of the discourse of per-
sonal responsibility for many Americans. Clearly, however, it is wrong simply
to assume that the nonpoor have behaved well and discharged all their respon-
sibilities, especially without first articulating and defending a general account
of ethical responsibility. Young notes that most people do not really believe
that being ethically responsible means simply avoiding dependence on others.
“A more realistic understanding of being responsible, one that better matches
what most people think, might go something like this: a responsible person
tries to deliberate about options before acting, makes choices that seem to be
the best for all affected, and worries about how the consequences of his or her
action may adversely affect others.” This is a demanding standard, and Murray
and Mead have not shown that the nonpoor meet it.
Young concludes this chapter by applying her insights to Dworkin’s theory
and to the related theory of John Roemer, which, unlike Dworkin’s, makes
room for structural injustice.
Young’s second chapter, entitled “Structure as the Subject of Justice,” pres-
ents Young’s argument for the conclusion that political, economic, and social
structures must be central to any good account of the genesis of poverty: we can-
not handle the task by appeal to individual responsibility alone. She begins with
a complex example of a woman, named Sandy, who is forced into homeless-
ness by a combination of factors: condo conversion where she has been living,
the high cost of rental housing, combined with the demand for a three-month
security deposit; the need to live near transportation to her workplace and in a
neighborhood where she feels her children will be safe and have good schools
to go to; a sex-segregated labor market that makes low-wage service jobs the
primary option for women without college degrees. Young notes that we can
certainly identify some elements of personal responsibility in Sandy’s situation,
including her earlier educational choices, her choice to get divorced, and her
choice to value highly her children’s education. Nonetheless, we also feel that
something has gone badly wrong when a person like Sandy cannot find a place
to live that she can afford.
136 justice: ethics and responsibility

Can we blame Sandy’s situation on specific individuals with whom she

has come into contact? Going through the available options, Young argues that
we really can’t. “No particular agent she encounters has done her a specific
wrong,” and yet she suffers injustice. This injustice can only be analyzed at the
structural level, by talking about the way the housing market works, the way the
service economy works, and so forth. Nor can we pinpoint a particular unjust
policy as its origin.
Its causes are not so immediate as the persons with whom the
wronged sufferer interacts, and not so focused as a single policy.
The sources of the generalized circumstances of being vulnerable
to homelessness are multiple, large scale, and relatively long term.
Many policies, both public and private, and the actions of thousands
of individuals acting according to normal rules and accepted
practices, contribute to producing these circumstances.
Methodologically, Young is an individualist, and she notes that it’s a good thing
that social theory has moved away from the old debate about that question:
“Few theorists of social structures deny that individual actors produce them.”
Nonetheless, the fact that individual actors produce social structures does not
entail that particular individuals can be rightly blamed for the failures of those
structures: the individuals may be acting in a normal and acceptable manner,
and yet the cumulative effect of their actions may be to produce an unjust situa-
tion. “Social structure, then, refers to the accumulated outcomes of the actions
of the masses of individuals enacting their own projects, often uncoordinated
with many others.”
The second chapter ends with a close examination of John Rawls’s argu-
ment concerning the basic structure as subject of justice. While agreeing with
Rawls against the criticisms of Liam Murphy and Gerald Cohen, Young argues
that Rawls’s account of what forms part of the basic structure is somewhat too
narrow. He selects a set of very basic institutions, without acknowledging the
many ways in which these are continuous with diffuse social processes. Young,
by contrast, urges us to look at the whole society, seeing “patterns in relations
among people and positions they occupy in relation to one another.” Although
I’m not sure this critique of Rawls is entirely successful, I shall not elaborate
that point here.
The third and fourth chapters are the heart of the book. I shall describe
their argument very briefly, since I shall be returning to it later. In the Arendt
paper that Young intended to revise as chapter 3, now entitled “Guilt versus
Responsibility: A Reading and Partial Critique of Hannah Arendt,” Young fol-
lows Arendt to some extent but also criticizes her formulations in some ways.
She argues that we ought to distinguish guilt from responsibility. When we
apply the concept of guilt to someone, we are blaming them for something that
they have done in the past. The function of guilt is to locate fault, to single out
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 137

for either moral or legal blame. It is usually not appropriate to ascribe guilt to a
group as such, unless we have some reason to conceive of the group as a collec-
tive agent (e.g., as in the case of guilt ascribed to corporations). Responsibility,
by contrast, is a forward-looking concept. To ascribe responsibility to a person
is to say that they have a job to do. We can hold either individuals or groups
responsible, and responsibility for social ills is typically shared among many
agents. People can be responsible without being guilty.
Young rejects Arendt’s suggestion that people bear responsibility simply
because they are members of a political community; however, she does think
that the sort of participation in political processes that licenses the ascription
of responsibility does not entail an ascription of guilt. A typical case will be
the passive or normally active behavior of non-malicious people who simply
go along with their society’s way of doing things. These people, Young argues,
are not guilty “and should not be blamed.” Nonetheless, they are cases of “a
political responsibility not taken up.”
Because we dwell on the stage of history, and not simply in our
houses, we cannot avoid the imperative to have a relationship with
actions and events performed by institutions of our society, often in
our name, and with our passive or active support. The imperative
of political responsibility consists in watching these institutions,
monitoring their effects to make sure they are not grossly harmful,
and maintaining organized public space where such watching and
monitoring can occur and citizens can speak publicly and support
one another in their efforts to prevent suffering.
In chapter 4, “A Social Connection Model,” Young now puts these ideas to
work analyzing the structural injustices that she has described in the second
chapter. The social dynamics of Sandy’s situation are not helpfully analyzed
in terms of guilt. Pinning guilt on someone is not appropriate, first, because
in such cases there really has not been any bad behavior: no malice, and, or
so Young argues, no negligence. Although many actions of many individuals
contribute to the unjust outcome, no individual has a significantly large causal
role to be blamed for that outcome.
Moreover, the focus on guilt is pragmatically damaging: by seeking to pin
blame on individuals, we absolve others, and thus those others may be able to
go on ignoring the fact that as citizens we have a shared responsibility of the
type she has described. “A rhetoric of blame in politics often seeks a single or
a few particularly powerful actors who have caused the problems, often some
public officials . . . . The power of some actors is improperly inflated and that
of many others is ignored.” We also deflect attention away from the nature
of the background conditions within which agents make choices. Finally, we
produce defensiveness rather than cooperative helpfulness: “Rhetoric of blame
in public discussion of social problems . . . usually produces defensiveness and
138 justice: ethics and responsibility

unproductive blame-switching.” Even when people do acknowledge guilt,

finally, the “blame game” usually produces an unhelpful sort of self-focus:
“People become more focused on themselves, their past actions, the state of
their souls and their character, than on the structures that require change . . .
Such self-indulgence can distract us from discussing more objectively how
social structures operate, how our actions contribute to them, and what can be
done to change them.”
Young then argues that the most helpful concept with which to approach
structural injustice is that of shared responsibility. We turn away from the
past and toward the future, accepting, collectively, the fact that as citizens we
bear responsibility for monitoring political institutions and ensuring that such
structural injustices do not arise within them, or, if they are already there, that
they are ameliorated.
In chapter 5, “Responsibility Across Borders,” Young turns from domestic
politics to the global sphere. She argues that what she has called the social
connection model is helpful in facing global inequalities. Thinking in terms
of shared responsibility for global conditions might at first seem paralyzing:
“How can I begin to take action to discharge my responsibility in the face of
such massive and diverse problems?” Many injustices in the world result from
structural processes, but it seems hard for individuals to accept even a shared
responsibility for so many of them.
Young boldly now asserts that the demanding nature of our responsibility
under the social connection model is a reason to embrace it, not to reject it. The
fact that we are parts of many causal networks that lead to structural injustice
is simply a truth, and one that we need to face. “We should pause at the sight
of such responsibility. Dwelling too long in the shadow of such awe can be
paralyzing, to be sure. So we should move to consideration of action, and then
questions of what is possible and reasonable to expect come into play.” The rest
of the chapter is then devoted to making the idea of shared global responsibility
manageable and tractable. She does this through a detailed consideration of
sweatshop labor in the developing world, showing how many non-blameworthy
actions collectively create a structure that is unjust, and looking at ways in which
the anti-sweatshop political movement has “involved a great many people and
achieved some success in creating a public discussion of injustice of working
conditions and some changes in institutions and practices.”
This chapter contains a lot of empirical material, as, with Young’s always
bracing realism, she shows how her abstract model helps us confront an actual
political challenge. Along the way, she discusses, sympathetically but critically,
work by Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan that bears on the question of how
we imagine personal responsibility for global harms.
In thinking about who bears responsibility for ameliorating global ills, she
now argues, we ought to consider several specific parameters: First, an agent’s
power, her position, within structural processes, for actual influence over those
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 139

processes. People who have greater influence have greater responsibility.

Second, we ought to consider an agent’s privilege. Privilege and power usu-
ally go together, but in most such situations there are some privileged agents
who don’t have much causal influence: nonetheless, simply because of their
privileged lives, they have greater responsibility than others. Third, we must
consider an agent’s interest. Here what Young means is that people who are
the most affected, the victims of structural injustice, have a particularly strong
interest in changing the situation, and so they ought to take more responsibility
than others for doing so. Finally, people should think about what Young calls
collective ability. What she has in mind is that individuals are sometimes mem-
bers of groups in such a way that they can draw on the resources of an already
existing group, such as a stockholder organization, a labor union, or a church
group, and use that group as a resource for change. Such membership gives
individuals a larger share of responsibility.
Notice, then, that so far Young has focused on individuals and on groups
that form part of “civil society.” She has said little about state responsibility or
about the responsibility of international institutions. In the concluding section
of the chapter, she states clearly that she does think both of these very impor-
tant in thinking about shared responsibility, but she also thinks that they have
too often been the exclusive focus of accounts of global justice. In downplaying
them and playing up other more informal associations, she seeks to right the
balance.
Chapter 6 is entitled “Avoiding Responsibility.” Here Young studies differ-
ent ways of thinking through which people avoid accepting their responsibility
with respect to global structures. The first is reification, or the pretense that the
processes that produce injustice are inevitable and unchangeable, like natural
forces that cannot be otherwise. (Here she discusses both Marx, Lukacs, and
Sartre in an illuminating way.)
The second bad strategy is denying connection. Many people simply deny
that they have any connection to people at a distance, while accepting respon-
sibility for the conditions of people close at hand. Often this strategy is assisted
by using the guilt idea: the person says, look, I’ve done nothing wrong and
so how can you ask me to take responsibility for improving these conditions?
Drawing on Onora O’Neill’s analysis of global interconnection, Young argues
that we do bear responsibility for a wide range of global conditions.
The third impediment to accepting responsibility lies in what Young calls
“The Demands of Immediacy”: we acknowledge that we are connected to mil-
lions of strangers, but we also point out that we simply have no resources left
for such people: our time and energy are used up on the demands made on us
by relationships of immediate interaction. Here, drawing on Levinas, Young
insists that “Every other is an irreducible and unique locus of need and desire,”
and that we cannot avoid the ethical demand to weigh the interests of the dis-
tant against those of the close, not if we are ethical beings in the first place.
140 justice: ethics and responsibility

There is “an irreducible, even tragic, tension in moral life,” given that we must
take care of our own and also attend to the “potentially infinite” claims of dis-
tant individuals. What we should say is that we can never fully discharge our
ethical responsibility: the ledger is never fully balanced. But we must not on
that account withdraw our attention from people at a distance from us. One
way in which we can at least reduce the tension between the near and the far is
to enlist those we love in the shared task of working for global justice: in that
way “the attention and energy we put into being personally responsive to oth-
ers is at the same time attention and energy devoted to political responsibility
for justice.”
The last bad strategy that Young considers is the attitude that says that this
is “Not My Job.” This strategy, once again, is aided by the use of guilt as a cen-
tral moral category: for I say, pin the blame on someone else; I, clearly, haven’t
done anything wrong. Here Young discusses critically Bob Goodin’s sugges-
tion that in cases where there is nobody to blame we ought to rely on the state
to take action. As before, Young feels that leaving things to the state narrows
the sphere of responsibility much too much, leaving individuals free to think
that they have nothing to do other than pay their taxes. But even government’s
ability to rectify structural injustice depends on the active involvement of its
citizens in that endeavor. And, given the great extent to which assets and activi-
ties that might elsewhere or at another time have been in state hands are, in
the United States today, in private hands, we can hardly expect stripped-down
government to solve such problems even with support.
Each excuse for not accepting responsibility, Young concludes, has a
truthful basis, sees something that is real. But each is ultimately an evasion of
responsibility that we ought to assume. The rhetoric of guilt distracts us from
that shared project.

Guilt and Responsibility

I hope that this summary has shown what a rich and exciting book this is. There
are several topics on which I would like to write a paper; the criteria for greater
and lesser responsibility is one of them, the strategies of avoidance another.
Now, however, I shall focus on the distinction between guilt and responsibility,
which lies at the core of Young’s argument.
In Young’s view, an agent is guilty just in case she has done a blameworthy
action. Blameworthiness usually requires harmful intent, although Young rec-
ognizes that it may in some cases only require a culpable degree of negligence.
She briefly recognizes, too, that we hold people legally accountable without any
showing of mens rea in cases involving strict liability, such as statutory rape,
although this recognition plays, so far as I can see, no subsequent role in her
argument.
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 141

Young does not tightly define responsibility, since her concept emerges
by way of discussion and critique of Arendt. But let me do so on her behalf.
An agent is responsible, by contrast, just in case (a) the agent is causally
embedded in processes that produce a problematic result, and (b) the agent is
in a position to assume ongoing forward-looking responsibility (in cooperation
with others) for ameliorating those conditions. At times, these two conditions
appear to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient for being responsible,
but at times, as in the passage I quoted earlier, Young adds a third element:
citizens in general ought to monitor and superintend the institutions in their
society, and it is in virtue of that general moral duty of citizenship (in addi-
tion, presumably, to the first two conditions) that a given agent can be said to
be responsible. I don’t think that this third condition creates any obscurity in
Young’s account, since presumably she thinks that this general normative fact
always holds, both of citizens in their domestic relations and of members of the
global community in their international relations.
Young makes two distinct types of arguments for distinguishing guilt from
responsibility and in favor of ascribing responsibility, but not guilt, to citizens
in a society that contains structural injustice: two intrinsic or conceptual argu-
ments, and several pragmatic arguments. The first conceptual argument says
that guilt requires blameworthiness, but agents often participate in structural
injustice without blameworthiness. The second conceptual argument says that
guilt is backward-looking, whereas responsibility is forward-looking.
Now to Young’s five pragmatic arguments. Young argues, first, that focus-
ing on fixing blame distracts us from our future tasks. Second, she argues that
it does worse than that, focusing our attention on a few likely culprits while
apparently exonerating many other people who really ought to get involved in
the task of making things better. Third, a focus on blame, because it targets
individuals, tends to distract us from the background conditions within which
injustice arises. Fourth, playing the “blame game” produces a squirming
defensiveness rather than a helpful cooperativeness. Finally, fifth, guilt turns
the mind inward, so that we become unhelpfully focused on the state of our
own characters, rather than on the task that lies ahead of us.
This is really a wonderful piece of work, and I have to say that it completely
transforms the nature of the debate about such matters. Nonetheless, although
initially I was thoroughly convinced by Young’s account, I am now less con-
vinced, and let me try to say why.
First, on the conceptual distinction, I think that it is really very difficult to
maintain the retrospective/prospective portion of the distinction, guilt being
appropriate to past acts only, and responsibility to future acts only, for the sim-
ple reason that time marches on. Let us stipulate that at time t, agent A bears
responsibility R for social ill S. Time passes, and she shirks her responsibility.
What should we say next? I think it can’t be right to say, well, looking back
on it, she did nothing wrong at t, and we should now forget about t and focus
142 justice: ethics and responsibility

exclusively on what lies ahead of her at t + 1. If we take that line, preserving the
clean distinction between retrospective guilt (which we’re not supposed to be
assigning to participants in structural injustice) and prospective responsibility
(which we are supposed to be assigning to them), well, then people get a free
pass indefinitely, since no task they have failed to shoulder ever goes onto the
debit or guilt side of their ledger, and the new task always lies ahead of them.
By contrast, it seems to me that what we ought to say is that if A has responsi-
bility R for social ill S, and she fails to take it up, then, when the relevant time
passes, she is guilty of not having shouldered her responsibility. I think that
this follows quite simply from the logic of ought; Young says that A ought to
shoulder the burden; well, that appears to imply that if A doesn’t shoulder the
burden A has done something wrong.
What about the second point, that agents can participate in structural
injustice without doing anything culpable? Here I think that we should defi-
nitely grant that A need not have malicious or harmful intent. But I do not
think we should grant that A is not negligent. For if it is a general moral truth
that citizens ought to monitor the institutions in which they live and be vigilant
lest structural injustice occur within them, then I think it follows that they are
culpably negligent if they do not shoulder that burden. The same seems true in
the international sphere. Sometimes we may not want to blame the agent very
much, since such general moral truths might not be known to her. But, here as
elsewhere, ignorance of the law, including the moral law, is no excuse. Maybe
we want to add a category of particularly non-culpable participation that is more
analogous to strict liability, in the sense that no mens rea need be present at all:
still, the agent has violated the law, and thus is guilty.
These points seem like powerful reasons to reject the conceptual distinc-
tion. What about the additional conceptual point that guilt is individualistic,
while responsibility is often shared? Well, I think that we have a good way of
understanding what a given agent’s task is within a general scheme of shared
responsibility. Indeed, Young’s various criteria (power, privilege, interest, col-
lective ability) give us a good way of thinking about the size of a given agent’s
share, whether in the end we endorse exactly this account of how the shares
divide or some other similar account. So, we don’t blame an agent for not
shouldering the entirety of the social task all by herself, but we blame her for
not shouldering the part that she ought to have shouldered, and thus we blame
her for her contribution to the bad outcome.
What about the pragmatic arguments? I think that Young would now
say, even if we grant the conceptual symmetry between blame and responsi-
bility, still, it seems right to focus on the future rather than on the past, on
what can and should be attempted rather than on people’s failure. So, I must
now confront those five arguments. First, does focusing on blame distract us
from our future tasks? Well, one does not have to buy into deterrence as a
complete theory of punishment in order to think that the ascription of blame
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 143

serves as a powerful deterrent toward committing future blameworthy acts.

Think about a child. It is certainly true here, as in the political case, that a
good parent will not focus on pinning blame on the child for misdeeds with-
out directing her at the same time to helpful modes of conduct in the future.
Surely, as Young says, the accent should always lie on the future, which can
be changed, rather than the past, which cannot be. However, it is a little hard
to see how we ever get to the future without a critique of the past: praise and
blame for good and bad actions that have already happened help a child learn
how to perceive new situations in the future, and supply her with powerful
incentives to seek good actions in the future and to avoid the bad. Suppose
every time the child does something selfish the parent says simply, “From
now on, treat others fairly.” Not “From now on, do things differently,” which
implies that the child did something substandard just now, and certainly not,
“You just treated Johnny very unfairly, and next time I really expect you to
try hard to be fair,” which tethers responsibility to guilt. No, this parent says
simply, “From now on, treat others fairly.” This sends an unhelpfully confus-
ing message to the child. She really doesn’t learn about fairness, since she
doesn’t learn what she did unfairly just now. Indeed, she doesn’t even learn
that she has done something unfair just now. So to that extent her ability to
identify future fair acts is not enhanced, and her motivation to do so is not
strengthened.
So too, I believe, with citizens. If we just say to people, “From now on con-
serve energy,” without showing in detail how the wasteful lifestyle of Americans
contributes to global harms, little learning takes place, and moral incentives are
not created. By contrast, when we say, “Look how large your carbon footprint
is,” learning is promoted and motivation is strengthened by a confrontation
with one’s own obviously quite harmful acts.
Young’s second argument is that focusing on blame often has the ten-
dency to pin fault on a small number of culprits while making most of us feel
exonerated. Well, of course that might happen, but clearly it need not. It all
depends on the causal analysis. A good analysis of each person’s contribution
to global warming applies blame to all Americans who have not made major
efforts to reduce their contribution. We might compare, here, two recent films.
“Who Killed the Electric Car?”2 was a very entertaining and revealing whodunit.
As its title implies, it had the aim of pinning blame on a small number of
individuals. In the end, a handful of executives and politicians end up looking
guilty, and the general public felt lulled and relaxed. By contrast, Al Gore’s “An
Inconvenient Truth”3 is much more inconvenient, because it does show us all
the collective task that we have mostly all been shirking. For the most part, it
directs us toward the future, but not without placing blame on most people for

2 Directed by Chris Paine, Sony Picture Classics 2006.

3 Presented by Al Gore, Directed by Davis Guggenheim, Paramount 2006.
144 justice: ethics and responsibility

culpable inattention. So Young’s second pragmatic point is sometimes true,

but need not be.
The third claim is that a focus on blame distracts our attention from back-
ground conditions. Well, once again, it may do so, but any good allocation of
blame would not do so. When we ask whether a child is to blame for not doing
a household chore such as mowing the lawn, we can ignore background condi-
tions that make it unusually difficult to carry out that chore (such as a tornado,
or a power cut). But we should not and we need not. If we do, we surely won’t
get the ascription of blame right.
Young’s fourth clam is that playing the blame game simply makes people
feel defensive and evasive, while exhorting them to responsibility is more likely
to produce cooperation. This seems to me a powerful truth, but a partial one.
Surely it is true that if you want people to come together around a cause, it can
sometimes be counterproductive to tell them all the time how bad they are.
They may then just want to avoid you, whereas if you show them what they
can do in the future they are more likely to listen to what you say. On the other
hand, guilt is also a powerful incentive to make reparations, and when the
appeal to guilt is coupled in the right way with respect for the person, or even
love, it can even more powerfully produce such motivations.
Here I think it is useful to distinguish between two different ways of
ascribing guilt. One way is narrowly targeted: we look for a few ringleaders and
single them out for blame. This indeed is likely to produce squirming evasion
of future responsibility, and it is also likely to make others sit back and relax,
rather than shouldering their share of the burden. On the other hand, there is
another way of ascribing guilt that is general: it says that we all participate in
a wasteful lifestyle (or almost all of us), and we all need to change. This is the
sort of guilt that Martin Luther King Jr. skillfully evoked in his white audience,
when he spoke of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as a
“bad check” that has come back marked “insufficient funds,” or as a “promis-
sory note” on which the United States has “defaulted so far as her citizens of
color were concerned.”4
Now of course King did not harp on guilt: most of his message was future-
directed. But it was important that the ascription of guilt was part of the mix,
for the situation of black Americans was bad, and white Americans, through
their inaction and negligence, even if they were not malicious ringleaders, bore
the guilt for that ongoing situation, 100 years after Lincoln signed the Eman-
cipation Proclamation. If King had dwelt only on the glorious future, without
telling white Americans that they have been irresponsible and negligent in the

4 Speech delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, popularly known as the “I Have a Dream”
speech. Among the thousands of places where one can find the full text of this speech is www.americanrhetoric.
com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.
 last thoughts on responsibility for global justice 145

past, I think his speech would have had less power to motivate constructive
engagement than it in fact did.
Finally, Young tells us that guilt makes people turn inward and focus
on themselves, rather than turning outward to focus on others. Well, again,
maybe. But why can’t sincere self-examination be a very important ingredient
in the process of genuinely turning outward toward others? It seems to me
that it’s only when we identify and work against our own narcissism, our self-
ish anxiety, and our desire to lord it over others that we can truly turn toward
others, somewhat more freely of those powerful impediments. Nor need these
processes be two separate phases of a moral life. Gandhi’s life, and the move-
ment he created, shows that a turning within can sometimes be not just the
catalyst of a turning outward, it can be simultaneous with it. Both he and his
followers learned to practice a critique of their own violence, their own tenden-
cies to domination, as an essential aspect of their freedom struggle on behalf
of the nation as a whole. I guess I think that if we turn outward prematurely,
before we conduct an honest critique of our own inner world, our dedication
to ameliorative action may prove shallow or short-lived. Forces that remain in
the personality, pushing us toward narcissism, will ultimately distract us from
social efforts.
I do not feel confident about any of this. I feel that the logical next step
would be to have a conversation with Iris about all these points. I think that
together we would have gotten much deeper into the topic, understanding
more clearly where and why we differ. I am sure I would have come to under-
stand, for example, why Iris does not adopt Gandhi’s view of political struggle,
or my related, but rather psychoanalytically influenced, view of narcissism and
aggression. I am sure she would have had a lot to say and that it would have
been very powerful. Unfortunately, however, that conversation is no longer
possible, and it remains for all of us to try to continue the argument as best
we can.
This page intentionally left blank
 12
4

Injustice, Evil, and Oppression

Claudia Card

A New Paradigm

Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a; hereafter JPD) quickly
became one of the most frequently cited sources in feminist philosophy on the
nature of oppression.1 In this book, Young rejects what she calls a distributive
paradigm of justice. She presents an alternative to approaches influenced by
John Rawls’s idea of justice as fairness in distributing benefits and burdens
of social cooperation. Rawlsian approaches tend to begin from and become
fixated on economic and political conflict resolution under ideal conditions.
Young does not take justice’s primary concern to be adjudicating conflicts of
interest regarding the distribution of such goods as income and wealth. On
her view, the primary concern is to work toward a society that would be free
of oppression and domination. This approach centers on human development
and power relationships, not on external benefits and burdens. And it begins
from a set of very nonideal conditions. We might call it an agency or human
development paradigm.
In Inclusion and Democracy (Young 2000; hereafter ID) Young delves still
deeper into the evils of oppression, distinguishing them from the harms of domi-
nation. Yet evil is not a concept that she uses. It is very deliberately not a concept
that she uses. That point brings out a divergence between her interests and mine.

For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I am grateful to Alison Jaggar, Ann Ferguson, Paula
Gottlieb, and the audience attending a session devoted to the work of Iris Young at the Central Division meetings
of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, 2007.
1 Another feminist classic on oppression (also cited by Young) is Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression” (Frye 1983,
pp. 1–16).
148 justice: ethics and responsibility

She views oppression through the lenses of justice and a politics of human diver-
sity that evolves into a politics of inclusion. I have a history of viewing oppres-
sion through the lenses of moral categories. Young’s work has persuaded me to
rethink my long-standing assumption that oppression is necessarily a product of
culpable wrongdoing. I return to this matter at the end of this essay.
JPD did not offer a comprehensive theory of justice, nor did it aim to do so.
Still, the more focused theorizing into which it led Young is no less complex
than a theory would be. Instead of beginning with the positive idea of justice,
Young begins with everyday injustices and works toward a vision of what a soci-
ety might be like without them. ID further clarifies the forms that injustices
take. In ID, Young distinguishes between oppression and domination in a way
that seems to me exactly right. Oppression, she notes, hinders self-development,
whereas domination hinders self-determination (2000, p. 31). The focus is
on agency in both cases—agency, not the sorts of external goods that can be
multiplied through cooperative efforts. Those who are oppressed are gener-
ally also dominated. But those who are dominated need not be oppressed as
well. At least, they need not suffer hindrance to the development of capacities
other than capacities for self-determination. And yet, historically, domination
has often facilitated oppression. Important to Young’s argument in ID is that
inclusion of diverse social groups in a society’s political processes undermines
whatever tendency there might otherwise be for some groups to dominate oth-
ers. In that way, inclusion tends to block a great facilitator of oppression.
JPD is widely cited for its portrayal of oppression as presenting five
faces: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and
violence (Young 1990a, p. 40, pp. 48–63). Of these five faces, marginaliza-
tion has garnered less attention from philosophers than the others. In ID
Young indirectly makes marginalization a focus. She does that by developing
the requirements of its opposite, namely, inclusion. The project of ID further
concretizes JPD’s rejection of a distributive paradigm of justice. Developing
agency, in Young’s vision of justice, takes priority over achieving fairness in the
distribution of the kinds of goods that it makes sense to distribute. An inclu-
sive society prioritizes political participation by all groups, thereby making the
oppression of minorities much less likely.
In the sections that follow this one, I take a closer look at Young’s views
on oppression, with special attention to her work on groups. The evolution of
her thought on social groups is an important part of her philosophical legacy.
It interests me especially in relation to collective evildoing, and I have learned
much from it. Young is critical of the idea that our identities are simply deter-
mined by the social groups to which we belong (2000, pp. 99–102). Rather,
these social groups (many of which are not chosen) “condition” us by delineat-
ing our options and by delineating the range of our future possibilities. Groups
into which we are born include much of what I have elsewhere called “the
unnatural lottery” (Card 1996, p. 20). Rawls has described the natural assets
 injustice, evil, and oppression 149

and liabilities with which one is born as one’s luck in the natural lottery (Rawls
1999; pp. 11, 13). By the unnatural lottery, I meant that network of unjust social
norms (often nothing very natural about them) into the midst of which one is
born, which determine one’s starting points in life (and often one’s future pros-
pects). At least some of the social groups that Young mentions (gender groups,
for example) are arguably part of a basic social framework that Rawls calls “the
basic structure of society” (Rawls 1999b, pp. 6–10). Still, we make our own
identities, Young maintains, through our actions, interactions, and choices.
In some cases, she notes, it is not so much the groups to which we belong but
significant events in our lives that become central to our identities. Perhaps an
example would be non-Jewish, non-German survivors of World War II: being
such a survivor might be a defining event in many such lives, more so than the
social groups to which they belonged.

Varieties of Social Collectivity

Social groups are at the forefront of Young’s thought on justice from the begin-
ning. She opens JPD with the question, “What are the implications for political
philosophy of the claims of new group-based social movements associated with
left politics—such movements as feminism, Black liberation, American Indian
movements, and gay and lesbian liberation?” (1990a, p. 3).These liberation
movements point to the “differences” of that book’s title. Yet the groups indi-
cated by these names actually form an odd list, as she soon realized. Women,
ethnic groups, and people identified by sexual orientation, not to mention age
groups and religious groups (added a few pages later, pp. 42–43), are not all
“groups” of the same order, even though none of them is a mere aggregate.
Their structures are significantly different. Members of such groups are related
to one another in significantly different kinds of ways.
In JPD she writes, “A social group” is “a collective of persons differentiated
from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life,” and
its members “have a specific affinity” with one another based on these things,
which leads them to associate with each other either more than with those
outside the group or in a different way (1990a, p. 43). She was no doubt think-
ing of cultural groups, perhaps African-American or American Indian ones,
when she wrote those words. But she was soon led to draw distinctions among
different kinds of social groups in light of such facts as that many women (for
example) appear to have no specific affinity for women and that the same is true
of other groups, even many cultural ones. A well-known result of oppression
has been widespread horizontal hostility (although that is not a term Young
uses), that is, intra-group hostility. The hostilities among women encouraged,
even cultivated and rewarded, by oppressive practices are well-known: mother/
daughter, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, wife/whore, heterosexual/lesbian,
150 justice: ethics and responsibility

and so on. And yet, affinities are there, too. As Adrienne Rich noted three
decades ago:
“Women have always lied to each other.”
“Women have always whispered the truth to each other.”
Both of these axioms are true. (Rich 1979, p. 189)
Four years later, appreciating all this and more, in her Signs essay, “Gender
as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective” (1994a), Young
stole the idea of “seriality” from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Rea-
son (1976), becoming—as she put it—one of Linda Singer’s banditas (who raid
male-authored works for useful concepts). She played with the idea of seriality
in a feminist context, making creative applications of that concept that Sartre
did not anticipate. “Gender as Seriality,” reprinted as the opening chapter of
Intersecting Voices (Young 1997a), applies a distinction, which Young attributes
to Sartre, between serial collectivities and other social groups. Sartre, she says,
illustrated serial collectivity with the examples of people waiting in line for a
bus and people listening to the radio. Bus riders and radio listeners are mem-
bers of series that do not construct their members’ identities. Nor do members
share common characteristics or have a particular affinity for one another or
even awareness of themselves as belonging to a social collectivity. Yet they are
not mere aggregates. The glue that binds members of a serial collectivity con-
sists of routine activities, habits, and materials which each engages for their
own purposes. Young began to explore the idea that women, like bus riders, are
a serial collectivity. She identified two basic externalities that unify women into
a series. One is a sexual division of labor. The other is enforced, institutional-
ized heterosexuality.
In “Gender as Seriality” (1994a), Young follows Sartre in reserving the
term “social groups” for self-conscious unions that members of series some-
times form deliberately to respond to social structures in which, as members
of a series, they had previously participated unselfconsciously. Series are here
treated as a backdrop to the formation of other social groups. Before women’s
groups were consciously formed, “woman” was not an identity. There were,
of course, women, as there are bus riders. But we did not tend to identify our-
selves as women. Rather, we tended to identify ourselves in terms of our rela-
tionships to significant others (usually male). When we published, many of us
used initials instead of giving our first names, in order to hide our gender. We
thought of ourselves as human beings. Not as women. We wanted to be per-
ceived as human beings. Not as women. Yet even when “woman” became for
some of us an important, even central, part of our identity, that was not because
of our common female anatomy (actually quite diverse). It was because of our
choices regarding the importance of certain shared experiences of the external
structures—including sexual divisions of labor and enforced heterosexuality—
that had made us into what Young initially calls a serial collectivity.
 injustice, evil, and oppression 151

In ID Young moves further from Sartre and articulates her own vocab-
ulary to mark differences among collectivities. She first distinguishes aggre-
gates from both associations and social groups. She then divides social groups
into structural ones and cultural ones. Both associations and social groups are
distinguished from aggregates in being defined by interactive relationships
among their members. All the philosophers in the world form an aggregate,
not unified by any external structures or materials. But some of us belong to
associations of philosophers. Associations—such as the American Philosophi-
cal Association—are purposefully constituted for specific functions (like hold-
ing conventions at which papers, such as an early version of this one, can be
presented).
Social groups, in contrast to associations, are less clearly defined. They are
not explicitly constituted. It is less usual to join a social group and more com-
mon to discover that one belongs to such groups. Among social groups, ethnic
groups are paradigmatic of the cultural ones, whereas groups distinguished by
gender, race, class, sexuality, or ability are structural. Structural groups are the
ones that would be naturally thought of as Sartrean serial collectivities. The
ingenious idea that women are a structural group is a very interesting way to
make concrete Frye’s claim, in her essay “The Possibility of Feminist Theory,”
that what unify women are overlapping patterns, rather than common charac-
teristics (1992, pp. 59–75). The patterns of interaction structured by the sexual
division of labor and compulsory heterosexuality are excellent candidates to
play that role.
Social groups are porous. Not rigidly bounded, they overlap. They “emerge
from the way people interact” (Young 2000, p. 90). “The attributes by which
some individuals are classed together in the ‘same’ group appear as simi-
lar enough to do so only by the emergent comparison with others” (ibid.).
Young cites as an example the Maori, who, prior to the British conquest of
New Zealand “saw themselves simply as belonging to dozens or hundreds of
groups with different lineage and relation to natural resources” (ibid.). Upon
reading this, I recalled a man in my “Feminism and Sexual Politics” class who
remarked one day in 1980, “I did not know I was Cuban until I came to the
United States.”

Who Is Oppressed? And Who Is Responsible for It?

For Young (as for Frye) oppression is structural. The agents of oppression are
interlocking social structures that trap the people they oppress. At the same
time that the norms of the sexual division of labor and of enforced hetero-
sexuality oppress us they unify us into the structural collectivity we know as
“women.” The idea is that such social norms actually make individuals into
women in the process of oppressing them. This idea fits well with Frye’s
152 justice: ethics and responsibility

observation that the term “oppression” embeds the term “press,” which sug-
gests “reduce,” “mold,” and “immobilize” (1983, pp. 2–7). Sexist structures
mold us into women. Indeed.
Who, then, or what, is oppressed? Who is molded into a woman? We say,
“Women are oppressed.” Yet insofar as women are a structural group, it appears
that there would be no women apart from oppressive social structures, as there
would be no bus riders apart from buses. Who, then, becomes a woman? (Beauvoir
implies: one does. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” [1953, p. 273]).
We say who becomes a bus rider by means of proper names or memberships in
cultural or other structural groups. Then, is it social groups all the way down? That
is, individuals interacting systematically in certain ways? If so, it would seem that
there is a social aspect to our identities, whether we embrace it or not, that is not
a function of our choices. Social groups may not determine our sense of who we
are. But they often determine the ways that others identify us and the histories
that are in socially significant ways ours.
If women are constructed by oppressive social practices, such as a sexual
division of labor and enforced heterosexuality, it seems that women would
cease to exist without those practices, as bus riders would not exist without
buses. We would not cease to exist. But we would cease to be women. For
those practices might not be replaced by alternatives that unified all of us who
are currently women into a new structural group. Or, is it possible that some
less inclusive social groups deliberately formed by women would perpetuate
women’s existence as descendants who inherit a certain past, even though
structures of sex oppression had been abolished or disappeared? In that case,
we would still be women, but “woman” would have changed its meaning.
It would have evolved.
A related question inevitably occurs to me: Would there be no lesbians
if the social group women did not exist, if there were no women? To whom
are lesbians attracted? Mostly women, not just lesbians. Young’s account of
structural groups can illuminate the debate over whether lesbians are women.
Insofar as we cease to participate in the sexual division of labor and enforced
heterosexuality, there are grounds for regarding us as not women. Monique
Wittig took that position, maintaining, in what was a maverick idea when she
first espoused it, that lesbians are not women, that a lesbian has to be a not-
woman (Wittig 1992, pp. 9–20). Sarah Hoagland’s lesbian ethics was very
influenced by that view (Hoagland 1988). And yet, whether we have in fact
been conditioned by the practices that form so many of us into women is not
entirely a matter of our choices. The processes that mold us begin before we
are developed enough to make choices. Even without sexual relationships with
men, most of us learn to “handle” men in stereotypically feminine ways with-
out being particularly conscious of doing so. And so, it can also be argued that
lesbians are part of the structural group women despite our choices. Most of us
 injustice, evil, and oppression 153

who identify as lesbian have been raised to be women and have been treated as
women by most of the people who interact with us.
Yet the question remains: if the sexual division of labor and compulsory
heterosexuality ceased to exist, would there be no lesbians? Perhaps not. Same-
sex relationships could continue. But there might be no basis to classify parties
to same-sex relationships as members of a social group, any more than there
is any basis for classifying left-handed people as a social group. No external
structures currently unify left-handers into a social group, as they might do if
left-handers’ needs were more systematically taken into account.
We are not, according to Young, to think of social structures as ontologi-
cally any kind of super entity over and above the individuals who are system-
atically interacting in certain ways, in accord with certain norms, making use
of certain kinds of materials, and so on. To hold structures responsible for
oppression, then, is presumably to hold at least some individuals responsible
for oppression. But which individuals? Young begins to address this question
more fully in Global Challenges (2007). In oppressive institutions, the oppressed
interact systematically with those who dominate and exploit them and with the
privileged who benefit from others’ oppression. We know that Young, who is
not into the blame game, would not blame women for sex oppression, although
many (most?) women are complicit in sex oppression in a variety of ways—for
example, in supporting the norms of compulsory heterosexuality. Questions
of responsibility become important for securing accountability (which need
not involve blame) and determining who should shoulder which burdens of
change. ID argues for inclusion of the oppressed in decisions that affect them.
There is room for further work on the nature of such inclusion, on issues of
accountability, and on distributing the burdens of change.

The Nature of Oppression

With luck, most of us can develop capacities to evaluate, criticize, and influ-
ence at least some of the groups into which we are born as well as many of the
groups with which we may ally ourselves (even groups from which we may
distance ourselves). One of the most serious harms of oppression is systematic
hindrance of the development of these capacities, for example, punishing as
disloyal or treasonous attempts at criticism or dissent. Individuals who could, if
they wished, identify as biracial, bisexual, bicultural, bilingual, or multi- almost
any of these things are familiar with pressures to identify with one group at
the expense of the other(s) and with accusations of disloyalty or self-hatred for
refusing to do so. Oppression can limit our ability to form identities that we can
affirm, tolerably coherent identities that are relatively stable, that have integrity,
and that support self-esteem and self-respect.
154 justice: ethics and responsibility

To appreciate how her conception of oppression evolved, let us revisit

Young’s five faces of oppression in light of her later work on social groups, trac-
ing some of the modifications that the later work requires in her earlier work.
The faces, recall, are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural
imperialism, and violence (Young 1990a, pp. 40, 48–63).
In JPD Young invokes Marx’s (1967) account of exploitation as appro-
priation. The capitalist appropriates the powers of workers. Politically, this is
more on target than Kant’s view of exploitation (Kant 1996; pp. 79–81). It is an
understatement to say that oppressive exploiters fail to respect others as ends
in themselves. Marx’s capitalists not only use workers but use them up, drain
their substance, suck them dry. And how do they do this? It may be that no indi-
vidual capitalist has a maxim of action that captures the impact of exploitative
interaction. Social structures do it, which is shorthand for many individuals
interacting systematically in complex ways with effects that may not be initially
foreseeable but that can eventually come into view as people begin to acquire
a consciousness of what they have been doing. Those who acquire such a con-
sciousness may attempt criticism and rejection of the exploitative practices.
Suppression of such criticism and dissent is apt to be culpable even if the prac-
tices criticized were not.
Nonunionized workers were Sartre’s paradigm of serial collectivity.
Exploited workers are robbed of control over their powers and of benefits
derivable from them. If this appropriation disempowers them too much or
too rapidly, it becomes self-defeating. Hence, the well-known tension between
oppression and exploitation: to be exploitable, one must remain useful, at least
until one can be replaced. There must be power there to exploit. Yet appropria-
tion of a worker’s labor does stunt the worker’s growth as an interactive social
agent. The result is apt to be a stultifying life—no hope or vision for the future,
not much different from being a long-term prisoner. The working poor who
resist Marx’s view or who find it offensive tend to emphasize kinds of control
and forms of culture that are less dependent on economics—humor, storytell-
ing, songs, religious ideals, and moral values, all of which can ameliorate a
materially deprived life. Yet the individual worker is as unable as the individual
woman to get off the bus.
Foreshadowing ID, Young wrote in JPD that marginalization may be the
most dangerous face of oppression. The marginalized are expelled from use-
ful participation in social life. She cited the old, people with disabilities, single
mothers and their children, the involuntarily unemployed, and American Indi-
ans, “especially those on reservations” (1990a, p. 53). People who are marginal-
ized are vulnerable to potentially severe material deprivation, even premature
death. There may be no motive, as there is in exploitation, to keep the marginal-
ized alive and functioning.
Yet one might object that those who have disabilities but enjoy class privi-
lege may not be vulnerable to deprivation or social invisibility. Franklin Delano
 injustice, evil, and oppression 155

Roosevelt presided over the United States from a wheelchair. ID emphasizes

that we belong to many structural groups, some of which can negate or dimin-
ish an individual’s vulnerability to the oppressiveness suffered by so many
in others. Who or what, then, is marginalized? Is it the group? Is it only the
unlucky members of a group? Is it, rather, the facts of disability?
Instead of offering an answer to this question asked in this way, in ID
Young revisits marginalization by way of its opposite, inclusion. She is then
able to offer a more layered account of marginalization that invokes practices
of democratic representation and the many possibilities of inclusion and exclu-
sion associated with them. That a group is inadequately represented does not,
because of multiple group membership, entail that individual members are
expelled from social life or that they are materially deprived. Marginalization,
now finally understood as exclusion from participation in democratic processes,
is a matter of the degrees to which and the ways in which individuals can be so
excluded in a less than just society.
The third face of oppression, which Young called “powerlessness” (but
probably should have called “disempowerment,” to capture the idea that this
is something done to people) is redundant. All oppression is disempowering
insofar as it hinders the ability to exercise and develop one’s capacities for
agency (one’s “power” in the broadest sense).
Cultural imperialism receives a truer and more careful account in ID than
it had received in JPD. In ID, cultural imperialism is presented as a form of
domination, rather than, as in JPD, as a face of oppression. Recall that domina-
tion hinders self-determination, whereas oppression hinders self-development.
What cultural imperialism interferes with is self-determination. It does not
necessarily hinder self-development, although it can. Cultural imperialism can
be deeply unjust, arrogant, and disrespectful without actually disempowering.
But it need not be any of these things. Consider denazification. Denazification
aimed to destroy Nazi culture. Was it imperialistic? It forcibly imposed demo-
cratic values on a very undemocratic society. Sounds like domination. But was
it also oppressive? I would say, rather, the opposite. It liberated others from
Nazi oppression. It did not hinder the development of the capacities of those
who had become Nazis. What it hindered were extremely oppressive uses of
their capacities to govern and to administer political institutions. It restricted
the autonomy of those who had used their autonomy to oppress others.
Violence is the last of Young’s five faces in JPD. Whether violence is
oppressive likewise depends on the nature of the violence, how it is used, and
its effects. Violence can be used to dominate without stunting the development
of capacities for agency. Some violence actually stimulates development. My
grandfather as a child was thrown into deep water and told to sink or swim.
That was a violent lesson. But he learned very fast to swim.
The case of violence suggests that Young’s faces of oppression are best
seen not as analytic of the concept of oppression but as characteristic forms
156 justice: ethics and responsibility

that injustice takes. Injustices include many forms of domination as well as

oppression. Young’s aim was never to offer an analysis, in the sense of a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions, of oppression. It was, rather, to zero in on
the most important forms that oppression takes in the real world, to elucidate
the values at stake in eliminating oppression.

Concluding Thoughts

Young seems to me to have more in common with Rawls than she recognizes.
Both are more Stoic and less Epicurean in their approaches to social justice
than John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and other welfare economists. Both
Young and Rawls place a higher value on agency than on external goods.
Agency in Rawls’s approach plays a key role behind a hypothetical veil of igno-
rance in proposing principles that would remove obstacles to action, insuring
basic liberties for all, refusing to exclude anyone in advance from competing
for political office. In the lexical ordering of his two famous principles of jus-
tice, Rawls treats basic liberties as of far greater importance than any of the
other primary goods except self-respect. There can be no trade-offs in Rawls’s
theory between basic liberties and income or wealth. In Young’s theorizing
about justice, agency becomes key in her concern to include in political pro-
cesses people from a wide variety of social groups and to eliminate the kinds
of practices that can hinder the development of one’s very abilities to act, even
when there are no external obstacles. Like Rawls, she is more concerned with
agents and relationships than with such external goods as income and wealth.
But her theoretical starting point is opposite to his. He begins with a vision
of principles for evaluating social practices under the ideal supposition that
most people would abide by requirements of justice most of the time, yielding
a nearly just society. She begins with the negative concept of injustice, with
real-world heavy duty instances of it, and tries to imagine what a society free of
injustices would have to be like.
Finally, I want to return to the divergence noted at the beginning of this
essay between Young’s approach to oppression and my own. I have been espe-
cially interested in oppression as an evil, even a paradigm evil. Evils, on my
theory, are wrongs that deserve priority of attention, the worst wrongs. Not all
wrongs, not even all injustices, are evils. The challenge in responding to evils is
how to do so without doing evil in the process. My approach to justice, highly
colored by Rawls, has been to think of it as a part of ethics and to regard one’s
sense of justice as part of one’s moral sense.
Young’s interest in oppression is more political than moral. She is con-
cerned with mobilizing effective resistance to oppression without making moral
judgments regarding the sources of that oppression. She was frank about her
reasons for not making those moral judgments. Negative moral judgments,
 injustice, evil, and oppression 157

she feared, would reduce the likelihood of cooperation from those so judged,
and their cooperation may be very needed. My interest in evils, however, is
not basically an interest in blaming but in identifying the worst wrongs and
in thinking how to respond honorably, without doing further evil. Identifying
culpable perpetrators can be important to instituting productive accountability
and acceptable distributions of the burdens of change.
I have long thought of oppression as a paradigm of evil, in the ethical sense
of “evil” developed and defended in my book The Atrocity Paradigm (Card 2002).
On the theory of that book, evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms
produced by culpable wrongdoing. In regarding oppression as paradigmatically
evil, I have thought it not only intolerably harmful but also culpably produced.
Yet, if what makes a practice oppressive is that it hinders self-development in
the oppressed, there is no necessity that this hindrance be culpably produced.
Oppression, like many injustices, is definable independently of the psychologi-
cal states of individuals. Oppression is defined in terms of what people suffer
(undergo), not in terms of what others do to cause it (although the conduct of
others does cause it). In that regard, oppression is similar to injustice in Aris-
totle’s narrow sense of that concept (Aristotle 1925, pp. 106–36): not receiving
one’s due. What counts as one’s due is definable independently of the psycho-
logical states of the agents, if any, who are responsible for what one has (or
lacks). Aristotle saw this and struggled with an inadequate vocabulary for draw-
ing the distinctions that need to be drawn regarding whether someone acted
unjustly or not (Aristotle 1925, pp. 125–28).
Perhaps because Young approaches oppression by way of the idea of injus-
tice, she is inclined to see it from the points of view of those who suffer it,
who may not understand its causes or even care so much what caused it as
how to end it. To some extent, her readiness to suppose that much oppression
is not the product of culpable activity may be a result of her preoccupation
with routine governmental and economic practices. My recent preoccupations
have been torture, terrorism, and genocide, in which culpability figures promi-
nently. For a while I was inclined to reconcile Young’s view and mine regard-
ing culpability and oppression by noting that although a practice might have
arisen without culpable wrongdoing, when an appreciation of its oppressive-
ness becomes possible on the part of agents who can resist or work for change,
then refusals to engage in resistance or work for change can turn what had
been a social disaster into a moral evil. Refusals and other failures to work for
change can certainly be culpable. Yet I now think the more important point is
that Young is right to appreciate that oppression does not necessarily presup-
pose culpability, even if it is always an injustice and even if much oppression is
in fact also the product of culpable wrongdoing.
To the extent that Young is right about the likelihood that oppressive
social structures can come into being without culpability on the part of their
agents, I cannot continue to regard oppression as paradigmatic of evil without
158 justice: ethics and responsibility

modifying my theory of evil. I do want to be able to make sense of oppression as

evil. But doing so requires me to modify my analysis of evil, at least as applied
to institutions or practices. I have become persuaded in thinking about torture
that a better analysis of evil would substitute “inexcusable wrongdoing” for
“culpable wrongdoing.”2 With this revision, evils are “reasonably foreseeable
intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongdoing.” “Inexcusable” here
refers not only to the absence of diminished agency but also to the absence of
even partially justifying reasons, reasons that could mitigate blameworthiness
in accountable agents or the injustice of a social practice. The absence of miti-
gating reasons does not imply the presence of wickedness or sadism. Often,
ordinary selfishness is inexcusable, and it can bring about reasonably foresee-
able intolerable harm. Evil in institutions or practices can, of course, take the
form of inexcusably culpable deeds by individuals. But it can also, or instead,
take the form of norms that are utterly indefensible, from a moral point of
view, whether those who are guided by those norms are aware of it or not.
An advantage of this revision is that it preserves, better than my earlier
analysis, the weightiness of judgments of evil. Culpability has degrees. “Evil”
may be too severe a judgment when the agents of even major harm were not
very culpable. Another advantage of substituting “inexcusable wrongdoing” for
“culpable wrongdoing” in the definition of “evils” is that the new definition can
make better sense of structural evils and evil in institutions. “Inexcusable” does
not always have the same meaning when applied to institutions or practices as
when applied to individuals. When applied to individuals, it implies culpability.
But applied to practices or institutions, “inexcusable” can mean only that the
rules, the norms, that define, or structure, the practice are not even partially
justified, morally speaking. That is, there are no good moral reasons in favor of
those norms. That view is compatible with Young’s belief that oppressive social
structures can evolve without culpability in individuals. There are, of course,
explanations for the existence of such structures. But there may be no justifying
reasons for them. There may be no culpability, either, if no one is accountable for
the existence of the structures, even if individuals are fully accountable under
other descriptions for what they do. I am still inclined to think that oppressive
structures that are entirely the product of non-culpable activities are relatively
rare. Young was inclined to think they are, on the contrary, all too common.
But that is not a philosophical disagreement between us.
If the alternative to regarding oppression as an evil is to regard it simply
as an injustice, there arises the danger of understating both the wrong and the
harm of oppression. For although many injustices are grave, some are fairly
trivial (petty thefts, or unjust salary discriminations among handsomely paid
CEOs). Oppression, in contrast, is never trivial. Yet evil, as Bat-Ami Bar On

2 I owe this idea initially to Kekes (2005), whose second book on evil characterizes evils as inexcusably
wrong, although I develop that idea in my own way.
 injustice, evil, and oppression 159

has recently reminded me (2004), is a primarily moral category, not primarily

a political one. Justice straddles both ethics and politics. If a specifically politi-
cal concept exists that corresponds to “evil” in picking out the most serious
political wrongs (ones that are never trivial) as “evil” picks out the most serious
moral wrongs, perhaps that concept is oppression. Unlike domination, oppres-
sion is always an evil. If the concept of oppression enables us to identify politi-
cal atrocities and distinguish them from lesser political wrongs, as the concept
of evil enables us to identify moral atrocities and distinguish them from lesser
moral wrongs, Young’s lifelong work on oppression bears a certain analogy or
parallel to my own focus on evil, despite our differences.
This page intentionally left blank
 13
4

The Faces of Animal Oppression

Lori Gruen

About fifteen years ago, I wrote an article analyzing the connection between the
oppression of women and the oppression of animals.1 I argued that nonhuman
animals are oppressed in a myriad of ways and that examining the mutually
reinforcing structures that support the oppression of nonhuman animals and
the oppression of other groups is an important liberatory project (Gruen 1993).
These claims were, and continue to be, met with some skepticism. In response
to one critic, I turned to Iris Young’s “The Five Faces of Oppression” for intel-
lectual support.2 Here I will return to the question of oppression beyond the
species boundary, again drawing on Young’s insights and explore how it can
be claimed meaningfully that nonhuman animals, like so many human groups
that differ from those in positions of power and privilege, suffer from exploita-
tion, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence and
thus can be considered oppressed. When we understand the situation that indi-
viduals and groups are in as oppressive ones, then greater attention can be paid
to rectifying the particular wrongs caused by oppression.

Animal Oppression

Humans have always interacted with nonhuman animals, and while contexts and
relationships have changed the structure of the relations have, arguably, stayed

1 When it is not too rhetorically cumbersome, I will use the most accurate phrase “nonhuman animals.”
When I do occasionally use the term “animals” I am not including human animals in the category.
2 Gruen, 1996. “The Five Faces of Oppression” was originally published in 1988. References here are to
the pages in Young (1990a). Iris and I never had a conversation about her views on the oppression of animals.
I always hoped we would “get to this someday.”
162 justice: ethics and responsibility

much the same. Humans dictate how nonhuman animals in human environ-
ments will fare. Given that human environments are continuously expanding,
that human behaviors—i.e., emitting green house gases and polluting water and
air—cannot be contained in one geographical region, and that we are encroach-
ing on even the most remote places on earth, it is not unreasonable to claim that
virtually all nonhuman animals are living in human-impacted environments.
Most of our actions affect them. Humans dominate and control the lives of non-
human animals. Humans oppress nonhuman animals. While some individual
relationships may not look or feel like dominating and oppressive ones, the struc-
ture of the relations are characterized by the forces of oppression. When we look
at Young’s categories of oppression we can see how this is the case.
Young suggests that “the central insight expressed in the concept of exploi-
tation” (Young 1990a, p. 49, my emphasis) is that this type of oppression
occurs when one group systematically extracts the labor of another to benefit
themselves and not the laborer. Although the concept of exploitation in tra-
ditional Marxist and more recent socialist-feminist theory has been reserved
for human laborers, it is not at all difficult to expand the concept to include
nonhumans. Consider the plight of dairy cows, battery hens, and sows in fac-
tory farms. Intensively reared dairy cows are so overworked that they begin to
metabolize their own muscle in order to continue to produce milk, a process
referred to in the industry as “milking off their backs.” The cows are milked by
machine and often suffer from painful inflammation of the mammary glands,
or mastitis. Sows are confined for their entire lives and repeatedly artificially
inseminated so as to produce piglets who are removed three weeks after birth,
fattened up, and sold for consumption. In factory farms, sows spend most of
their lives in crates that are seven feet long and two feet wide—they literally
have no room to move. Hens are kept in battery cages stacked tier upon tier in
huge warehouses. Confined seven or eight to a cage, they too cannot move or
even spread one wing. Conveyor belts bring in food and water and carry eggs
away. The lives and bodies of female animals on factory farms are completely
controlled to produce the maximum amount of product at the smallest cost
to the producer. Factory farming, a process in which over five billion animals
annually in the United States alone are intensively confined, manipulated, and
ultimately slaughtered to produce the greatest profit for the few agribusinesses
that control the market, not only exploits female animals’ biological and repro-
ductive labor, but also denies all factory farmed animals their lives so that some
humans can profit. The animals are exploited and when their labor is thor-
oughly extracted, they are killed.
Young’s second category, marginalization, involves, in part, separating one
group and viewing them as dependent upon the dominant group. The con-
ceptual structure of the human/animal divide, in mythology, in religion, in
history, in art, and also in material terms, defines human as not animal, as
above animal, as dominant over the animals. Human civilization and progress
 the faces of animal oppression 163

is measured by how far we humans have come from our animal ancestors. The
group human is framed by the nonhuman animals in the margins.
The marginalization of animals is not just conceptual or symbolic. It has
direct and often devastating consequences on their lives. Consider those ani-
mals, particularly chimpanzees and orangutans, who are used in entertain-
ment and commercials. Taken from their mothers at birth and raised to be
comedic human stand-ins, infant apes are often kept alone and terrorized into
performing. Dressed in human clothes, running amok in offices or shopping
stores, these individuals are deprived of species typical behaviors and commu-
nity with others of their kind. When they become too big to handle (usually
around puberty, between 6–8 years old) they are further marginalized, sent
to roadside zoos and other substandard facilities, where they might spend the
remainder of their lives, in the case of chimpanzees that can be as long as 50
years, alone in a small cage. Young suggests that even when marginals have
their needs provided for, “injustices of marginality would remain in the form
of uselessness [and] boredom . . .” (Young 1990a, p. 55). One need only visit one
of the many unaccredited zoos or roadside exotic animal “farms” to see lives of
uselessness and boredom, animals pace, rock back and forth, and look out at
the world with what Jane Goodall has called “the thousand mile stare.”3
Young illustrates the oppressive nature of powerlessness by analyzing class
injustices yet much of what she argues can be extrapolated to the conditions
under which nonhuman animals live. Those who are powerless are denied the
opportunity and authority to make choices about their own lives, they are inhib-
ited in the development of their own capacities, and they are subject to disre-
spectful treatment. From zoos to feedlots, pet shops to laboratories, factory to
fur farms, nonhuman animals are denied the most basic control over their lives.
If they are allowed to reproduce, their infants are usually taken from them; they
rarely have choices about when to eat, what to eat, or how much to eat; and very
few have choices about basic movement, often forced to sit on cold concrete
or other inappropriate substrate, and those who do live with others don’t have
the option of choosing with whom to interact. Not only are actual nonhuman
animals treated with disrespect in a myriad of ways, one of the most poignant
ways of disrespecting humans is to compare them to a nonhuman animal.4
To be a nonhuman animal, in some way, is to be a thing unworthy of respect.
Even seemingly powerful animals in the wild are increasingly rendered inca-
pable of doing what they might otherwise choose to do as habitat is being

3 As described by Roger Fouts in “Serving a Life Sentence for Your Viewing Pleasure” a publication of the
Chimpanzee Collaboratory at www.chimpcollaboratory.org. He writes, upon witnessing a young chimpanzee in
a refrigerator-sized enclosure that when she looked at him and Jane, Jane commented that she was looking right
through them with “the ‘thousand mile stare’ that she has seen in young children starving to death in Africa. This
chimpanzee had given up. She was no longer a chimpanzee.”
4 Patricia Hill Collins (1991) describes this well in her discussion of the ways that Black women are linked
to animals, and the way that this linkage allows for the perpetuation of oppression. See chapter 6.
164 justice: ethics and responsibility

destroyed and they are more frequently meeting human animals who are cer-
tainly less physically powerful, but who have guns and other high-powered
weapons that can be shot from jeeps, ships, and helicopters.
Though the majority of nonhuman animals are hunted and killed for eco-
nomic reasons, many are killed, at least ostensibly, in the name of culture.
Consider the case of the Makah Nation, the only Native American tribe that
has a treaty right to hunt and kill whales. With the exception of a legal hunt
that led to the death of a three year old gray whale in 1999 and the illegal
hunt that mortally wounded a gray whale in the fall of 2007, the tribe had not
hunted whales for over seventy years but they are campaigning to be granted
permission to do so again. Most Makah view the hunt as a way to reclaim their
traditions and to provide the younger generation with the basis of identities
that can help to shape their goals and aspirations (although some elder mem-
bers of the Makah community view the hunt as a travesty). For the majority
of the Makah the cultural value of whale killing is crucial to their identities.
While some Makah have suggested that the cultural values and the value of the
whales can be simultaneously promoted in the hunt, it might also be claimed
that the Makah are imposing their culture on the whales, much the way white
Americans are imposing their cultural values on the Makah and other Native
Nations. These impositions represent a form of cultural imperialism and in the
case of the whales, it denies the very possibility that a whale’s life may be valu-
able to her and her family independent of the dominant cultures conception of
that value. (In the case of the Makah, they can only be considered a dominant
culture in respect to the whales, certainly not within current U.S. society in
which they are subject to cultural imperialism and marginalization.)
In our personal lives, we can see the way cultural imperialism operates on
the lives of our “domestic pets” or “companion animals.” When humans bring
nonhuman animals into their homes, the nonhuman animals are forced to
conform to the human rituals and practices that exist there. Cats and dogs are
often denied full expression of their natural urges when their “owners” keep
them indoors or put bells around cats’ necks to impact their success at hunting
or forbid dogs from digging or otherwise scavenging for food. While there are
clearly reasons that can be given for imposing such restrictions on companion
animals, and while there are also important benefits that are gained by both
the companion animals and their human companions in domesticated rela-
tionships that are thoughtful and compassionate,5 the potential benefits do not
erase the fact that they are forced to live by our cultural standards.
Finally there is the issue of violence. Young writes, “What makes violence a
face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often
utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them
possible and even acceptable. What makes violence a phenomenon of social

5 See, for example, Cuomo and Gruen (1997).

 the faces of animal oppression 165

injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character,
its existence as a social practice” (Young 1990a, pp. 61–62). The assembly-line
method of intensive agribusiness is violent from start to gruesome finish. Dur-
ing transport, many animals suffer broken bones; some are crushed or suffo-
cated by animals that cannot control their movement during shipment. Early
on, chicks have their beaks cut of with hot blades, cattle and other animals are
branded with hot irons, and pigs have their tails cut off so they won’t be pulled
off by other animals in the crowded conditions in which they spend their short-
ened lives. When they are transported again to slaughter, most are hung upside
down while still conscious, then are jolted into unconsciousness before their
throats are slit. Not all animals slaughtered are lucky enough to be unconscious
as they bleed to death, however. While raising and slaughtering animals for
food on factory farms is an extreme instance of the oppressive violence Young
noted, it is also a social practice that obscures, and in some instances autho-
rizes, other forms of violence against nonhuman animals.6
Though Young did not mention nonhuman animal oppression in her writ-
ing, another feminist philosopher, Marilyn Frye, uses the oppression of non-
humans as a metaphor for human oppression:
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is
confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental
or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to
each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them
and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience
of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or
booby trapped. Cages. Consider a birdcage . . . It is perfectly “obvious”
that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related
barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight,
but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the
solid walls of a dungeon. . . . (Frye 1983, pp. 4–5)
Importantly, for billions of nonhuman animals their cages and stalls and crates
and dungeons are not metaphors, but realities, and our understanding that
their reality is one in which they are oppressed can provide ways of thinking
about how to overcome oppression and achieve justice for them.

Recognition and Oppression

The skepticism about applying the term oppression to nonhuman animals,

and perhaps even adopting Young’s analysis of oppression to describe our

6 Many countries that use non-humans for food (whales in Japan, dogs in Korea, apes and other large
animals in parts of Africa) rightly point out the hypocrisy of complaints by those in countries where animals are
reared on factory farms.
166 justice: ethics and responsibility

treatment of nonhuman animals, might be based on the idea that in order to

be oppressed one has to experience oppression as oppression. Oppression is an
experience that is subjectively understood as limiting, harmful, frustrating, dis-
respectful, and worse. Critics might contend that while the caged bird cannot
fly away, only humans can understand the structures that prevent her flight.
Nonhuman animals may be unable to do certain things in virtue of the ways in
which we exploit and marginalize them, strip them of power and control, force
them to live the way we want them to live and are physically and psychologically
violent toward them, but they do not suffer from the extra knowledge that we
are doing these things to them because of who or what they are.
Certainly the fact that humans can be aware of their oppression repre-
sents an added feature of the injustice that oppression is for them. Oppression
denies individuals and groups the ability to pursue their way of life or to express
themselves. Oppression operates to systematically frustrate or deny a group of
people the chance to live their lives as their own, to be, as it were, the narrators
of their life stories. This way of understanding oppression has led some, for
example Seyla Benhabib (2006, p. 441), to interpret Young as claiming that
oppression represents a violation of the right to recognition. Since nonhuman
animals are not the kinds of beings who can be said to formulate identities that
would be the basis for a right to recognition, it would be a mistake to think of
them as being oppressed.
However, oppression does not reduce to being denied the right to recog-
nition in the case of humans as well as in the case of nonhuman animals.
Oppression can be measured objectively even if no member of the group being
oppressed themselves, recognize their oppression. This is particularly impor-
tant in cases in which “internalized oppression” or “false consciousness” or
“adaptive preferences” may be operating. The fact that there are such cases
suggests that determining whether or not oppression is operating will require
an objective analysis of the context that goes beyond subjective assessment. In
the case of women who may claim that their marginalization and their power-
lessness do not constitute oppression, for example, we may want to determine
who is benefiting from the practices that keep them marginal and powerless
and who, as a group, is suffering from it. In many instances, though an indi-
vidual woman may not identify her treatment as oppressive, the structures of
oppression may nonetheless be present and those who perpetuate the struc-
tures continue to benefit from them, even in cases where the individuals being
oppressed may also be said to benefit. For example, if becoming a sexual servant
gets one out of conditions of horrible poverty, then there may be at least some
benefit for the sexual slave, but that doesn’t mean the conditions in which she
exists are not oppressive. There are those who benefit (the men) systematically
and there are others (women) who may not themselves be sex slaves but who
nonetheless suffer from stereotypes, prejudices, and material hardship that are
enabled by the structures that allow sexual slavery. The importance of viewing
 the faces of animal oppression 167

oppression objectively is particularly clear in egregious cases of adaptive pref-

erence formation in which sex slaves view themselves as only worthy of being
slaves and accept that they are getting what they deserve. In contexts in which
the ability to think thoughts free of oppressive constructs is absent; it would be
dangerous to understand oppression as a strictly subjective experience.
Indeed, Young does not argue that one has to see oneself as oppressed in
order to be oppressed. She believes the criteria for oppression that she iden-
tifies “are objective. They provide a means of refuting some people’s belief
that their group is oppressed when it is not, as well as a means of persuading
others that a group is oppressed when they doubt it.” (Young 1990a, p. 64).
In recognizing this she provided us with tools to address oppression even in
those contexts where it has distorted the very experiences of those who are
oppressed. She also, I believe, allowed for the possibility that others whom she
did not identify directly, such as nonhuman animals, may be oppressed.
One might object to the sensibility of the claim that nonhuman animals
are oppressed, even objectively oppressed, because oppression is a social pro-
cess that is exerted on groups and there is no social group that is “nonhuman
animals.” The category “nonhuman animal” itself is so large and variable that
unlike human social groups there are no positive characteristics, identities, or
affiliations that members of the group share. The group nonhuman animals
seem to be based on a taxonomical distinction—the group consists of all non-
human animals that are not members of the species Homo sapiens. Within the
group nonhuman animals, there are individuals as diverse as aardvarks and
elephants, dolphins and cheetahs, mice and mountain goats, beings that have
very little in common except for the classification as “not humans.”
However diverse the group nonhumans actually is, and despite the impor-
tance in most contexts to attend to the diversity of interests and needs that the
variety of species within the group nonhuman have, the larger category serves
a central symbolic role in human social lives and in our self-understanding,
as mentioned above. Given that the group has a social reality, even if not a
meaningful biological or conceptual basis, it can be thought of as akin to the
human social groups that are more often the subjects of discussions of injus-
tice and oppression, e.g., “People of color” or “LGBT.” These human groups,
as Young notes, are products of social processes, and so too is the group of
nonhuman animals. Members of human groups may not “share a common
nature”, they are “multiple, cross-cutting, fluid and shifting” (Young 1990a,
p. 48), but insofar as they are identifiable to those in positions of power, they
can be subject to oppression. Unlike unified analyses of oppression, one of the
virtues of Young’s approach is that it recognizes that there are different kinds
of groups that are constructed for different reasons in different contexts and
that oppression will operate differently given these social facts. This important
recognition of difference provides a way of making sense of the oppression of
nonhuman animals.
168 justice: ethics and responsibility

Perhaps the most forceful objection is that there are important differ-
ences, not in the analysis of nonhuman animal oppression and the oppression
of human groups, but in the purposes or ends such an analysis is meant to
achieve. Young’s analysis of oppression is aimed, in part, at identifying forces
that contribute to particular forms of injustice. Members of oppressed groups
are denied the possibility of developing and exercising their capacities and are
unable to express themselves and be heard in democratic, social deliberations.
The goal of identifying oppression is to help construct institutional solutions
that will enable members of oppressed groups to become full, equal partici-
pants in their social lives. It might be argued that these aspects of justice simply
do not apply to nonhuman animals and thus saying that nonhuman animals
are oppressed either is metaphorical or means something very different than
what Young had in mind.7
In one sense, it is true that the goals that Young’s anti-oppression analysis
is meant to enable are not goals that nonhuman animals could share, even if
they were desirable to them. Participating in decisions about the division of
labor, reformulating social and cultural institutions to make visible previously
oppressed groups’ values, creating institutions that allow for full participation
in social decision-making are liberatory ends for humans seeking justice, but
they don’t apply to nonhuman animals, even those that are living in human con-
texts. Nonetheless, I believe there is an important way that the shape of these
ends for humans can help us to think about the shape of justice for nonhuman
animals. The success of thinking in these ways will not only help clarify what
anti-oppressive treatment might mean for the nonhuman animals themselves,
but may also assist in pointing a way past what has become a fairly ugly divide
within the movement for animals. Let me turn specifically to this question.

The Significance of an Oppression Analysis

for Nonhuman Animals

Much of the work that is directed at articulating the ethical and political impor-
tance of the plight of nonhuman animals, or at least the work that has gained
the most attention, focuses on how an individual nonhuman animal’s rights or
interests have been violated or ignored.8 As sentient, feeling beings, as beings
who can experience pleasures and pains, both physical and in many instances,
psychological, they are, in important respects, no different from us. Since we
can make claims on one another, whether verbal or not, when our interests or
rights are in jeopardy, as ethically valuable beings like us, they too can make
such claims. Nonhuman animals are morally considerable in virtue of the fact

7 I thank Ann Ferguson for raising this sort of worry.

8 See Gruen 2003, for a summary of the various mainstream views.
 the faces of animal oppression 169

that they share with us the very capacities, most notably sentience, that we think
make us morally considerable. To recognize these capacities as ethically salient
only in humans is to engage in a form of “speciesism” which is akin to “rac-
ism” and “sexism” and other discriminatory attitudes. However, while animal
advocates have identified speciesism as a form of prejudice, this has not led to an
analysis of the structures of power that speciesism represents and reinforces nor
has the identification led to a consistent strategy for combating this prejudice.9
There is a divide within the animal advocacy movement between those who
are focused on ending suffering and those who are focused on ending the use
of animals. Both positions are often referred to as “animal rights” positions,
but they have been increasingly distinguishable as advocates of each position
have taken issue with the other.10 Those who are primarily concerned with the
pain and suffering nonhuman animals experience often adopt a utilitarian
view—they are interested in minimizing unnecessary animal suffering and in
practice that means they are opposed to most uses of nonhumans, particularly
in the developed world. Those who are primarily interested in ending animal
use call themselves “abolitionists”—they too are interested in ending animal
suffering but are driven by the principle that opposes the use of nonhumans in
all contexts. As abolitionist Gary Francione, who wants to rid the world of the
use of animals for any purpose, including companionship, has written:
our recognition that no human should be the property of others
required that we abolish slavery and not merely regulate it to be more
“humane,” our recognition that animals have this one basic right
[not to be property] would mean that we could no longer justify our
institutional exploitation of animals for food, clothing, amusement,
or experiments. (Francione 2000, p. xxix)
Animal liberationist Peter Singer doesn’t see the contrast between abolition
and regulation in such stark terms. He argues:
It’s absurd to say that because we do one thing that is arguably bad
for [animals] therefore it doesn’t matter what else we do to them
and can just treat them as things. You might as well have said in
the debate about slavery that we shouldn’t have had laws to prevent
masters beating their slaves because as long as they are slaves they
are just things and you might as well beat them as much as you like
[until slavery has ended]. (Leider 2006)
The difference in the positions are more than just rhetorical; in practical terms they
lead to different sorts of assessments of the problems nonhuman animals face.

9 Importantly, feminists who think about the oppression of animals as related to other oppression have
done the most work here—Carol Adams (1990), Greta Gaard (1993), Josephine Donovan (1990), and myself.
10 For a very telling example of this see the debate between vegan advocate Eric Marcus and law professor
Gary Francione. Transcripts are here: http://www.gary-francione.com/francione-marcus-debate.html.
170 justice: ethics and responsibility

One of the most contention current issues is that of “cage-free” eggs.

As I mentioned above, the battery system of egg production is exploitative, pain-
ful, and, I’ve argued, oppressive for hens. They are kept in small cages in which
they cannot stretch a wing, surrounded by tens of thousands of other hens also
in small cages and all the cages are stacked in rows in large, ammonia filled,
dark sheds. Around the globe, an estimated 3.5 billion birds live under these
terrifying, crowded, painful conditions until they are sent to slaughter after a
year of egg production. In response to the awful reality these hens are forced to
endure, animal campaigners and compassionate consumers have pushed for
more humane conditions. In response to both changes in law and changes in
demand, some egg producers have switched to “cage-free” systems. These cage
free systems take hens out of cages, but still keep thousands of them crammed
in large, ammonia filled dark sheds. The hens are still debeaked—a painful
process that involves using a hot blade to cut through the complex horn, bone,
and sensitive tissue of the hen’s beak. This procedure often leads to deformities
that prevent hens from eating, drinking, or preening normally. The cage free
hens are also sent to slaughter after a year. Sometimes the hens can go outside
of the shed, but the exits are very small and the sheds so crowded that the only
hens that could get out would be those closest to the door.
There is no question that the move from the battery cage system of egg
production to the cage free system represents an improvement in the welfare of
the hens, albeit a rather small improvement. For those concerned with animal
suffering, even this small improvement represents a victory. So many hens suf-
fer so horribly that improving the conditions even minimally amounts to a vast
overall improvement, given that people are still eating eggs. For those opposed
to any use of animals, cage free systems of egg production work to prolong
the violation of the rights of these animals as it makes people feel better about
their abuse. Abolitionists point out that many people conflate “cage-free” with
“cruelty-free” and worry about the complacency that these small improve-
ments encourage. While rarely admitting it publicly, many abolitionists think
the chance of actually ending the use of animals is greater if the conditions in
which they exist are worse.
By resisting discussion of improving animal welfare in “institutions of
use” on principle, abolitionists are unable to address very practical issues of
nonhuman animal well-being. Consider another example: presently there are
approximately 2,500 chimpanzees in captivity in the United States. These
chimpanzees live in conditions ranging from naturalistic, group enclosures
where the chimpanzees are given options about what to play with, what to eat,
and who to spend time with to sterile, solitary conditions in which everything
they do is completely controlled by masked, gloved humans. For most captive
chimpanzees, the conditions are somewhere in between. From the abolitionist
perspective, all of these conditions represent a violation of the chimpanzees’
rights. Since chimpanzees who have spent their lives in captivity cannot be
 the faces of animal oppression 171

released to the wild (and given that wild chimpanzees are under dire threats
from habitat destruction and the bushmeat trade) there is an important ques-
tion about what to do for captive chimpanzees who can live for 50 years or
more. Abolitionists, insofar as they are unwilling to discuss improving condi-
tions of “slavery” are unable to sensibly and consistently discuss what to do for
these sensitive, captive individuals.
However, by recognizing these situations as oppressive, rather than
merely as painful situations or, alternatively, as situations in which individual
rights are violated, different practical solutions come into view. When combat-
ing oppression for human groups one of the most important structures that
requires interrogation is the market that both provides excuses for oppres-
sion and forces certain groups to suffer under oppressive working conditions
because all too often they are denied any other options. Surely the economic
system that allows for modest improvements in the conditions of hens while
continuing to make significant profits can be pushed further. Given that there
are many people in the world for whom access to protein is limited and would
require killing animals, perhaps wild animals, it is important to consider mod-
els of symbiotic living and respectful use that might allow for non-oppressive
egg consumption.11 As we also know from situations of human oppression,
there are often contexts in which conflicts between the interests of various
groups require compromises in order to eliminate oppression. What is neces-
sary, often, is identifying ways to respectfully attend to the needs, interests,
and desires of the members of the oppressed groups on their own terms.
An absence of oppression does not necessarily translate into either complete
freedom or a life free from pain or distress. What we are after, as Young points
out, is the possibility of developing one’s capacities so that one can be, in some
sense, a participant in a meaningful social life. If we extend these ends to cap-
tive chimpanzees, for example, we might find that attending to their particu-
lar needs for social and psychological engagement are centrally important to
allowing them to live non-oppressed, yet nonetheless imprisoned lives. Chim-
panzees appear to understand themselves as captives and humans as captors,
but insofar as it is possible to treat them with respect, to provide them with
the power to determine much of what they do with others of their kind, and to
develop responsive and sincere relations with them while respecting their wild
dignity, they may be able to live reasonably safe and meaningful lives.
Framing the discussion of animal liberation as one that is understood in
terms of oppression provides for an importantly different, and arguably deeper
analysis of not only our current practices towards nonhuman animals but the
ways such practices support unjust and harmful social and political structures,

11 There are multiple examples in nonindustrialized countries, while in our own Polyface Farms may be
another (although there is some controversy here). For a fuller discussion see Singer and Mason (2006) and
Pollan (2006).
172 justice: ethics and responsibility

particularly structures of power. If we are to recognize and identify the oppres-

sion of nonhuman animals, then we may more readily be able to see oppression
in other contexts. There may be a perceptual as well as practical advantage. For
example, gender or racial hierarchies, in which white men are thought to be
separate from and superior to white women and women of color share a similar
structure to hierarchies that separate humans from other animals and justify
human dominance over the allegedly inferior others. Linking people of color
and all women with nonhuman animals reinforces the inferiority that serves
as a justification for various forms of oppression. In speciesist social contexts
(which is virtually every social context in the contemporary world) the nonhu-
man animal other serves as a marker of the rightfully oppressed. By compar-
ing those who are to be oppressed or continue to be oppressed, oppressors
can naturalize and justify oppressive structures. When we begin to identify the
cruel and life-denying attitudes and practices that nonhuman animals are sub-
ject to as oppressive practices, we not only begin to explore ways to undermine
their oppression, but oppression generally. Iris Young’s analysis of the faces of
oppression provides a valuable way to begin this long-overdue process.
 14
4

Making Character Disposition Matter

in Iris Young’s Deliberative Democracy

Desirée H. Melton

Our democracy is imperfect. Votes are miscounted, election judges fail to show
up at polling sites, candidates are personally attacked and scrutinized rather
than their platforms and positions on important issues, lobbyists are bought;
voters are discouraged from voting in many ways, and fraud can turn the out-
come of a relatively fair election. Despite its flaws, however, most of us would
probably agree that democracy is the best political arrangement we have out of
the options available to us.
Deliberative democracy sidesteps many of these problems of traditional
democratic institutions because political agents immediately face each other.
Yet it is not without its own flaws. Stemming from the discursive tradition of
Habermas and Levinas, the deliberative model prides itself on cooperation and
respect for inclusive deliberation among the citizenry allowing for the expres-
sion and critique of many diverse views from people of diverse backgrounds.
Unfortunately, as Young points out, many potential deliberators are excluded
from participating.
In Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young focuses on the problem of exclu-
sion. She notes that there are times when groups of people are deliberately
and insidiously excluded from participatory democracy but also shows that
exclusion is oftentimes unintentional—yet just as harmful. For example, in
town meetings, public hearings, city council meetings and other venues where
people gather to discuss policy, social difference can be seen as a hindrance
rather than an important political resource; representatives are sometimes out
of touch with whom they represent; and in deliberation, notions of appropriate
speech can discourage those from participating who speak in other (but just as
effective) ways.
174 justice: ethics and responsibility

Exclusion is particularly distressing given that the assurance that every eli-
gible person can participate in democracy without impediment is one of our
most cherished political ideals. Inclusion is the core of other important ideals
like political equality and reasonableness; they come across as empty if every-
one who will be affected by the outcome of a decision does not have the oppor-
tunity to participate in its discussion.
Young proposes solutions to the problem of exclusion and suggests ways
to deepen democracy. To correct for exclusion in deliberation, for example,
Young proposes communicative procedural changes to broaden traditional or
standard notions of political discourse which will bring more individuals into
the discussion and aid in communication across difference.1 Young’s project is
seemingly straightforward—the core ideal of deliberative democracy is inclu-
sion, so if individuals are excluded from participating, they must be brought in
to hold democracy true to its ideal. Importantly, Young also states that delibera-
tive democracy has a core, normative ideal of moral respect, which is indirectly
upheld by inclusion (Young, 2000).
This essay considers whether the communicative changes Iris Young pro-
poses to increase inclusion will be enough to also uphold moral respect as a
normative ideal. I will suggest that moral respect as the core of democracy,
coupled with the exclusion of individuals which cheapens it, calls for more
effort on the part of deliberators than simply being mindful of how one com-
municates with others. Young proposes measures like changing the rules of
discourse so that the marginalized are included. And while the problem of
exclusion does need discursive correctives like Young’s, the problem of moral
respect calls for something else. The procedural changes Young proposes will
likely increase inclusion and promote more civil and respectful deliberative prac-
tices, but to have respect for the other requires dispositional change on the part
of individuals. I will argue that deep deliberative democracy based on moral
respect depends on everyone who will be affected by a decision on an issue
being included in discussion around it, as well as for people to be vulnerable
enough to other selves to feel respect for one another as individuals who are
dependent on one another for understanding across difference.
There is another reason to focus on moral respect and inclusion separately.
The nature of political involvement has changed rapidly over the years due
to the centralization of political power in most representative democracies in
policy debates among elites, rather than between representatives and those they
supposedly represent. Proposals that aim to make democracy more inclusive
by changing rules of discussion, therefore, are only suitable if there are actually
people deliberating. Although she says otherwise, many of Young’s proposals

1 Young’s project of inclusion has its critics. María Lugones (1994), for one, has been critical of Young’s
past attempts at using social difference as a resource, particularly Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference
(1990a) and Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (1990b).
 making character disposition matter 175

seem more appropriate for small-scale town hall meetings, whereas politics is
now overwhelmingly large-scale, limited to debates among a few contenders
of the major parties who compete to represent millions of individuals who will
never meet, let alone engage in face-to-face discussion.
In the section, Deliberative Democracy vs. Aggregative Democracy, I
briefly explain why Young supports the deliberative model of democracy. In
the section Communicative Greeting and Recognition, I discuss the modes of
communication Young proposes to include in deliberation, focusing on greet-
ing. In the section A Vulnerable Disposition: Political Acknowledgment vs.
Existential Acknowledgment, I propose the kind of character disposition peo-
ple should have in deliberation as a counterpart to the communicative changes
discussed in the previous section. In conclusion, I offer some thoughts on what
can bring about a vulnerable disposition.

Deliberative Democracy vs. Aggregative Democracy

Young divides contemporary democratic theory into two broad categories: aggre-
gative and deliberative. The aggregative model is competition based. Under this
model, candidates and political parties attempt to satisfy the greatest number of
citizens’ preferences as aggressively as is fair. Citizens, in turn, compete (also
aggressively but fairly) as individuals and as part of interest groups for the can-
didate and/or party that best matches their preferences. Decisions and elections
are won based on whose preferences are “most widely held” or whose aggrega-
tion is “the strongest” (Young, 2000, p. 21). In contrast, the deliberative model
is discussion-based. This model is based on the broad understanding that all
who will be reasonably affected by a decision should be able to participate in dis-
cussion around it. In deliberation, individuals should expect to come to agree-
ment on some issue; arguments are presented and then challenged with other
arguments, and proposals are refined until, eventually, agreement is reached.
Both the aggregative and the deliberative models are normative. The aggre-
gative model is based on the fairness of healthy competition and the delibera-
tive model is based on the fairness of healthy discussion around some issue. To
Young, the deliberative model is preferable to the aggregative because it is based
on norms which we should hold, namely, political equality, reasonableness, and
publicity. All of these norms are anchored by what is perhaps the most important
norm for deliberative democracy: inclusion. For political equality, reasonable-
ness, and publicity do not go very far if people are not included in deliberation to
begin with (Young, 2000). In deliberation, preferences and interests are evalu-
ated on the basis of what is good or just rather than having them “lose” because
the other side is better prepared and has access to better resources.
A limitation of this model is that it tends to privilege argumentation. Those
who voice their interests in a nonlinear fashion or through storytelling are
176 justice: ethics and responsibility

often ignored or looked down upon, so while they may be structurally included
in deliberation, their presence has no weight because they are not heard or lis-
tened to. Young calls this form of exclusion “internal exclusion” (Young, 2000,
p. 53). Internal exclusion is more subtle than “external exclusion” (Young,
2000, p. 53). External exclusion is more obvious because individuals are bla-
tantly barred from participation. For example, polling centers are closed or
deliberation is scheduled during times where groups of people are unable to
attend. External exclusion is easier to attend to than its more subtle counterpart,
internal exclusion. Young argues that one way in which internal exclusion can
be prevented is by de-privileging argumentation as the primary form of delib-
erative discourse; Young does not want to eliminate argumentation altogether,
just to add other voices. She identifies three modes of communication (greeting,
rhetoric, and narrative) that if included, can be as effective as argumentation.
Including them can enrich deliberative democracy in, among others, one very
important way: the dominant mood is transformed because marginalized and
disenfranchised groups are taken more seriously and respected.

Communicative Greeting and Recognition

Communication is such a familiar part of our lives that most of us take for
granted the fact that there are rules to our communications. All cultures have
rules for how one is to speak with another, with the rules changing depending
on to whom one is speaking and the nature of the conversation. Speech, body
language, and personal space, are all a part of normal everyday communication
but for most of us it isn’t until someone “breaks” the rules that they become
apparent. One does not observe the same rules of speech, body language, and
personal space, for example, when they are teaching a class as when one is at a
social gathering with friends. In the United States, for example, students would
probably be taken aback if a professor suddenly began speaking to them nose-
to-nose—it would be unsettling and seem inappropriate. The professor would
be “breaking the rules” of personal space.
“Rules” of communication can be misleading, however. In political deliber-
ation for example, less powerful groups and individuals are often not acknowl-
edged. Young cites the welfare reform debate during the Clinton administration
as exclusionary; the people who were to be directly affected by the outcome of
the debate (young mothers) were largely not a part of it (Young, 2000). Young
suspects that if people are not included and addressed in public debate, it may
give the appearance (true or not) that the more powerful and privileged groups
do not see them as people worthy of inclusion in these decisions, but as prob-
lems to be solved.
Young recognizes that words like “traditional” and “standard” are not
neutral but rather mask an orientation that can be exclusionary to individuals
 making character disposition matter 177

with different orientations. Rational, dispassionate discourse is the norm and

if deliberators deviate from the norm by speaking nonlinearly and passionately,
they are often looked down upon and marginalized. Young proposes changes to
the rules of political discourse to include marginalized voices. Specifically, she
focuses on the way deliberators greet one another (greeting or public acknowl-
edgment), the way one’s preferences and thoughts are shared (rhetoric), and
the form one’s thoughts take (narrative) (Young, 2000).
Greeting or public acknowledgment, the initial encounter between delib-
erators, is a very important part of the deliberative process because it sets the
tone for interactions that follow. I want to focus on greeting because I think
Young (2000) places unreasonably high expectations on what it can accom-
plish. As she says:
In the moment of communication that I call greeting, a speaker
announces her presence as ready to listen and take responsibility for
her relationship to her interlocutors . . ., [one] explicitly acknowledges
the others whom they aim to persuade. (p. 59)
Young emphasizes the importance of small gestures like making small talk,
exchanging pleasantries, hugs, and handshakes, and saying “hello” and “good-
bye” because they show respect and politeness to others and affirm that one
will be ready to listen to others when deliberating. She says that gestures like
these serve to acknowledge the other before taking up the real business of polit-
ical deliberation (Young, 2000).
It is certainly important to take a few minutes and engage the other with
whom one will deliberate by saying hello and asking how one is doing, how
one’s week has been, having food and drink together, etc., before deliberation
begins. This period of informal chatting has been pejoratively called “soften-
ing up”—pacifying to increase agreeability—but it needn’t be negative. Except
when softening up is used coercively, it can be an acceptable way to bring about
a calm atmosphere, especially when it precedes what could be a heated discus-
sion. Greeting can be a very effective aid to communication—especially persua-
sive communication—by letting the other know that one is ready to listen by
gentle softening up with small talk and pleasantries.
The value of greeting the other before deliberation begins, however, is lim-
ited. Young uses “greeting” interchangeably with “public acknowledgement”
and recognition; describing greeting as a dispositional situating of oneself to
another such that one’s “ethical responsibility” for the other is acknowledged
(Young, 2000, p. 57). I think this is a misleading way to describe greeting,
which as Young herself acknowledges, can be either genuine or hypocritical.
Greeting is a communicative, largely external activity. One communicates
greeting with words (“hello,” “how are you”) and touch (handshakes, hugs)
by showing that one is there, present, and ready to listen which aids in further
communication when discussion begins.
178 justice: ethics and responsibility

Young notes that there is always the risk that individuals (often the over-
privileged) will just go through the motions of greeting others with “pro forma,
superficial” (Young, 2000, p. 61) gestures and that individuals will have to
work at maintaining the recognition and inclusion contained in greeting ges-
tures. I agree with her and I think this is why so many of us are cynical about
politics and politicians. Often, politicians tell us exactly what we want to hear.
They smile, shake hands, look us in the eye, give assurances, tell us they share
our concerns and can help; they design political platforms to address our issues
and concerns and when they’re in office often the promises are forgotten, leav-
ing people angry and disillusioned. There is little assurance that the same kind
of disillusionment will not issue simply by enhancing communication. Delib-
erators can say “Hello” to one another, engage in mild flattery, ask how one
another is doing, then, when the deliberation is over, forget about the particular
individual one just greeted. But there is another more important limitation to
greeting than its susceptibility to hypocrisy and that is its inability to encourage
a disposition of vulnerability and exposure like Young wants it to. She describes
greeting as an act of recognition:
The sensual, material proximity of the other person in his or her
bodily need and possibility for suffering makes an unavoidable
claim on me, to which I am hostage . . . the speaker responds . . . by
taking responsibility for the other’s vulnerability . . . recognition
is best thought of as a condition rather than a goal of political
communication that aims to solve problems justly . . . As a political
issue of inclusion, recognition is primarily a starting-point for
political interaction and contest, rather than its end. (Young, 2000,
pp. 58–61, my emphasis)
Young’s vivid description of democratic engagement evokes an intimate rela-
tionship of responsibility and need. People come to deliberation and enter into
a reciprocal relationship with other selves with the expectation that their pos-
sibility for suffering and worth as a person to whom moral respect is due will
be recognized. Yet I am unconvinced that this kind of deep recognition can be
accomplished through communicative speech or physical gesture. The changes
Young proposes will allow for better communication and political acknowl-
edgment, but not existential acknowledgment, and I think a deep existential
acknowledgment is what Young wants to bring about.

A Vulnerable Disposition: Political Acknowledgment

vs. Existential Acknowledgment

Young’s greeting is a political acknowledgment. By addressing others before

deliberation begins, individuals soften up one another and bring about a calm
 making character disposition matter 179

atmosphere conducive to better discussion. The other modes of communication

she argues for ensures that other voices are included in deliberation but they do not
bring about a climate where one feels responsible for the other person in need.
Thus, the problem of exclusion (increasing the numbers of deliberators) can
be addressed with instrumental changes like including other modes of com-
munication, but the problem of keeping democracy true to moral respect as a nor-
mative ideal requires more than procedural correctives—it requires a certain
kind of acknowledgment that comes from a certain kind of disposition.
Young’s description of the greeting moment in deliberation reveals that
she wants an existential response on the part of deliberators to others’ situated-
ness and the demands, interests, and preferences that come from their par-
ticularity. Existential acknowledgment (or recognition) involves a demand that
greeting is incapable of meeting. Recognizing another’s vulnerability and then
feeling responsible and claimed by it requires selves to have a disposition that
encourages one to feel claimed and responsible. Individuals come to the delib-
eration vulnerable with the possibility for suffering and want acknowledgment,
but if others to whom they are vulnerable do not recognize and feel claimed by
the vulnerability, they will not have the response Young describes. Therefore,
the disposition of deliberators is important. A self with a vulnerable disposition
is more likely to recognize the needs of others and more likely to existentially
acknowledge others. A vulnerable disposition is an internal undertaking involv-
ing a dispositional comportment where a self sees oneself and others as individuals
who are mutually dependent (on one another) for understanding.
A vulnerable disposition is one in which a self internalizes and reflects in
one’s disposition a preparedness to understand across difference because oth-
ers are dependent on this understanding; giving it shows moral respect to other
selves. It is a way of being in the world that says “I will let your situatedness
as a particular individual with the capacity for suffering affect how I see the
world,” and reveals a deeper commitment to others; deeper than “I hear you.”
This internal exposure is like an existential space between individuals and the
plea for justice. One is then able to respond to the other’s particular interests,
problems, desires, or needs.
After all, democratic deliberation is more than an arena for discussion
across difference—in deliberation individuals expect to make a decision on
some issue after what can be difficult and painful discussion.2 Where greet-
ing in deliberation is a political acknowledgment of the other in deliberation
that shows one is ready to listen, existential acknowledgment shows respect
for another’s particularity; it shows the other that one is open and ready to
better appreciate and understand where others are coming from. To be able to

2 Gooding-Williams (1998) highlights the importance of having a common ground in deliberation. For
him, deliberation across difference is enhanced the more groups understand about each other. Wendy Brown
(1996) has concerns that groups that highlight their differences and disagreements as groups may be overly and
(detrimentally) dependent on their suffering.
180 justice: ethics and responsibility

respond to the other as a self with interests, problems, desires, and needs, one
must see the other as vulnerably dependent on this response deserving of moral
respect. The ability to see others as deserving of moral respect, to acknowledge
them existentially, depends on a vulnerable disposition.
Procedural changes of the kind Young advocates are important for inclu-
sion and better communication across difference, but moral respect as an
ideal requires selves who see themselves dependently in relation with others.
Deliberation, then, is a coming together of selves who are mutually dependent
upon one another for moral respect. Procedural changes without dispositional
changes treat the deliberative arena as a stagnant, superficial space for conver-
sation rather than a dynamic, alive space comprised of selves who legitimately
want understanding and respect.
Moral respect as a normative ideal gives a legitimate weightiness to delib-
erative democracy that is often unaddressed but is revealed in the selves of
the participants, not in the procedure. Moral respect as an ideal of democratic
deliberation should have selves who are vulnerable to others. This requires
internally seeing oneself and others as individuals who are mutually dependent
on one another for understanding which then gives one the ability to existen-
tially acknowledge others in deliberation. To existentially acknowledge others
means to treat the other as a particular, unique, situated self rather than simply
a social type.
It may seem artificial or disingenuous to talk of actively cultivating a vul-
nerable disposition. Alternatively, the way I have described it may seem as
though “becoming” vulnerable is a passive event that one cannot bring about
and if so, one does not control whether one has a vulnerable disposition or not.
To be sure, there are elements of both. A vulnerable disposition can either be
actively cultivated in ways that needn’t be insincere, or it can happen passively.
One way to cultivate a vulnerable disposition is by seeking out and having expe-
riences that can bring about change.
Some ways in which vulnerability can be passively achieved include expo-
sure to different points of view in higher education that reveal one’s own long-
held views and invite critical evaluation of them. A particularly moving political
speech can sometimes make one think about things that have not been seriously
considered before. Living abroad for a length of time in a place with a culture
very different from one’s own is a well-known stimulant for self-reflection.
We also have the potential of becoming vulnerable through actively seek-
ing out experiences that can change the way we see ourselves in relation to
others. Richard Schmitt and Milton Fisk’s recent essays in socialist thought are
particularly useful in envisioning the relationship between social situatedness,
experience, and character change. In “Can We Get There from Here? Reflec-
tions about Fundamental Social and Human Change,” Schmitt asserts that
we can change our character and how we see ourselves in relation to others if
we make social changes. Social changes include living with people of different
 making character disposition matter 181

races, socioeconomic levels, and religions, such that we live differently and
develop different skills; we become different people (Schmitt 2007). In “Social
Feelings and the Morality of Socialism,” Fisk emphasizes that having a “moral
orientation” gives rise to feelings and promotes dispositions that can guide us
in our actions—they can encourage actions that cohere to a feeling and dis-
courage actions that do not cohere (Fisk 2007). He says that having positive
social feelings toward others can allow us to identify with others and motivate
us toward helping to improve their lot. For example, having “feelings of sym-
pathy, compassion, and benevolence” (p. 123) will promote us to respond to
the distress of others appropriately. Having negative social feelings works the
same way. If one has “feelings of outrage at, mistrust of, and disillusion with
decisions, officials, and programs” (p. 123), one is moved to act. In both cases,
having social feelings toward others whom we consider part of our community
rouses us to act to change the situation.
Although my project is somewhat different from Fisk’s and Schmitt’s,
character change through social rearrangement coupled with the promotion
of social feelings in community captures the existential mood that I think will
allow others to existentially acknowledge one another. Thus, one way to actively
develop a vulnerable disposition is through purposely living around, interacting
with, and befriending people who are very different from oneself, and allowing
oneself to have the kinds of social feelings that one would appropriately have
toward a member of one’s community. For example, one would feel compas-
sion toward one’s black neighbors when they suffer from discriminatory social
and political structures and would appropriately feel outrage at the structures
that cause it.

Conclusion

Democracy’s broad principles are laudable: respect for basic human rights,
political pluralism, free and fair elections, and religious freedom, among
others. In a well-functioning democracy, these principles are not just lofty ide-
als to which governments aspire, but are lived and experienced by the body
politic. Underpinning these broad principles is the conviction that individuals
matter equally in decision-making and are equally respected as participants.
And it is the latter that I think is often understated although I think it holds
much of democracy’s appeal.
Young states that “society is bigger than politics and outruns political
institutions, and thus democratic politics must be thought of as taking place
within the context of large and complex social processes” (Young, 2000, p. 45).
I agree wholeheartedly and suggest that those acknowledging the problems
of democratic culture due to the size and scope of society must anticipate and
hope that selves will make ethical adjustments in their manner independent
182 justice: ethics and responsibility

of political involvement—but that the adjustments will persist when they do

become involved in politics.
The ethical adjustment I am calling for, existential acknowledgment,
involves a vulnerable character disposition whereby others are visible as par-
ticular humans with the capacity for suffering that demands moral respect.
One way to bring about this disposition is to seek out ways to interact with peo-
ple very different from ourselves. Interacting with differently situated others
does not guarantee that one will have appropriate feelings of compassion when
others suffer unfairly because of social structures that discourage those with
too much privilege from understanding the situation of those who suffer from
a lack of privilege.3 Nonetheless it may be a necessary condition to promote the
inclusion Young envisions because it promotes moral respect. Acknowledging
one another as humans with the capacity for suffering is acknowledging and
respecting humanness. My claim here is that we need to expect and encourage
this kind of existential acknowledgment if we are to be just.

3 For example, white-skin privilege has been explored by many scholars including feminists, critical race
theorists, and sociologists. People with white skin, however, are often reluctant if not outright hostile to its
existence because they have been encouraged to not see discrimination. See Charles Mills’ recent article on
epistemic ignorance (Mills, 2007) and his book The Racial Contract (1997), which contains an earlier treatment
of the phenomenon.
4
PART V

JUSTICE: DEMOCRACY
AND INCLUSION
This page intentionally left blank
 15
4

Iris Young, Global Responsibility,

and Solidarity

Ann Ferguson

In some very insightful papers in the two years before her untimely death
(Young 2004, 2006c, 2006d) and her unfinished book manuscript Responsi-
bility for Justice, Iris Young presents an overview to a new conception of social
justice based on the shared political responsibility that groups of people have
who are involved in structures and processes that create unjust harms to oth-
ers. Her new paradigm allows a way to address questions of global responsibil-
ity that individuals hold for each other across national borders and local social
power positions such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability without
appealing to an ahistorical cosmopolitan universal humanist ethics.
In this chapter I shall support Young’s shared political responsibility
model of social justice, but shall argue that her justice project in turn must
be based on solidarity as an achieved social base for such a project, that is,
individuals and collectives involved in solidarity practices. I claim that Young’s
earlier paper using distinctions which conceptualize women as a series con-
nected by practical social structures (Young 1994a) point toward the need for
solidarity practices rather than identity-based projects if women are to assume
shared political responsibility across social power locations of race, class, sexu-
ality, national borders, and other such inequalities. Such solidarity practices
are key for other social justice movements as well as feminism, and are becom-
ing an achieved social base through a developing global network of alternative

A version of this chapter was first prepared for the Feminist Philosophy Conference May 11–12, 2007
at UMass Amherst in honor of my retirement (http//:www.umass.edu/wost/events/feministphilosophy.htm).
I want to thank Uma Narayan, our keynote speaker at that conference, who has pushed me to think more criti-
cally about problems of solidarity in practice in a globalized capitalist world, cf. her keynote address for the
conference (Narayan, 2007).
186 justice: democracy and inclusion

economic, political, and social practices that oppose neoliberal capitalist global-
ization and other global injustices. These global injustices include systematic
violence and discrimination against women, gays, and minority racial/ethnic
groups, exploitation of workers by multinational corporations, unjust wars by
nation-states, and global poverty, sometimes caused by environmental disas-
ters to which governmental responses are unjust or unfair, such as the current
U.S. government’s inadequate compensation to the mostly poor Blacks and
Latinos displaced by hurricane Katrina.
I put forth a conception of solidarity importantly inspired by the works
of Carol Gould (2007b), bell hooks (1984), Chandra Mohanty (2003), Sandra
Bartky (2002), Amy Allen (1999) and most recently, Carolynn O’Donnell
(2007), an undergraduate at Mt. Holyoke College who wrote a senior thesis on
solidarity which I chaired. This concept of solidarity, as a disposition involving
feelings of emotional connection and commitment to support the struggles of
others to challenge oppression, is connected to a new concept of global social
justice we can call the “solidarity justice” model. The solidarity justice model is
one which only becomes possible at the particular historical stage of advanced
corporate globalization in which we are now living. It can be contrasted with
previous ahistorical ideal models, such as cosmopolitan views of justice, or
ideal theories of justice as fairness such as those of John Rawls (1971). I shall
conclude by arguing that Young’s political responsibility conception of justice
requires that the solidarity conception of justice be in place before it can really
be an effective normative standard for critiquing individual actions, social prac-
tices, and institutions.
Young contrasts her political responsibility model of global justice with the
mainstream liberal liability model. To understand the ways these different mod-
els of justice relate, it is helpful to understand them as answering claims based
on different aspects of justice. The liability conception is based on principles of
desert and recompense for damages and harms that apply when a person or par-
ticular institution can be identified as the leading cause of the harm or damage
done to a specific person or persons, for example, when someone has damaged
or stolen someone else’s property, or when an institution, such as a business,
has, by negligence, caused harm to someone in a preventable accident. In such
a case, particular people or institutions can be held to blame for their actions
or inactions, and legal systems are usually set up to resolve conflicting claims
about punishment or compensation to the victims of such injustices. By exten-
sion, claims of injustice against employers and educational institutions based
on reported violations of the principle of merit (that occupations and openings
should be rewarded on the basis of merit, or desert), can also be seen to fall
under liability justice, since the grievance is addressed to an authorized hiring
or admissions official who is charged with discrimination in failing to hire or
admit someone of superior merit in favor of one with less, and hence of causing
an unjust harm to the former person. In such a case, the individual or institution
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 187

is assumed by their actions to be the cause of the discrimination, hence to be

blameworthy, and may be sued for damages or compensation.
An example of global injustice that cannot be captured by the liability con-
ception of justice is the injustice caused to workers in maquilas or in sweatshops
who are paid a nonliving wage and forced to work in dangerous and unhealthy
conditions. Such conditions are typically found in situations where workers
are employed by multinational corporations who are working in so-called free
trade zones of countries where national laws protecting labor rights do not
apply, or in shops where the workers are immigrants, often illegal immigrants,
who are not unionized and whose legal rights are unclear. Thus, the employers
cannot strictly be held liable for unjust salaries or working conditions, since
they have not broken any laws, but clearly there is another sense in which they
are engaged in an unjust process. It is that sense that Young is trying to capture
with her political responsibility conception of justice.

Young’s Political Responsibility Paradigm of Justice

In my view, Young has made out a clear case that the examples she gives of global
injustice do require the paradigm she calls the Political Responsibility paradigm
to supplement the Liability paradigm of Justice. She is right, I think, to claim that
individuals who participate in the normal workings of such institutions as global
capitalist markets and as citizen-subjects of nation-states have a shared political
responsibility to challenge unjust practices that occur within them by uniting
with others in political networks and projects which challenge them.
In the following I will address two things: first, I shall raise a puzzle over
the issue of whether practices which violate what could be taken to be the
universal principle of respecting women’s rights as human rights, which are
unjust from a cosmopolitan view of justice, can be the sort of practices that
distant strangers not obviously involved in promoting those practices have a
political responsibility to oppose. If we cannot find a way to construe Young’s
political responsibility paradigm to cover these cases, we may want to argue
that her paradigm, while necessary, is not sufficient to cover all cases of global
injustice not covered by the Liability paradigm.
Secondly, I shall argue that we need to broaden Young’s Political Respon-
sibility paradigm of Justice to include as a necessary precondition, the existence
of those operating on what I have called the Solidarity paradigm of Justice.

Women’s Rights as Human Rights

Do people in other countries have a moral obligation in any sense, or a politi-

cal responsibility in Young’s sense, to try to intervene in another country in
188 justice: democracy and inclusion

order to avoid a systemic institutional injustice which violates women’s human

rights? And is this the case even if the human rights violations do not occur in
any clear-cut set of institutions or processes in which these people are engaged,
like consuming goods produced in the global capitalist market, which would
implicate them as individuals in enabling such processes to continue? Those
feminists, such as Susan Okin (1999), who defend women’s human rights from
a cosmopolitan point of view, would argue that we do have such obligations, for
our obligations to protect people’s rights do not stem merely from membership
in a nation-state but in virtue of Kantian categorical imperative to ensure that
people are treated as ends, not as mere means. Other feminists, such as those
who have taken the lessons of the postcolonial critique of Western feminism to
heart, have critiqued such cosmopolitan approaches as dangerous in that they
may lead to justifications for imperialist interventions, as in the case of Laura
Bush’s defense of the recent U.S. war in Afghanistan as leading to the libera-
tion of women from the oppressive regime of the Taliban. Further, there is the
danger that Western feminists, acting on the basis of general stereotypes of
non-Western women as victimized by their patriarchal culture or governments
(Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1997), may intervene in arrogant uninformed ways
which make the situation worse.
We seem to be left in a dilemma. On the one hand, we can insist on cosmo-
politan moral obligations which are onerous, hard to carry out, and can easily
boomerang in practice to create worse situations for the victims of injustice.
On the other hand, we can espouse a relativist or particularist theory of moral
and political duties which gives us no political responsibilities or obligations
to try to help those who are oppressed by honor killings or systematic sexual
violence. Young’s political responsibility paradigm won’t help us with these
cases, although it can help us with duties within the nation-state to oppose
violations of women’s human rights. All citizens in a nation-state can be said
to have political responsibilities to challenge unjust laws that prohibit repro-
ductive choices, for example, as well as the unjust absence of laws or state poli-
cies that will provide access to reproductive choices, health care, redress from
sexual violence, and so forth, since they participate in citizenship processes
and institutions which otherwise benefit them. But what do we do with cases of
injustice that fall outside the nation-state, and to which we are not immediately
tied by institutional processes?

Ideal vs. Nonideal Models of Justice

One way to bypass this dilemma is to introduce another distinction: that between
ideal vs. nonideal models of justice. The debates around social justice which pit
Classical and Neoliberal models of justice against Welfare Liberal models usu-
ally prioritize some intrinsic value, such as individual Freedom, over another
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 189

value, such as social Equality, in the principles of justice they espouse. The three
predominant values in the liberal Western tradition stemming from the Eng-
lish, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies are summed up in the motto of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity. Fraternity as a goal, which relates to the notion of Solidarity that
I shall develop below, has been neglected by liberals in the mainstream debating
conflicts between principles of justice. This is probably because it is assumed
to be a condition that will be achieved once people can come to agreement on
how to balance the other two and set up a social contract seen as beneficial to
all. However, I shall argue below that this assumption is a mistaken conclusion,
and that solidarity requires much more radical conditions.
While neoliberal laissez-faire capitalist thinkers prioritize the right to pri-
vate property as promoting the most individual freedom, welfare state liberals
argue that we need to curb such rights so as to promote the material conditions
for, if not absolute equality, then equality of opportunity for citizens to meet
their basic material needs. Radical liberals include demands to achieve radical
democracy and self-development as values usually ignored by those emphasiz-
ing individual freedom and equality. For example, Iris Young (1990a) argued in
her influential book on Justice, that we must include rights to self-development,
to freely exercising and developing one’s human capacities, as central to the
goal of social justice. Such a goal cannot be met without understanding the
institutional structures of exploitation, oppression, and marginalization that
perpetuate sexism, heterosexism, racism, class exploitation, and neglect of the
disabled. She also highlighted ways that the traditional debates about justice
between the neoliberals/conservatives and welfare state liberals tend to over-
look or distort such institutionalized injustices because they assume a distribu-
tive paradigm of justice: that justice vs. injustice is about the fair or unfair
distribution of goods, rather than the relative power or lack of it that the major-
ity of people have to control the political, social, and material processes that
govern their lives, including the distribution of goods and life choices.
Young’s approach is distinctive not only in its emphasis on different cen-
tral values—self- and collective-development and democratic inclusion—that
just institutions should promote, compared to the mainstream debate as to
whether to prioritize entitled freedoms or social equality. She is also presenting
what Charles Mills (2004) calls a “nonidealized” approach to moral and politi-
cal theory. That is, instead of giving us some ideal principles of justice assumed
to be the basic rationale for our existing social structures as a self-defined lib-
eral democratic nation, her emphasis is in uncovering the real existing insti-
tutional structures of exploitation and oppression that actually operate in our
country; and by extension, in any capitalist, racist, male-dominated country,
which would include most nations of the world. On the basis of these really
existing structures of oppression, her conclusion is that the United States and
other countries with similar institutional structures are unjust.
190 justice: democracy and inclusion

I have also mounted a similar critique to idealized paradigms of global

justice elsewhere (Ferguson 2006b) in favor of a nonidealized paradigm I call
the Solidarity paradigm of Justice. Young (1994a) conceived of women as a
“serial group,” that is, those placed contingently in a group due to a social posi-
tion created by gendered social structures. She suggested that women are like
passengers waiting for a bus who have no automatic reason to identify with
each other, and certainly not to take their being women as a reason for solidar-
ity with each other. But under certain circumstances, for example, if the bus
breaks down and the women enter into collective dialogue as to what should be
done, a common politics of the group becomes possible. While such a model
of gender commonality challenges any essentialist identity politics for women,
nonetheless it can provide a nonidealist ground on which to understand the
emergence of solidarity politics, as I outline below.

The Concept of Solidarity

There have been many concepts of Solidarity advanced in modern political

theory, starting with the rather vague concept of Fraternity mentioned above,
which was advanced in the French Revolution. There it wavered between being
three senses: first, a cosmopolitan concept involving a felt empathic connec-
tion to all other humans, in the most universalistic sense, secondly, to all other
citizens, in the sense of identification and support for a national community
in which one felt a part, and thirdly, to the particular combination of social and
economic classes, the so-called Third Estate, revolting against the aristocracy
and monarchy. Solidarity as fraternity in this third sense was developed by
Marxism and labor movements informed by Marxism which maintained that
their common interests to challenge capitalist class exploitation would lead the
international working class to develop the needed sense of felt bonding to over-
throw the capitalist system.
In developing her theory of transnational solidarity in a globalizing econ-
omy, Carol Gould (2007b) argues that the development of the global corporate
capitalist economy has created economic interdependencies and international
divisions of labor that require the expansion of concepts of solidarity based
on a more particular sense of community such as the nation-state. She distin-
guishes between cosmopolitan, civic, interest-based, and welfare state concep-
tions of solidarity, based on some distinctions made by Kurt Bayertz (1999).
She also finds Bayertz’s distinction between the factual and normative senses
of the term solidarity helpful. The normative cosmopolitan sense of solidarity
would claim that all humans should be conceived of as one big moral com-
munity, and thus that we have moral obligations to aid and support all other
people. But there are problems with this claim, since solidarity involves a felt
connection to others, and it is clearly false in the factual sense that all people
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 191

feel solidarity with all other humans, particularly because national ties tend
to trump any transnational feelings for those in other countries. And while
cosmopolitans might want to argue that we ought, in the normative sense of
solidarity, to “feel-with” all other people, to use Sandra Bartky’s (2002) con-
ception of solidarity, it is problematic whether such a claim is plausible, given
the empirical difficulties involved in getting people who don’t know each
other, and who may come from cultures alien to each other, to have the sense
of being similar enough to each other that seems to be a precondition for feel-
ings of solidarity.
The third notion of solidarity Gould and Bayertz distinguish has to do with
defense of common interests. Factual solidarity occurs when people form a
group, such as a labor union, to stand up for common interests, an action
which is associated by a felt sense of bonding with members of the group.
Normative solidarity with respect to interests is the claim that one has a moral/
political obligation to defend the group rights or interests of which one is a
member against an opponent who threatens those interests, whether it be
an individual or a group with institutional power, as in the case of corporate
employers who create unsafe and excessively exploitative working conditions
for sweatshop employees.
Unfortunately, neither the civic friendship nor the group interest notions
of solidarity as commonly understood can easily meet the goal of giving us
the preconditions for the sort of global political responsibility Young advocates
as an obligation for those involved as consumers of sweatshop projects. Just
because one comes to understand that one’s consumption of a sweatshop prod-
uct perpetuates a system or process that is unjust, one does not automatically
come to form a civic bond or feel empathy with those oppressed by the process.
And particularly if one finds oneself in an internationally competitive market-
place where one’s own low paid job requires one to find low cost consumer
goods, one might feel one’s solidarity with the group interests of one’s own
family members if the household economy trumps any solidarity owed to those
not one’s kin or compatriots.
There is a similar problem of whether mass-based transnational solidarity
is really feasible for identity-based social movements, such as local or nation-
ally based women’s and feminist movements. What is needed for women in
order to achieve solidarity with women very different from them in terms of
their nationality, class, sexuality, ethnicity, race, or religion? As many intersec-
tional feminist analyses, notably by women of color feminists, have indicated,
the mere formal commonality of being identified as a woman by one’s society
does not automatically give one common interests with those whose class,
racial, ethnic, sexual, or national interests and privileges are not the same as
one’s own.
Carol Gould (2007b) argues that we can develop a notion of transna-
tional solidarity which would be premised on the existence of overlapping
192 justice: democracy and inclusion

solidarity networks based on the expectation of mutual aid and reciprocity in

challenging various structural oppressions, and argues that these are increas-
ingly made possible because of the Internet and other means of global net-
working that have been developed by global social movements. While I agree
with Gould, she does not really deal with some of the philosophical problems
with the notion of transnational solidarity, the material and social conditions
under which it is possible, as well as exactly what sort of transformation of
values is required to achieve it. I shall try to provide answers to these ques-
tions below.

An Intersectional Feminist View on Solidarity

An intersectional feminist analysis, like that of bell hooks, can give us another
way to look at the development of feminist solidarity. Rather than seeing it
as based on a facile sisterhood achievable by women due to their common-
ality of being women in male-dominated structures as does Robin Morgan
(1996), hooks sees it as a goal to be achieved by an active coalitional process
which creates a common bonding across differences of race, class, sexual-
ity, nation, religion etc., based on dialogue and disagreement (hooks 1984).
Such dialogue, with the permission to express and debate disagreements, is
a necessary ongoing process to produce trust and a sense of common cause.
In this way one group can come to understand and respect another group’s
priorities to fight oppressions promoted by those very social institutions or
processes in which the first group may garner privileges. This then can lead
to a moral/political commitment to challenge these other oppressions as if
they were one’s own, as a way to promote the common collective good of
other relevant groups of women. This will first be understood concretely
as including the good of those particular women whose situation one has
empathized across differences in particular dialogues and coalitions seeking
to promote social justice. Hopefully the next step is to be open to identify-
ing more generally with the collective good of all women regardless of their
differences.
For hooks, this sisterhood solidarity, as an achieved value in this two step
process, involves transforming oneself so as to define one’s own moral identity
as a passionate commitment to promote the collective good of all women which
would require the elimination of all social domination relations that oppress
them, not simply those of gender, i.e., sexism. Clearly such a sense of solidar-
ity goes beyond that of a present interest-based solidarity, since one’s present
interests as a socially located individual, e.g., with class, race, heterosexual, or
national privileges, will often be in opposition with promoting sisterhood soli-
darity based on one’s transformational moral identity based on the collective
good of all women.
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 193

My concept of solidarity is similar to that of hooks as well as Amy Allen1,

who uses some of the ideas of Hannah Arendt (Allen 1999, ch. 4). Given that
this redefinition of solidarity involves a transformation among those who
pledge it to work for a collective good, not merely for those in their own social
location (so is not limited to those who share what Arendt called “the identity
under attack” (cf. Arendt 1968, p. 18), we should redefine this as transforma-
tional solidarity.
While hooks and Allen’s rearticulation of a sisterhood as transformational
solidarity may avoid the problems faced by Morgan’s too-simplistic solution to
the problem of difference for feminism (Morgan 1996), their theory as outlined
faces the possible charge of idealism in relation to the conditions for achieving
the kind of collective bonding through dialogue and disagreement that allow
women to develop a commitment to fight for a collective good for women that
includes challenging all structural social injustices. Doesn’t this suppose the
leisure time and resources to meet and dialogue with women across national
borders that only relatively privileged women have? Don’t people, men and
women, who want to promote an inclusive feminist commitment to a collec-
tive good of social justice for all, require material conditions that can allow
them face-to-face, Internet or other material opportunities to dialogue, under-
stand and trust particular others in spite of disagreements? And lacking these
conditions to form emotional bonds, are we left merely with “imagined com-
munities” (Ferguson 1995) or “world-traveling” (Lugones 1987) of the most
abstract sort which are subject to all sorts of imposed arrogant understandings
of what really is the collective good of those absent women one is supposedly
in solidarity with?
There is still a rather weak sense in which one can use the concept of group
interest of women as a possible motivator for a normative claim for group
solidarity. Anna Jonásdóttir (1994) distinguishes between formal and content
interests that women have as a socially positioned group in all male-dominated
modern societies. Her argument is based on the view that modern (capital-
ist) societies have historically developed interest-based politics in which groups
seek political power to shape their own choices based on their group perception
of these interests which pit them against competing groups. But historically,
women as members of these societies as citizens, and in more specific social
groupings within the particular polity such as social class, or race or ethnicity,
have lacked the “formal,” i.e., legal or political access comparable to men in the
polity or particular social groupings to shape the conditions of their choices in

1 Allen argues that Arendt’s notion of political power as a type of power with others that comes about when
people engage in principled concerted action together to bring about some common good. This idea of power is
of a relation in which power only appears when it is actualized in collective action. Allen argues that solidarity
among women can thus be reconceived, not as based on a collective given existing identity, but as “solidarity
among feminists (women and men) as a power of those who pledge to work together to fight relations of subor-
dination” (Allen 1999, p. 109).
194 justice: democracy and inclusion

various areas of life—political, familial/personal, or material. Thus, they can

be said to share a formal interest to achieve that access to shape their choices
in those areas, even though their content interests as divided by class, race,
religious belief etc., may be in conflict. On this analysis, we could see achieving
these formal interests, e.g., the right to vote, to own property, to have repro-
ductive choice, to be legally protected from male violence, as necessary social
conditions to improve each woman’s position vis-à-vis the men in the polity or
more specific social grouping. An empirical argument for an inclusive social
justice solidarity could be based on the need for a massive women’s movement
across race, class, and other social domination differences to achieve women’s
formal interests. The popular way of putting this interest-based argument in
the U.S. second-wave socialist feminist movement was the slogan: “we can’t be
free until everyone else is free”2.
Iris Young (1997b) deals with this problem to some extent in her paper
“Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought”
in which she critiques both Seyla Benhabib and Hannah Arendt for assuming
that communicative democracy requires the symmetrical reciprocity of putting
oneself in the other’s shoes. She points out that this way of thinking of the kind
of enlarged moral thought necessary to act collectively for the common good
encourages people to emphasize only the commonalities between them, rather
than be sensitive to their differences. But Young too does not discuss the mate-
rial conditions necessary for this sort of transformational solidarity to occur, as
opposed to the sort of social movement identity politics that create affinities,
and spacial or institutional connections which together create what she calls
“differentiated solidarity” (Young 1994a, 2000).

Network Solidarity, the Solidarity Economy,

and Solidarity Justice

Fortunately, the capitalist globalization processes in which we are all involved

have created contradictions or conflicts between material subsistence needs,
ideological expectations, and national and ethnic sovereignty demands that have
created oppositional networks, grassroots politics, and alternative economies
both within and between nation-states that some have come to call the Solidar-
ity Economy. Alternative local solidarity economies now exist in all countries,

2 The problem with this argument is that it may not be an empirically plausible claim for all women,
particularly when one considers the vast amount of political, familial/personal, and material choices that wealthy
white women have in advanced capitalist societies. Are they not in fact “free” in all the senses that really matter?
On the other hand, one may argue that even very wealthy women can be victims of lack of self-esteem, and love
dependencies on men that perpetuate their continued lack of equal choices in a love relationship, for example,
being victims of male violence. If they were able to feel solidarity with other women they would also benefit
themselves because of the mutual aid and reciprocity involved in solidarity relations, which could allow them to
challenge the internalized sexism that impedes their freedom to leave such abusive relationships.
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 195

including the United States, and there are also transnational links between
these economies at the nation-state level. For example, the new Latin Ameri-
can political-economic block, MERCOSUR, encourages trading and economic
in-kind exchanges not based on the market logic of profit. Such exchanges
between Venezuela and Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Uru-
guay are explicitly made on the basis of solidarity to meet peoples’ human
needs. For example, Venezuela sends Cuba oil, while Cuba sends doctors to
work in poor Venezuelan neighborhoods. And Venezuela has been initiating,
through the state-owned oil company Citgo, low-priced oil to poor communi-
ties in the United States which are exchanges not sanctioned by the U.S. gov-
ernment. And feminist NGOs, such as Women to Women International and
the Global Fund for Women, are supporting alternative solidarity economic
networks which allow women in the North to support women’s cooperatives
and human rights associations in the South.
A feminist historical materialist method can help us to understand the
contemporary historical development of a distinctive Solidarity conception of
Social Justice based on socialist-anarcho-feminist visions. Workable and sus-
tainable alternative visions and values which challenge the values of an exist-
ing society in a way which undermines justifications for the existing economic
order can only be based on the actual development of alternative social relations
of production and political decision-making, that is to say, alternative political
economies, which give people a realistic and not just utopian understanding
of what is fair and just. In the late 1800s Marx critiqued the social democratic
Gotha Program of German social democrats for its utopian attempt to pro-
mote the principle, from each according to their ability, to each according to
their needs, for he argued that a capitalist system which rewards capital not
labor can ultimately only promote principles of justice that are based on ren-
dering unequals to unequals, e.g., based on one’s property or capital, including
human capital, or work/“merit” (Marx 1875/1977). But while Marx concluded
that only internal critiques of justice can be offered of capitalist justice, new
spaces of political economy have opened the possibility of an external critique
of capitalist paradigms of justice, which elaborates more egalitarian norms of
social relations in these collective spaces outside of the capitalist logic.
The anticorporate globalization social movements, helpfully furthered by
successive international and regional conferences of the anticorporate global-
ization World Social Forum since 2001, have created alternative economies
which are strong enough to challenge the neoliberal and welfare state concep-
tions of Justice based on unequal property rights that the hegemonic capitalist
political economy promotes. These alternative spaces include worker-owned
cooperatives and social movement-controlled micro-lending loan funds, which
many empowerment projects for women are based on, such as SEWA, the
South Indian self-employed women’s organization. These spaces are operating
under the principle of Justice as solidarity, that is, from each according to their
196 justice: democracy and inclusion

ability, to each according to their needs, where all are understood to be working
for the good of the collective whole. These are not isolated examples of coops
or individual projects, but whole networks of people which are forging what
Bowman and Stone (2004, 2006) call a solidarity economics, and what Alpero-
vitz (2006) calls a commonwealth tier alongside of the capitalist economy and
centralized nation-state3.
One implication of the Solidarity paradigm of Justice is that it requires those
engaging in solidarity practices to transform their own identities so that they
reconceive what their common interests are. No longer can they simply iden-
tify their interests with those constructed under dominant white supremacist
capitalist patriarchal systems as “citizen worker/consumer” (Mohanty 2003) if
they are among those lucky enough not to be forced to be illegal immigrants in
a country not of origin; nor identify their interests with simply surviving by fol-
lowing the norms and practices of the hegemonic economies and ideologies, if
they are among the unlucky ones who are the poorest citizens whose consumer
activities only allow meeting basic survival needs, or who are immigrants
whose initial situation leads them to acquiesce with the competitive individual-
ist survival values of the capitalist job market. Rather, participating in solidarity
alternative economic networks provide them the material base to transform
their identities toward a more collective vision that sees their enlightened inter-
ests as connected with a radical change in the total system so that institutional,
political, economic, and social structures would coincide more closely with the
Ability-Need principle of Solidarity Justice. They thus have both the material
and the emotional possibilities to form the kind of empathic connections with
individuals, associations, networks, and groups that will allow them occasions
to participate in and develop practices that reinforce and expand social spaces
and processes which operate under the Ability-Need Solidarity principle. Else-
where, I have recently argued that the crisis in unpaid or low-paid caring work
in wealthy countries of the North has created a new motivation for a new demo-
cratic socialist-feminist vision of an economy and household organized so that
people could achieve their right to care for family and community members in
a viable fashion (Ferguson 2007).
Concrete solidarity work has become a possibility not just for feminist
women, but for women and men who have the possibility to connect to labor,
environmental, fair trade, and other solidarity networks which allow them to
come to a changed understanding of their long-range interest. Such a trans-
formed understanding of self-interest connects to a notion of collective good

3 There are also transnational labor union connections, such as those between the UE in the United States
and FAT in Mexico, and other labor union solidarity, as well as NGO solidarity around immigrant rights and
against free trade policies in favor of fair trade policies, some of these organized through network solidarity (cf.
Gould 2007). Women’s rights and women’s groups with other social justice foci, for example women for peace
such as Women in Black, Code Pink, and Madre, or global women’s rights groups such as Women Living Under
Muslim Laws, have been organizing women’s delegations and global conferences to form solidarity networks.
 iris young, global responsibility, and solidarity 197

only achievable by challenging the structural injustice or injustices in solidar-

ity projects in which those with what I have called elsewhere “bridge identi-
ties” (Ferguson 1998)—a process of pivoting one’s perspective toward that of
different others—are able to empathize, bond, and struggle along with those
oppressed by such structures.4
To conclude, we might connect this transformed understanding of one’s
self-interest with that of radical humanists Karl Marx and Iris Young, who posit
in their various ways that the goal in life ought to be for humans to be able to
choose, promote, and develop their own capabilities in a democratic fashion.
Marx thought this would only be possible in a society without exploitation, i.e.,
in going from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (Marx 1844/1977);
while Young thought it required social justice movements which were success-
ful in overcoming oppressive and exploitative structures to promote what she
took to be the goal of justice, i.e., promoting democratic self- and collective
development of individuals’ capabilities (Young 1990a).

Conclusion

In this chapter I have defended Iris Young’s political responsibility paradigm

of social justice as an important step in conceptualizing global justice, and
I have also used work by Carol Gould, bell hooks, and Amy Allen to argue that
we need to supplement such a paradigm with a solidarity paradigm of social
justice. I have argued that this is a realistic not a utopian possibility because the
material and social solidarity networks have already developed which makes
this a viable paradigm. The solidarity paradigm of justice is one that is prefer-
able to cosmopolitan universalist approaches (Kant), and is also one based on a
nonidealist approach to the ethics of justice, like that of Iris Young’s in Justice
and the Politics of Difference (1990a).

4 Examples of such bridge identity formations would involve all those in groups forming the solidarity
networks I mention above, either in face-to-face meetings or in group-to-group communications on the Internet
or through representatives to local, regional, and international conferences or meetings that allow them concrete
understandings of each groups’ particular problems and struggles in ways that suggest that uniting in common
struggle can strengthen them in their fight for social justice.
This page intentionally left blank
 16
4

Varieties of Global Responsibility: Social

Connection, Human Rights, and
Transnational Solidarity

Carol C. Gould

In her last papers, Iris Marion Young developed an important position on

global responsibility, which she called a “social connection” model (Young
2004, pp. 365–388; Young 2006c, pp. 102–130). This approach was advanced
to supplement existing “liability” models of responsibility and to articulate a
conception of our moral responsibilities to counter the structural injustice
characteristic of contemporary globalization processes. In this chapter, I will be
concerned to analyze Young’s model and to consider it in the context of other
approaches to our obligations to people at a distance, especially that of Pogge.
I will go on to delineate some other varieties of global responsibility—particu-
larly in regard to fulfilling people’s human rights—that hold importance in this
new domain, as I have argued previously, and will also link these conceptions
of global responsibility to a notion of transnational solidarities.
Young’s final papers fit well with, and carry forward, her overall trajec-
tory in social and political theory, and exemplify her usual courage in tack-
ling directly the difficult philosophical issues that emerge from contemporary
social and political practice. In the various phases of her work, a connection
of this sort between theory and practice has been evident: in her early work
on socialist feminism; in the emphasis she placed on domination and oppres-
sion within theories of justice; in her focus on difference and its impact on the
public sphere; in the centrality she gave to democratic theory and inclusive-
ness; and finally, in her recent work on global justice and responsibilities. In
my view, all this work displayed an unusual philosophical daring, in which

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Special Session in Honor of Iris Marion Young,
American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, April 7, 2007. I would like to thank the participants in that
session, as well as Francis Raven, for helpful comments and suggestions.
200 justice: democracy and inclusion

Young worked through numerous difficult issues, going beyond prevailing

understandings.
Substantively, I especially appreciate the supple analysis Young gave
of oppression throughout her work, and the connection she drew in Jus-
tice and the Politics of Difference (1990a) between justice and the critique of
domination. Young was a master of the analysis of social groups and made
important and lasting contributions to our understanding of them (though
I remain a little uncomfortable with some of her proposals for group rep-
resentation and group vetoes in politics). Her work on democracy helped
place the focus on inclusion as well as on deliberation, though there I would
differ with the idea that democracy is primarily instrumentally valuable in
leading to just outcomes. The last chapter of Young’s Inclusion and Democ-
racy (2000) dealing with self-determination as nondomination is also
highly suggestive in understanding democracy in a global context. I would
add that throughout her work Young was preeminently a social philosopher
and helpfully emphasized the role of affect in addition to reason in social
and political processes.
I would like to focus here on Young’s two articles on global responsibil-
ity and global justice, in which she considers the question of how to properly
conceptualize the moral responsibility of individuals in relation to the struc-
tural injustice resulting from economic globalization, and articulates a view of
shared responsibility for global harms that affect distant people. Responsibility
in global contexts is of course a very current issue, which has been approached
in various ways by consequentialist thinkers, as well as more deontologically
oriented ones. Young delineates a view that is informed by both feminist and
progressive social and political theory, and one that also comes to grips with
contemporary analytic approaches. Although there is much writing currently
being published on the issue of obligations to distant people and on responsi-
bility for global harms, Young was one of the leaders in explicitly theorizing
this issue and she has proposed an important model for understanding it. I will
critically and appreciatively analyze Young’s suggestive account and propose
a somewhat different approach in that context. I will then go on to delineate
certain other forms of global responsibility that I suggest supplement the sort
that Young discusses.

Young’s Social Connection Model

Young’s views on what she alternately calls a new social connection model
of responsibility for remedying global injustices, or a new sort of political
responsibility, are presented with reference to the practical case of people’s
responsibilities to deal with the structural injustices involved in sweatshop
labor. In her model, Young importantly ties the general issue of unjust global
 varieties of global responsibility 201

institutions and global harms to the personal responsibility of individuals,

but not by simply supposing that the global problems can be dealt with ade-
quately through an aggregation of disparate actions by individuals, e.g., by
calling on people to live more ethically or in the case at hand to simply avoid
buying sweatshop-produced clothing. Young was acutely aware that social
and institutional problems need to be approached through social movements
and political change, rather than simply by individual commitment to prin-
ciple or any set of separate individual actions. Yet, as she also emphasizes,
we need to go beyond a general progressive call for changing social and polit-
ical institutions to figuring out how individuals are to act in these unjust
situations to help effect change and to take responsibility for future-oriented
action to eliminate or minimize global injustice. In this context, she primar-
ily calls for collective action to remedy unjust situations, but also argues for
personal choices that would avoid or mitigate harm. Examples would be
corporate heads taking action to avoid violating the human rights of work-
ers, consumers not purchasing sweatshop-produced goods, and individuals
contributing to NGOs or social movements oriented to eliminating specific
oppressive situations.
A key feature of the social connections approach is its helpful emphasis on
structural injustice. According to Young,
Structural injustice exists when social processes put large categories
of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation
of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same
time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a
wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their
capacities. Structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong distinct
from the wrongful action of an individual agent or the willfully
repressive policies of a state. Structural injustice occurs as a
consequence of many individuals and institutions acting in pursuit
of their particular goals and interests, within given institutional
rules and accepted norms. All the persons who participate by their
actions in the ongoing schemes of cooperation that constitute
these structures are responsible for them, in the sense that they
are part of the process that causes them. They are not responsible,
however, in the sense of having directed the process or intended its
outcomes. (2006c, p. 114)
Young appeals here to a conception of domination that has roots in Marx’s
theory of alienation, in which he transformed Hegel’s more general notion
of objectification into a conception of the distinctive forms of domination and
exploitation characteristic of capitalism. As in my own account of domination
(e.g., 1978), as well as in C. B. Macpherson’s (1973) earlier one, Young proposes
that the problem with such structural domination lies in the ways in which the
202 justice: democracy and inclusion

lack of access to conditions restricts people’s development and exercise of their

capacities.1
Two questions immediately present themselves, however, in relation to
Young’s further claim—explicit in her model—that all people who participate
in these social processes are responsible for them, in a sense that would use-
fully go beyond the wholly abstract notion that they give rise to these processes
by taking part in them and maintaining them. One problem is that the criterion
of taking part in such processes seems necessarily vague in application. The
scope of application of participation in a social process extends to everyone who
“belongs to” the cooperative system or even indirectly contributes to it, as can
be seen from the following quotation from Young’s text:
The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals
bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute
by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes.
Our responsibility derives from belonging together with others
in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and
competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realize
projects. Even though we cannot trace the outcome we may
regret to our own particular actions in a direct causal chain, we
bear responsibility because we are part of the process. Within
this scheme of social cooperation, each of us expects justice
toward ourselves, and others can legitimately make claims on us.
Responsibility in relation to injustice thus derives not from living
under a common constitution, but rather from participation in the
diverse institutional processes that produce structural injustice. In
today’s world, many of these structural processes extend beyond
nation-state boundaries to include globally dispersed persons.
(2006c, p. 119)
Young’s position here has the distinct advantage of showing how responsibility
can extend beyond a nation-state, but it seems to apply to everyone within these
extensive systems, even those who have a very minor role. The difficulty would
seem to be the standard one that where everyone is responsible, no one is.
Of course, Young recognizes that people should not be held equally
responsible. Thus she writes that “Persons stand in systematically different and
unequal social positions due to the way institutions operate together” (2006c,
p. 124). Nonetheless, perhaps because of her concern to recognize the agency

1 My own discussion of domination as control over the conditions of agency is originally in Marx’s Social
Ontology (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1978), e.g., p. 161; as “social domination” in “Contemporary legal con-
ceptions of property and their implications for democracy,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 11 (November, 1980):
716–729; in “Socialism and democracy,” Praxis International, 1(1) (April, 1981): 49–63, reprinted in Democracy:
Key concepts in critical theory (1993, pp. 246–256), among other articles; and in Rethinking Democracy (1988), esp.
pp. 38–39 and pp. 42–43.
 varieties of global responsibility 203

of the oppressed, as well as to avoid “turning off ” corporate executives by exces-

sively blaming them, Young ends up arguing that
On the social connection model, workers share responsibility for
combating sweatshop conditions and ought to be organized in order
to do so. Nevertheless, especially where freedom to organize is not
recognized or not enforced, they can discharge their responsibilities
only with the support of others, often faraway and relatively
privileged others, who make public the workers’ grievances, put
pressure on the agents that would block their unionization, and give
them material aid. (2006c, p. 124)
The implication that the exploited workers share responsibility for the sys-
tems that oppress them seems counterintuitive, at least from a view that takes
seriously the fact of their exploitation itself. It seems that here Young goes too
far in her claim that everyone is responsible for these systems. We can grant
that this might be the case on a very abstract level, and also that oppressed
people have some residual freedom of choice within even dismal surround-
ings, and moreover, that they are participants in the systems by which they
are oppressed. But her overly broad view seems to lose the very point of the
critique of oppression and domination in the first place—namely, that those
who are dominated or exploited specifically lack access to the conditions that
they need and further that because of the power of these systems they cannot
change them. So, holding them responsible, while perhaps not amounting
to “blaming the victim” as on the liability model that Young criticizes, seems
unfair to them, since the systems that dominate them are not of their choos-
ing. And they “participate” in them only in an equivocal sense of being in
some sense coerced to do so. Some agents are interested and very willing par-
ticipants (corporations) and others (the exploited workers) are usually reluc-
tant participants, having no real choice not to do so. We need not appeal to a
strictly Marxist analysis to recognize the degree to which some sort of class
analysis of this sort remains the case within current economic globalization
processes.
I would suggest, then, that we need something more than abstract par-
ticipation in a system of structural injustice to generate the relevant sorts of
global or at least transnational responsibilities. Indeed, I have proposed that in
addition to holding the wrong people responsible, a participation model holds
too many people responsible. Because of the interconnectedness of the current
global world, vast numbers of people are involved in some way in all manner
of social processes that have dominating or oppressive aspects. So, it would
be important to couple a view of structural injustice with an adequate political
economy that shows the ways in which transnational corporations are leading
agents in these processes and sweatshop workers are in large measure subject
to them. This in no way denies the agency of the workers. Indeed, it is because
204 justice: democracy and inclusion

of our recognition of the importance of their agency that normatively it is nec-

essary to rectify these exploitative systems.
We can go on to speculate that perhaps there is a conflation of two senses
of responsibility in Young’s analysis that might helpfully be kept distinct. The
first would be responsibility arising from causing or contributing to some
action or process—especially harmful ones, and the second is responsibility
to or for someone, in a sense of responsibility to do things for them or with
respect to them. Although, as Young points out, the first sense is usually expli-
cated in terms of a backward-looking liability model, in which individuals are
held responsible for particular actions, perhaps it would be possible to expand
this model in a more shared or collective direction without simply eliding it
with the second sense of responsibility. In the second sense, individuals are
said to be responsible either for taking care of others or for positively creating
conditions in which other people can flourish. (There are, of course, important
connections between these two senses, and I will briefly discuss those in the
concluding section.)
I believe we do need a sense of responsibility of the second sort. Indeed,
I would suggest that at least in the sense of creating conditions for flourish-
ing, it can extend even more broadly than Young proposes, namely, to all
human beings. But this remains an abstract requirement that in turn needs
to be given narrower institutional interpretations and applications that specify
these responsibilities. In this connection, we can wonder whether Young gives
enough attention to the creation or transformation of institutions that would
eliminate the modes of injustice she describes, as I will note further below.
Beyond this general human responsibility for helping to provide the con-
ditions for flourishing, I would propose that there is another set of mutual
obligations that arise within cooperative systems and communities that are
transnational or cross-border (though not fully global), but I would not identify
these cooperative systems in the way that Young does. Rather, I would iden-
tify them as communities or institutions oriented around what I have called
common activities, e.g., within voluntary associations, or firms, or even local
or regional political communities. Within these associations, where people
engage in common projects, they have obligations of reciprocal recognition
of each person as a co-agent in these processes, including the rights of these
others to codetermine these processes, i.e., to participate in deliberations con-
cerning these common activities. In the case of such associations, the obliga-
tions and rights do in fact arise from taking part in them, but I do not think
that systems of structural injustice are associations of this sort. Rather, to the
degree that groups or agents can be identified as exploiting others through the
activities or institutions of which they are a part, or can be identified as domi-
nating others through these systems, these groups ought to be held responsible
and accountable to these others. It is likely, as Young argues, that the liability
model is inadequate for such cases by not providing any account of shared or
 varieties of global responsibility 205

collective responsibility, but this suggests the need for reforming such a model
to make it more adequate to these cases.
In addition, it is indeed crucial as Young suggests to take a more forward-
looking stance in order to produce genuine reform, but I think that is better
approached in two ways, in terms of institutional transformation to eliminate
structural oppression and domination; and in terms of an approach center-
ing on human rights and democratic input, as I have argued elsewhere. I will
return to the types of global responsibility involved in this latter approach and
to its relation to the elimination of oppressive systems in the final section of
this chapter.

Young, Pogge, and the Role of Transnational Corporations

Young’s analysis is nuanced and helpful but we have seen that there are some
questions that can be raised about its full adequacy. In this context, we can
observe an interesting connection between her analysis and Thomas Pogge’s
work on global justice. Like Pogge, Young calls our attention to eliminating
global harms and specifically to structural injustice within economic globaliza-
tion. Both authors make an appeal to the relevance for responsibility of partici-
pating in a social and institutional system with others where this has the effect
of harming the global poor (in Pogge’s case) or of leading to the oppression or
domination of groups of people (in Young’s account). Yet there is a significant
contrast between their approaches: Pogge argues that Western nations harm
the global poor by imposing a system on them that exploits their resources and
denies them opportunities for free trade and in this way systematically deprives
them of the possibilities of fulfilling their human rights. Accordingly, he goes
to some trouble to lay out the causal connections involved here in order to
argue for obligations on the part of rich nations and of the individuals within
them to remedy this situation in order to meet their negative duty to avoid
depriving people of the possibility of fulfilling their human rights. In contrast,
Young sees Pogge’s analysis as at least partly appealing to what she has called
a liability model of responsibility for global injustices of which she is critical
(although she notes that she is not seeking to replace all reference to liabili-
ties in her own analysis). Instead of focusing on liability, Young proposes, as
we have seen, that everyone connected within systems that result in injustice,
especially forms of domination, have responsibilities to work to eliminate the
injustices in the ways that they can.
However, juxtaposing their views, we can raise some concerns about each
approach to global responsibility—one that applies to Young’s distinctive social
connection account and another that seems to apply to Pogge’s account as well
as to Young’s. As already intimated, a problem with Young’s approach is that
in her effort to avoid talking very much about liability, the important causal
206 justice: democracy and inclusion

connections that Pogge foregrounds may be relatively neglected. There seems

an element of truth in Pogge’s claims that Western nations are responsible
in the sense of liable for imposing exploitative institutional arrangements
on developing nations and for benefiting from this (although Pogge himself
does not emphasis this factor of benefiting). Yet, as Debra Satz and others
have pointed out against Pogge, there is a certain unfairness in holding every-
one in Western nations responsible for the relevant deprivations (Satz 2005,
pp. 47–54) because, as I would put it, workers in these Western economies
often have little role in these exploitative decisions. And although Young rec-
ognizes factors of power and privilege in determining how much one can do
to help, her “social connection” model at the same time seems necessarily to
downplay these crucial differences in accountability, and she explicitly seeks to
hold everyone accountable for rectifying the situation.
Along these lines, another question can be raised about both Young’s and
Pogge’s accounts, one that I raised earlier in my remarks about Young on capi-
talism. In the case of Pogge [as I have argued elsewhere; (cf. Gould 2007a)], the
emphasis he places on “Western nations” and the WTO unfortunately neglects
the role of global corporations in this process of deprivation; accordingly Pogge
sees genuinely free trade almost as a panacea. Likewise, we have suggested
that, perhaps surprisingly given her earlier work, in Young’s social connections
model the fact that everyone participating in these processes is held account-
able does not do justice to the premier role of global corporations, which after
all seem to be the driving force behind contemporary economic globalization.
Young is right that to focus on corporations and their executives exclusively,
without any regard to the participation of working people and consumers,
would not be correct. But it appears that a social connection model might well
lead us to treat corporations as at one with all the other participants in these
systems—consumers, producers, suppliers, media, etc.—whereas they are
major players (perhaps along with nation-states).
Accordingly, I have to differ from Young in her assertion that “When execu-
tives of multinational retailers or consumers who shop at retail outlets hear the
claims of anti-sweatshop activists as laying blame on them for the conditions
under which goods are produced, they rightly become indignant, or scoff at
the absurd extremism of the movement” (Young 2006c, p. 125). While Young
is right that the problem is not personal but structural, I have suggested that
the difference in responsibility between global corporations and the exploited
workers is not adequately conceived as a matter of degree.
Young’s further proposal that what one should do to fulfill one’s respon-
sibilities here depends on the factors of power, privilege, interest, or collective
ability to remedy the situation, also does not seem fully adequate to deal with
the structural nature of the injustices at stake. I suggest that there is a need
for structural transformation in these institutions themselves, such that the
workers within them participate in their direction. Beyond this, really dealing
 varieties of global responsibility 207

with these deep problems of contemporary globalization will require new,

more representative systems in social, economic, and political life (including
in transnational contexts) and the introduction of democratic accountability
into the relevant emerging institutions of global governance. Thus, I would
suggest that institutional problems require institutional solutions, though this
is of course not to absolve individuals of their obligations to help create such
institutions.

Human Rights, Global Responsibility, and Transnational

Solidarity

I would now like to turn to the broader question of the role of social connection
responsibility to other sorts of responsibilities that may be involved in global
justice. As I noted, both Young and Pogge place the emphasis on participat-
ing in institutional, social, and political structures or systems with others as
grounding our responsibility for the harms and inequalities that result. Both
also emphasize rectifying injustice as the main focus of global responsibili-
ties, with Pogge in particular at pains to deny that his view entails positive
duties. He seems concerned to convince even libertarians that they are obli-
gated to stop supporting systems that exploit the global poor. In Pogge’s case,
the emphasis on connectedness in a social system as a ground of responsibil-
ity has the unfortunate consequence (cf. Gould 2007a) that in the absence of
these connections we have no obligations to help fulfill people’s human rights
(Gould 2007a). He seems to posit certain luxuriant societies that can be sup-
posed to be self-sufficient. Pogge of course does believe that there are positive
obligations that flow from the negative duty to avoid harming. If Young were
arguing analogously, then the characterization that she gives of positive and
future-oriented obligations to act by virtue of our social connectedness would
not yet be sufficient to settle her position on whether there are independent
positive moral obligations to fulfill human rights globally (since it is clearly pos-
sible to have positive obligations that flow from a negative duty—as in Pogge’s
duty “to avoid depriving”).
Beyond this, however, there is a substantial body of criticism, in my view
well-founded, directed at Pogge’s notion that avoiding depriving others of
rights fulfillment is simply a negative duty. Philosophers have suggested that
his view tacitly appeals to a positive duty of aid. Whether or not this is the case
for Pogge, my own view is that global justice does also involve positive obliga-
tions or responsibilities to help or aid others, and I would suggest that this
needs to be an important part of an account of our global responsibilities.
I believe that these positive duties, obligations, or responsibilities are best
formulated in terms of a conception of human rights, and I have argued for
this in previous work (Gould 1988, esp. chapters 1 and 7; Gould 2004). That is,
208 justice: democracy and inclusion

in addition to avoiding participating in systems of injustice, and correlatively

working to eliminate such systems, I believe we have responsibilities to help
others in fulfilling their human rights. However, there is a natural and forceful
objection to this, one that has unfortunately led Pogge and others to eschew
this notion. The objection is one of impossibility. If helping to fulfill people’s
human rights is held to be a duty or obligation or responsibility owed to each
and every other person, and human rights include also economic and social
rights, prominently a right to means of subsistence—then we simply cannot
help everyone to fulfill them. Consequently, Pogge rejects such an “interac-
tional” account of human rights, in which they are claims that hold on indi-
viduals, in favor of an institutional one in which we have obligations to avoid
imposing institutions that make it impossible for people to fulfill their human
rights.
But there is a more natural way of articulating these responsibilities for
which I have argued. That is, not only do we have an obligation to avoid impos-
ing exploitative institutions but we have an obligation to work to establish eco-
nomic, social, and political institutions that will make it possible for everyone
to fulfill their human rights. On this view, the institutional application arises
as a practical interpretation of our general (interpersonal, if you will) obligation
to help people meet their human rights. On my approach, then, human rights
hold in principle as claims of each on all others in virtue of our interdependence.
But they can only be realized practically through devising social, economic, and
political institutions that would serve to fulfill them. These institutions have
heretofore been more bounded than the world as a whole and it is probably best
that they remain bounded, though not limited to nation-states.
Note that this account also entails an appeal to our interdependence as a
ground for obligations to meet human rights, the most basic of which can be
cashed out in terms of those conditions for action that constitute fundamental
human needs. Because of our vulnerability and our dependence on others to
realize these needs and to help frame and condition our individual and col-
lective projects, I argue that the obligation to respect and meet human rights
falls in principle on all others. I have suggested that these rights arise from
the social (rather than strictly legal) claims that people necessarily make on
others for providing these conditions for activity. (Note that Young too in her
early work makes a helpful appeal to such processes of claiming.) Practically,
however, the fulfillment of human rights can only be accomplished through
delimited social, economic, and political systems, and thus the generality of the
claims have to be specified in order to be effective.
Thus for Young, social connection is a ground for responsibility to avoid or
eliminate harming others globally, where this is understood within institutional
frameworks. Young cites O’Neill’s idea that we are responsible if we presup-
pose or rely on others. I think these claims are plausible for the case of harm-
ing others, though I have indicated that structural transformation, including
 varieties of global responsibility 209

of work, is required for dealing with the sorts of exploitation that are Young’s
focus. But I have suggested that beyond the avoidance of harm, a more general
obligation needs to be articulated, one that has emerged especially clearly in
view of globalization. That is the obligation to help introduce and sustain insti-
tutions that will serve to fulfill people’s human rights.
There is indeed a complex relation between these two senses of obligation
or responsibility, in my own approach. To the degree that the harm in question
consists of structural forms of oppression or exploitation that serve to constrain
people’s agency, then freedom from this domination is an aspect of negative
freedom (which constitutes an addition to the standard notions of civil liberties
and political rights). The agency in question requires the availability of condi-
tions for its (positive) development, where these conditions include both social
ones (especially recognition) and material ones, and where these conditions
can be specified in terms of human rights. Since this agency is equal, I have
argued that we need to operate with a principle of equal positive freedom as
our principle of justice, understood moreover as equality through differences.
On this view, human rights enter as basic conditions for self-transformation,
and require an institutional framework, including democratic forms of partici-
pation for their fulfillment (Gould 1988, esp. chaps. 1, 5, 7; Gould 2004, esp.
chaps. 1 and 9). It can be seen from this brief sketch that the critique and over-
coming of structural injustice and the positive efforts to institutionalize modes
of realizing human rights are closely related to each other.
We can suggest further that the requirement of attending to the impact of
one’s own participation in systems of oppression is an important implication of
this view, as would be participating in movements working toward eliminating
injustice and positively establishing frameworks for human rights fulfillment.
This may involve social movements, but also political and legal innovations.
Crucial in this process is what I have called transnational solidarity.
Thus I have elsewhere proposed that the general obligation to help meet
each other’s human rights as well as to work to eliminate oppression gives rise
to, and is sustained by, new forms of solidarity (Gould 2007b). As a globally
relevant norm, solidarity can be articulated in terms of an obligation to act in
support of particular others at a distance (or to stand ready to aid these others),
with whom one shares a commitment to the achievement of justice. I have
also proposed that such solidarity need not take the form of general human
solidarity (indeed, perhaps even cannot take this form), but rather of networked
transnational solidarities (Gould 2007b). It thus remains limited to action or a
disposition to act in overlapping solidarity movements, oriented to the elimina-
tion of oppression or suffering and to the meeting of basic needs.
I suggest that solidarity in this sense involves a form of social empathy, or
an understanding of the distinctive situation and difficulties of other people or
groups. Unlike relations based on personal empathy, solidarity can thus hold
among associations as well as among individuals. But it goes beyond empathic
210 justice: democracy and inclusion

feelings and a commitment to justice, to action in support of these others in

the ways that they judge helpful. In this sense, it requires receptivity as well as
deference to these others. Since action is not always possible, a disposition or
readiness to act is also required, and dispositions of this sort need to be more
widely cultivated.
There is a strong element of voluntariness retained here, in that it is up to
people to choose which solidarity movement or network they want to take part
in. But I would suggest that there is a certain responsibility to be part of some
solidarity network or other, if human rights are to be eventually fulfilled more
globally. Moreover, it is plausible that the process of participating in solidarity
actions and movements can itself enhance commitment to the realization of
human rights. Through the expansion of social empathy, it can serve to moti-
vate a broader respect for these rights themselves.
One additional dimension of responsibilities in this global, or at least trans-
national, context can be added to this account, a dimension already implied in
the earlier discussion of “common activities.” This additional sort of respon-
sibility is in fact derived from the more traditional political responsibility that
Young finds appealing in Hannah Arendt’s account, but which Young appro-
priates for her own social connection model (Young 2004, pp. 375–377).2 I see
something like Arendt’s political responsibility implied in a rather separate
case from the ones on which Young focuses. Like Arendt, I think it is possible
to speak of the sort of political responsibility that is involved in a nation-state or
political community, where people act in common to realize shared projects.
In my own democratic theory, I have called these “common activities” or “joint
activities” (in a way that I now recognize shows some influence from Arendt).
Unlike Young, I suggest that these common activities, and indeed political
communities more generally, play an important new role in global justice con-
texts, in the form of cross-border or transnational communities. Thus, we can
recognize the collective and shared responsibilities that come from member-
ship in a given political community (in Arendt’s sense) as applying also when
these communities are cross-border as they are increasingly becoming. This
is not, then, a form of responsibility for global harms but is a more project-
oriented responsibility, where there are shared and overlapping goals. Like
Young’s own model, and like the responsibility to foster institutions to realize
people’s human rights discussed earlier, it is future-oriented and social.
In the final part of this chapter, then, I have proposed that there are in
fact several senses or varieties of global responsibility, which are interrelated
in complex ways. There is the responsibility associated with the functioning of
exploitative or dominating global economic and social systems, which Young
forcefully articulates, but which I have argued should be understood somewhat

2 Young there cites Hannah Arendt, “Collective responsibility,” in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the faith
and thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. W. Bernauer (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff 1987), pp. 45, 47.
 varieties of global responsibility 211

differently. I have suggested that we should accept her account, but with more
weight placed on the responsibility of global corporations and with greater
attention to the role of structural transformation, including in democratic con-
trol of work, to eliminate systemic exploitation. Beyond that, I have proposed
that we have a responsibility to move positively to establish institutions that
will enable everyone to fulfill their human rights, though it is practically impor-
tant to divide this work into more delimited local and regional efforts, coupled
with new means for minimizing global inequalities and enabling democratic
input into the institutions of global governance. We can also recognize the
obligations that we have within our social, economic, and political communi-
ties, whether they are traditionally local, or national, or newly cross-border.
Membership in these communities generates more familiar obligations, but
it is important to remember that since some of these communities are truly
transnational or even global, their scope can be quite broad and will require
new forms of transnational representation.
There may indeed be more than these varieties of global responsibility, but
I would suggest that there are at least these. In addition, we can see that new
transnational solidarities are required as a means of achieving global justice
concretely. We can say, then, that we have obligations to work to support par-
ticular individuals or groups elsewhere whom we can identify as oppressed or
suffering, out of a commitment to achieving justice. But this conception of soli-
darity not only points to a new sort of obligation but to a new way of meeting the
demanding obligations of global justice and human rights. As embodying an
important element of voluntariness as to where to devote one’s efforts to sup-
port others, it importantly helps to create on-the-ground relationships through
which we reciprocally meet our more general obligations to support others and
to pursue the establishment of human rights. In any case, it is clear through all
this that Young has called our attention to an important new domain for philo-
sophical reflection, namely, that of articulating how individuals and groups
can be responsible for rectifying global injustices, in a way that is demanding
but also plausible. This connection of theory to practice is only one instance of
Young’s manifold and important contributions to social philosophy.
This page intentionally left blank
 17
4

On Immigration Politics in the Context

of European Societies and the Structural
Inequality Mode

Máriam Martínez

The concepts of exclusion and inclusion lose meaning if they are

used to label all problems of social conflict and injustice. Where the
problems are racism, cultural intolerance, economic exploitation, or a
refusal to help needy people, they should be so named.
—Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy

Comme Socrate selon Platon, l’immigré est atopos, sans lieu, déplacé,
inclassable. (…) Ni citoyen, ni étranger, ni vraiment du côté du Même,
ni totalement du côté de l’Autre, il se situe en ce lieu “bâtard” dont parle
aussi Platon, la frontière de l’être et du non-être social.
As Socrates said, according to Plato, the immigrant is atopos, without
place, transferred, unclassified. (…) Neither citizen, nor foreigner,
nor truly to the side of Self, nor totally to the side of Other, he stands
in this “bastard” place which Plato speaks of, the frontier between
social being and social not-being.
—Pierre Bourdieu, La double absence

Many of the central ideas in this chapter were inspired by a very first draft of an article called “Structural
Injustice and Politics of Difference,” which Young sent to me when I met her in the fall of 2005 at the University
of Chicago. I am responsible for any interpretation of any argument that I took from it. I would like to thank
Mecke Nagel and Ann Ferguson for their help in improving this chapter. I thank Rafael del Águila for his indis-
pensable advice. Most of all, thanks to Tom, who has read several drafts and has discussed many ideas with me.
I dedicate with enormous love this chapter to him and to my parents, Aníbal and Ramoni.
214 justice: democracy and inclusion

Introduction: The Appeal to a Structural Level of Social Life

in Immigration Politics

In the last few decades, most of the Western liberal democracies have had to
face the challenge of reassessing immigration policies in order to achieve the
satisfactory inclusion of immigrant communities, particularly Muslim minori-
ties. Issues of identity and cultural distinctiveness are growing in these democ-
racies, where aims for assimilation are being addressed with new measures of
immigration control, taken mostly by conservative governments in the form
of security regimes that try to preserve a “national identity or character that all
members share” (Young 2000, p. 252). The presence of so many new people in
European cities like Paris, London, or Amsterdam has shown how such claims
for unity and common good within the aspirations of national identity have
favored some social groups while positioning others, especially Muslims, as
the deviant Other (Young 2000, p. 81).
In this chapter I advocate considering issues of immigration politics as a
matter of social justice. I endorse Iris Marion Young’s concept of social jus-
tice as “the institutional conditions for promoting self-development and self-
determination of a society’s members” where self-development means access
to opportunities for developing capacities, and self-determination represents
being able to determine one’s actions (Young 2000, pp. 31–33). I believe that
an appropriate interpretation of these ideals in the particular situation of immi-
grants’ inclusion suggests that they ought to be considered primarily as struc-
tural groups rather than cultural groups. From a social justice perspective it
does not matter if the source of the subordinate position of immigrant social
groups in European societies is a different set of practices, conventions, music,
language, or visual images. What matters instead is that because of this differ-
ence they stand in a structural position in which they find more obstacles to the
pursuit of their interests and skilled professions; a structural position in which
they have a small range of opportunities to achieve and develop autonomy or
exercise their capacities. Social group difference as structural differentiation
here is a resource for the sake of social justice because it “allows us to notice
structural relations of dominance and subordination among groups that raise
important issues of justice for individuals” (Young 2000, p. 102).
Thus, this chapter is focused on what Young has termed the Structural
Inequality Model in relation to immigration politics in Western liberal democ-
racies, and especially in European societies, where conflicts arising from group
differences are evaluated with a substantialist logic that tends to reduce differ-
ence to identity, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. I rely on Young’s conviction
that basing difference on structures of work, sexuality, and embodied normativ-
ity rather than on identity politics increases the likelihood of promoting jus-
tice. The chapter aims to approach immigration politics by paying attention to
 on immigration politics 215

the experience derived primarily from structural differentiation and structural

inequalities, because the “identity assertions of cultural groups usually appear in
the context of structural relations of privilege and disadvantage” (Young 2000,
p. 106). Muslims in many societies in Europe, for instance, claim the right to
wear traditional dress in public spaces at the same time that they experience
employment discrimination, marginalization in political participation, expres-
sions of xenophobia, violence, or harassment (ibid). I suggest that attending to
cultural difference here improperly narrows the scope of issues of social justice
that first ought to guarantee material resources and the ability to exercise capaci-
ties (cf. Young, p. 134). These material resources that usually have been preserved
in most of the democratic welfare states in Europe are the object of restrictions
under the argument that these coming waves of non-European immigrants
are making it necessary to renew the traditional redistributive welfare policies.
(Wolfe and Lausen 1997, pp. 231–55, cited in Young 2000, p. 243)
The appeal to a structural level in this chapter seeks to concretely identify four
aspects of “structural injustice” that are not well captured by liberal strategies of
accommodation and integration of immigrants in which principles of tolerance
require mostly that “the migrants be perceived as affirming the values and socio-
cultural accomplishments of the majority of society” (Young 2000, p. 220).
I point out the four aspects of critique as social and political outcomes that
result from this structural differentiation and the structural inequalities that
affect immigrant social groups:

1. Racism as a form of structural injustice is disappearing in liberal

discourses from general view, leaving in its place concerns about
ethnic and religious differences. In this case, the Structural Inequality
Model raises issues of stigma, exclusion, and discrimination rather
than problems of ethnic or cultural differences, and affirms that the
“primary claims of justice refer to experiences of structural inequality
more than cultural difference” (Young 2000, p. 105).
2. The liberal logic of tolerance and its limits obscure social processes
of normalizing behaviors that produce individual discrimination.
According to Young, this logic of normalization operates by marking
the practices of immigrants and cultural minorities as deviant when
compared to the normal as defined by culturally hegemonic groups.
3. From the liberal perspective, issues of gender are sometimes hidden by
general problems of religion where women normally are treated as the
objects of the debate (Young 2000, p. 62). In the case of the affaire
du foulard, or affair of the veil, in France for instance, religion has
displaced other relevant questions about gender discrimination such
as the sexual division of labor, gendered processes of socialization,
and the establishment of hegemonic norms that limit real
opportunities for women. (Young 2005a, p. 22)
216 justice: democracy and inclusion

4. The arena of civil society is displaced by a state-centered conception of

political action that maintains the traditional division of public and
private. Under this logic, the public is regulated by the state, which
decides what is permitted, supported, or required, and what is
forbidden or must be relegated to the private in order to guarantee
the neutrality and homogeneity of the public.
Identifying these four areas of analysis that background the Structural Inequal-
ity Model means assessing inequality and theorizing social justice for immi-
grant social groups through systemic relations of oppression. Structures in
Young’s account denote “the confluence of institutional rules and interactive
routines, mobilization of resources, and physical structures, which constitute
the historical givens in relation to which individuals act” (Young 2005a, p. 20).
The Structural Inequality Model thus attends to systemic factors of social struc-
tures and institutions in which people behave under constraints in ways that
inhibit their capacities (Young 2001a, p. 9).
Young has theorized these four important facets of the Structural Inequality
Model throughout her work. I do not claim, however, that these four areas exhaust
her approach. There may well be many other possible aspects, and even those that
I have chosen could deserve a deeper exploration. I have found these four particu-
larly important, first, because they pay attention to group difference for the sake of
a concept of social justice concerned with equal opportunity to develop capacities
and well being and not just freedom and autonomy. Second, because they seek
to challenge liberal conceptualizations such as the relation of public and private,
rather than search for the accommodation of emerging social conditions to the sta-
tus quo. Third, because The Structural Inequality Model assumes that perspectives
of individuals are incommensurable. I want to show how it frames and positions
women’s issues quite differently from the way that identity and multicultural poli-
tics constructs them, where gender issues usually serve to test other principles and
ideas and not as ends by themselves. Finally, I seek to approach ethnic difference
from a model that connects physical attributes and bodily characteristics with struc-
tures. I aim to deal with ethnic difference in a way that reflects on the processes
of socializing bodies that serve as excuses for structural inequalities, because the
institutional and social environment is biased due to standards for body aesthetics
that devaluate and structurally position some people abjectly. I believe that some
of these ideas are not so familiar in traditional perspectives and discussions about
immigration politics for European scholars and contexts.

Racism versus Ethnicity and Cultural Difference

As I have said above, in this chapter I propose addressing issues of social group
difference related to the process of immigrant inclusion in European societies
 on immigration politics 217

through Young’s account of structural injustice, because I believe it better cap-

tures concerns about physical attributes, socialized body types, and processes
that naturalize body characteristics against others which appear as inferior or
deviated. Approaching structural processes of racism from this view supposes
that what is constituted as problems of cultural and ethnic mutual identification
in relation to the presence of immigrant groups, especially Muslims and North
African in European cities, ought to be observed as a process that normalizes a
body aesthetic. This process in turn determines which people are most appro-
priate for low-status work1 (Loury 2002, pp. 15–55; Young 2001a, pp. 1–18), for
being structurally located as deviant, inferior, or stigmatized, and for living in
segregated places. This pattern, according to which undesirable work is done
primarily by people of color, can be observed to a large extent in the case, for
instance, of Afro-Caribbeans in several British cities, and in migrant popula-
tions from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Paris,
which mirrors similar patterns of employment discrimination and residential
concentrations in suburbs that have become racialized ghettos (Young 2000,
pp. 106, 202, 219).
According to Young, what differentiates race from ethnic issues is the
way in which body features are vilified. While ethnicity seems to be reduced
to cultural difference, racial oppression involves “existing as a group perceived
as having ugly bodies, and being feared, avoided, or hated on that account.”
(Young 1990c, p. 201; Young 2000, pp. 122, 152). Thus, from her writings we
can identify at least three structures of racial inequality that produce structural
injustice and reinforce inequalities among social groups, particularly biased
against immigrant groups.
First, racial inequality rises from processes of normalization that determine
that physical and other undesirable jobs are more appropriate for people per-
taining to racialized groups (Young 2001a, pp. 1–18; Young 2006a, pp. 92–93;
Young 1990, p. 122), reserving for them the lowest social status and the low-
est average incomes (Young 2000, p. 206). Structures of racial inequality are
essential to discussions of justice in the division of labor because the devalua-
tion of members of racialized groups determines the proper type of work for its
members according to a hierarchal status. In Europe, immigrants from North
and Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, and Latin America have been marked as other
and restricted to certain positions in the social division of labor (Young 2000,
pp. 106, 219).
Second, racial inequality rises from processes of stigmatization that “struc-
ture everyday interaction and subjectivity at nondiscursive levels of practical

1 The stigma of racialized bodies of African-American in United States is the result of process of nor-
malization and devaluation of body types that determines the proper work for some people. According to Loury
(2002), stigmatization of African-Americans could have its origins in the division of labor of slavery. Similar
patterns of stigmatization could have resulted from the legacies of colonialism in Europe. See Abdelmalek Sayad,
La double absence (1999, pp. 53–94).
218 justice: democracy and inclusion

consciousness and unconsciousness” (Young 1990c, p. 202). These processes

of stigmatization affect the way people react to others according to what is
marked as deviated, based not only on ideals of beauty but also standards of
comportment, of sociability, and guidelines of moral respectability. Justice
here does not imply the recognition of cultural practices but rather the chal-
lenging of processes that normalize attributes of persons and, by extension, the
behavior of these persons. In the United States, norms of intelligence, respect-
ability, and professionalism are more typically associated with whites than Afri-
can Americans (Young 2006b, p. 99), while in Europe similar patterns that
stigmatize body types and cultural behaviors can be observed to a large extent.
It can be said, for instance, that the cultural difference of Pakistanis in England
also carries a racial stigma in this sense. (Young 2006b, p. 101)
The third structure of racial inequality represents another source of struc-
tural injustice and refers to segregation as a process of residentially concen-
trating members of social groups that have been bodily stigmatized; this also
implies exclusion from privileges and benefits (Young 2000, pp. 196–228).
Although Young’s work focuses mostly on processes of segregation in Amer-
ica represented by Black neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, Cleveland,
Newark, or New York, she dedicates some of her writings to the phenomena
of residential racial segregation in European cities and documents how many
patterns in those processes follow very similar codes of interpretation and
explanation (Young 2000, pp. 201–204). The origins of both cases are quite
different but the results are similar. While in the United States racial segrega-
tion is largely the product of the historical stigma of blackness in America,
racial segregation in Europe is extremely related to the reception of immigra-
tion through which large populations from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East
remain concentrated in European cities such as London, Berlin, Amsterdam,
or Paris. Young points out how many of the people who have Asian, African,
Middle Eastern, or Caribbean origins are treated as foreigners even if they were
born in European countries, because they remain segregated in these Euro-
pean cities (Young 2000, p. 219). Process of segregation in the United States
and in Europe share, however, a common structure of racial inequality based
on “racialist social structures of privilege and disadvantage” that produce limits
on substantive opportunities for developing capacities (Young 2000, p. 203).
Young points out that some scholars have debated about the genesis of
these residential concentrations as spaces formed by ethnic enclaves rather
than ghettos resulting from exclusion by the white majority2 (Young 2000,
pp. 199, 203). Although those neighborhoods could be thought of that way,
they still usually have “notable disadvantages such as having poor transpor-
tation access, poor-quality housing for the price, location near unpleasant

2 On this topic she quotes the work of authors such as Peter Marcuse (1997, pp. 228–64) and Douglas
Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (1993, pp. 1–7).
 on immigration politics 219

industrial facilities” and they also “carry associations of danger and stigma that
make majority cultural groups move from them” (Young 2000, p. 204). These
conditions certainly suggest that these neighborhoods are founded on social
segregation. To the extent that it is not clear if these concentrations simply
result from the members of ethnic communities’ preference for living close to
those with whom they share cultural affinities, I suggest that they ought to be
considered primarily as racially concentrated neighborhoods that feed condi-
tions of structural inequality. However, in order to challenge this stigma that
they carry I propose Young’s principle of Differentiated Solidarity as an ideal
that assumes respect for the choices of the people that want to live together, at
the same time that it requires mutual obligation and solidarity between those
in urban spaces for providing services and keeping a sense of justice commit-
ment and solidarity among them (Young 2000, p. 201).

The Process of Normalization versus the Logic of Tolerance

and Its Limits

In her work, Young distinguishes in modern society three categories of non-

distributive issues of justice: the social division of labor, decision-making
power, and the establishment of hegemonic norms or what she calls “norma-
tivity.”3 Normativity refers to images, expectations, and social and institutional
rules that “make some persons or behaviors more valuable than others” (Young
2006a, pp. 94–96). In this sense, Young’s concept of normativity relies on
processes of normalization, an idea that she mainly borrows from the work of
writers such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner. Follow-
ing the argument that some structural injustices such as stigmatization, rac-
ism, and exclusion are not well captured by the liberal framework of tolerance
and its limits, I endorse Young’s project of theorizing those types of issues by
bringing them into an account that puts more emphasis on processes of nor-
malization. I propose that issues of immigrant exclusion should be primarily
concerned with issues of normativity rather than issues for the recognition of
cultural expression and self-government.
Normalization, in Young’s view, constitutes a major source of oppression
in our contemporary societies. By normalization she refers to “processes that
construct experience and capacities of some social segments into standards
against which all are measured and some found wanting, or deviant” (Young
2006b, p. 96). Processes of normalization tend to privilege the experience of
some people at the same time that they render invisible or deprecate the expe-
rience of others. Normalization transforms difference into deviance because

3 Although she speaks about these axes frequently, she develops them more rigorously in “Lived Body vs.
Gender” (2005a) and “Taking the Basic Structure Seriously” (2006a).
220 justice: democracy and inclusion

social and institutional norms expect certain attributes and behaviors from
people for whom the exhibition of such behaviors is untenable or impossible.
Thus understood, normalization is a source of structural oppression because
in these cases the structure itself construes their difference as a problem and
tends to exclude those who do not meet its norms.
Processes of normalization produce stigmatization and disadvantage
(Young 2006b, p. 97). Stigmatization because it constructs some people as
“outliers,” deviants, or misfits and thus devalues their social status according
to hegemonic norms of respectability, intelligence, beauty, morality, and eth-
ics. Secondly, processes of normalization produce systematic disadvantages in
terms of access to resources for developing skills and capacities for achieving
opportunities. In that sense, stigmatization and disadvantage not only have
enormous consequences for reaching positions of prestige, for accumulating
wealth and so on, but also, there are substantive implications for subjectivity
in terms of self-respect and valuation in the sense that being recognized as
an equal by others constitutes the first step for developing a positive sense of
the self 4.
In traditional approaches of politics of recognition such as those of Charles
Taylor (1992), conflicts concerning assertions for equal status and equal respect
normally are reduced to claims for cultural expression. While it is important to
differentiate claims for toleration of distinct cultural practices from those con-
cerned with stigmatized and disadvantaged positions, I suggest that in discuss-
ing claims from ethnic immigrated minorities in Europe, such as Muslims,
North Africans, or Latin Americans about freedom of cultural expression in
public spaces, their marginalized status in society, labor markets, and political
institutions should also be taken into an account.
Framing issues of politics in relation to group difference under the liberal
paradigm very often implies focusing on the “value of tolerance more than
that of inclusion in a diversely interacting public” (Young 2006b, p. 101). In
regard to cultural and religious groups in Europe these politics of difference
arise primarily from differences of nationality, culture, or religion. According
to Young, this logic of tolerance supposes envisioning limits constructed by the
normal and deviant that “normalize the experience of some group members
and marginalize others” (Young 1997a, p. 5). Indeed, it normalizes a discourse
in multicultural debates about limits of toleration and claims of immigrant
minorities that tends to obscure other issues about structural inequalities such
as differences in access to spaces and resources, to opportunities for develop-
ing capacities and well being, or for pursuing positions in labor markets as an
equal, that ought to be at stake in these debates. The logic of tolerance is based
on liberal politics concerned with rights of liberty, autonomy, and freedom

4 On the Hegelian idea of identity as constructed dialogically through processes of mutual recognition
see Taylor (1992, p. 25).
 on immigration politics 221

of expression while the Structural Inequality Model aims to highlight issues

of equal opportunity. In this chapter I suggest that issues about inclusion of
immigrants ought to be approached primarily on these terms.

The Displacement of Gender Issues

From the 1970s through the early 1980s, theories and social movements
emerged under the formula of multiculturalism. The central concern of these
politics can be understood as the reaction of the formal liberal legal equality (as
equal treatment) at the expense of assimilation and rejection of difference. Mul-
ticulturalism encourages cultural diversity and seeks equal respect for others’
ways of life. However, cultures very often do not accept this principle of equal
respect to everyone. Okin (1999) and Nussbaum (2000), very concerned with
equality and rights for women within multicultural contexts, have remarked
on the patriarchal condition of every culture and the subordinate state and
lack of opportunities that women suffer in relation to men in every country of
the world, but especially in developing countries, where “gender inequality is
strongly correlated with poverty” (Nussbaum 2000, p. 3). Multiculturalism very
often is figured as the framework in which issues of gender inequality are used
to test theories and approaches about tolerance, and where assumptions for
gender justice are invoked in discussions of equal treatment. Bhikhu Parekh
for instance, has listed twelve cultural practices that most frequently provoke
intercultural conflicts, among which at least seven of them concern the status
of women. These practices refer to issues such as those of marriages, wearing
or taking off the Islamic veil, and the Muslim withdrawal of girls from some
educational practices such as sports (Parekh 2000, pp. 264–65). According
to Young, bringing these conflicts under a liberal paradigm supposes mostly
framing gender issues in terms of toleration and its limits and then suppress-
ing other structural issues of exploitation, marginalization, or subordination
that usually affect women.
In the last section I relied on Young’s account in order to criticize the theo-
retical construction whereby tolerance is understood as the accommodation of
one group to another’s practices and forms of cultural expression and argued
that this logic contributes to structurally positioning persons as deviant-Other
because it tends to normalize the experience of some groups while marginal-
izing others. The liberal logic of accommodation and assimilation bases the
terms of the public debate on a notion of difference that is reduced to just
cultural practices and holds that the State has the power of allowing and tol-
erating. In these debates, women’s voices tend to get lost because the rhetoric
and discussions about religion, special rights, and the preservation of cultural
distinctiveness are very often not framed in terms that promote the inclusion of
their voices. In such discussions one can easily come to appreciate, as Martha
222 justice: democracy and inclusion

Minow pointed out, the multiple “ramifications of different ways of theoriz-

ing differences” and how fragile difference is when it so easily risks becom-
ing “assimilated into old categories of thinking so that it loses its novelty and
its message” (Minow 1990, cited in Gilligan 1993, p. xi). Dealing with differ-
ence in multicultural debates supposes keeping a resonance in which equality
still means sameness, because the questions and terms of these discussions
are framed around the affirmation that women should have the same rights
as men, and so, for example, shouldn’t cover their heads in public. This is a
normalized discourse in which difference refers to a cultural practice that will
be tolerated or not, depending on the degree to which liberal rights can be
extended. I suggest that difference in these debates ought to mean primarily
that one explicitly acknowledges the other, and that one hears her perspective,
incommensurable with one’s own.
What has been referred to as l’affaire du foulard in France has been
approached as a specific practice of cultural membership in which religion has
gained more attention than specific issues concerned about gender justice. The
practice of the veil suggests the problematic for the liberal state is whether
or not to tolerate it, depending on the political and institutional spaces, and
the personal choice of those who wear it. The State here, which did intervene,
invoking the principles of egalitarianism and autonomy, “act(ed) as the cham-
pion of women’s emancipation from their communities of birth” in a paternal-
ist and oppressive position which, however, “some women resisted (. . .) not to
affirm their religious and sexual subordination so much as to assert a quasi-
personal identity independent of the dominant French culture” (Benhabib
2002, p. 94).
In this case, religious identity became the main banner under which
claims for specific rights were addressed. I argue in this chapter that framing
these issues on multicultural and liberal accounts primarily tends to displace
issues of gender justice such as the sexual division of labor, processes of gender
socialization and gendered hierarchies of power. The sexual division of labor
persists in the assumption that “women devote primary energies to taking care
of children and other dependent family members” (Young 2006a, p. 93), so
women very often find substantive obstacles for developing other capacities.
Socialization of girls remains oriented toward caring and helping. These social
differences produced by the division of labor and process of socialization are
fundamental for gendered structural inequalities to the extent that because of
them women very often stand in a position more vulnerable to poverty and
abuse than men (Young 2005a, pp. 22–23). These axes of gender structures
such as the sexual division of labor and processes of gendered socialization also
produce gendered hierarchies of status and power and gender stereotyping that
limit real opportunities for women in labor market expectations, social posi-
tions, and public recognition. This set of issues of gender justice are related to
general assumptions, social conventions, and habits that stigmatize or devalue
 on immigration politics 223

women. According to Young, all those aspects of social interactions and

meanings are normally captured by recent political theory and multicultural
debates under the general term of culture “to refer primarily to differences
between groups based on ethnicity, nationality, or religion” (Young 2006a,
p. 95). In her account the term of culture refers more to “symbols, images,
meanings, habitual comportments, stories and so on through which people
express their experience and communicate with one another” (Young 1990c,
p. 213), while culture from multicultural approaches take nation, ethnicity, or
religion as paradigmatic of culture.5 For Young culture relies more on commu-
nicative action than on a substantial and coherent entity distinguished entirely
from other or others’ single substantial cultures. Despite the fact that they typi-
cally defend a position in which cultural difference should not be rigid and
enclosed, multicultural approaches, however, tend to freeze conventional hab-
its into natural practices because they speak about culture as a substantive,
static, and bounded entity limited to attributes of nationality, costumes, ethnic
groups, or religion. The term culture is too vague to capture these issues of
gender justice as well as is the notion of recognition which also “slides between
several meanings, the most common of which do not focus on the issues of
stigmatization and exclusion to which (she) want(s) to call attention” (Young
2006a, p. 95). The term recognition usually invokes problems of acknowledg-
ing ways of living and questions of self-government, while issues of gender jus-
tice are more concerned with other aspects, meanings, symbols, bodily habits
and stereotypes that function to limit the opportunities of many women for self-
development and self-determination. That is, these latter aspects may restrict
the conditions of equal opportunity to develop capacities and decide if I want to
wear the veil or not, to decide for myself if I experience that as an oppression or
as an expression. They also may restrict me from being free to “pursue (my) life
in (my) own way” because I participate in determining my own action and the
conditions of my action. (Young 2000, p. 32). Certainly liberal approaches to
multicultural debates would not have any objections to these principles of self-
development and self-determination. These principles, however, usually come
separated from the claims for cultural freedom and expression in multicultural
debates which take national, ethnic, and religious groups as the only kind of
group at issue, leaving too little space for the gender issues at stake.
Above I have pointed out that in addition to culture, it is necessary to
give an account that speaks about structural inequalities associated with gen-
der, about material resources, habits, meanings, and forms of communica-
tive action that denigrate images and expectations about women. I think that
these interactive norms that produce the gender division of labor, processes

5 See Young (2006a, p. 97), where she quotes three authors as paradigmatic examples of this usage of
culture, despite the “different implications of culture for politics” that they exhibit: Will Kymlicka in Multicultural
Citizenship (1995); Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (2001); and Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (2002).
224 justice: democracy and inclusion

of gendered socialization, and gendered hierarchies of power are not well con-
ceptualized under the paradigm of recognition politics. In relation to this, the
third aspect of the Structural Inequality Model refers to the necessity of specif-
ically looking for female voices in order to express a number of questions that
end up being displaced by general debates about religious identity, tolerance,
and its limits and claims for recognition of cultural difference. These debates
usually ignore structural biases against women or are arenas where gender
issues serve as mere instruments to test and define the frontiers for the appli-
cation of liberal rights. In the case of the veil in France, in spite of the fact that
there was a public discussion about issues of democracy and difference in
multicultural societies, “the girls’ voices were not heard in this heated debate
(so) the voices of those whose interests were most vitally affected by the norms
prohibiting the wearing of the scarf under certain conditions were silenced”
(Benhabib 2002, p. 117). As Young says, this logic usually operates by “displac-
ing and silencing the other as she might speak in a different, incommensurate
register.”6

The Displacement of Civil Society

Many of the theories and proposals associated with multicultural and liberal
approaches focus on the relation between state policy and the presence of eth-
nic and religious difference in Western democracies. Struggles about differ-
ence in these contexts are grounded in the logic of tolerance, and its limits for
accommodating what are defined as cultural practices within the barriers of lib-
eral principles and rights. Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Bhikhu Parekh, and
James Tully have all taken the important step of “politicizing culture” by chal-
lenging basic concepts of normative political theory, theorizing claims from
a large variety of movements and oppressed cultural minorities and treating
these issues as a matter of serious discussion.7
Liberal-democratic states face the challenge not only of accepting cultural
diversity but also of encouraging it as a value. Discussions about cultural diver-
sity, however, very often are centered on constitutional and formal rules that
derive from state regulations. While it is important to recognize the function
of state institutions in coordinating and administrating issues concerning

6 See Young (1997b, p. 44). I find in this article interesting insights about processes in which members
of privileged groups—in this case, men—very often try to represent the perspective of members of oppressed
groups—in this case, women—and how by doing that they end up silencing or restricting female voices and
founding the terms of the debates in a manner completely disconnected from female voices. I think this is a sug-
gestive example of her “asymmetrical reciprocity.”
7 It is important to note that all these authors have been criticized precisely for this reason of “politicizing
culture,” included Young herself. See Barry (2001, p. 276).
 on immigration politics 225

the integration of immigration policy, in the specific case of inclusion of eth-

nic minorities, civil society represents a vital space for “promoting inclusion,
expression, and critique for deep democracy” (Young 2000, p. 156).
The term civil society refers to “the entirety of social life outside state insti-
tutions” and also “a sector of private associations that are relatively autonomous
from both state and economy” (Young 2000, pp. 157–58). This private sector
independent from state and economy designates what Habermas calls the “life-
world” in which communicative interaction represents the primary structure.
In her writings, Young invokes an essential role of that primary structure in
promoting social justice, and then she criticizes those liberal accounts that, in
approaching issues concerning politics of difference, tend to narrow political
struggle just to state policy.
I suggest that her Structural Inequality Model provides significant insights
for extending issues of structural injustice beyond public policy because it rec-
ognizes this arena of civil society as a necessary terrain for political action.
Liberal state-centered policy usually does not recognize this “lifeworld” as a
location of structural injustices and implicitly maintains the traditional political
division of public and private. Debates about culture and difference are focused
on questions concerning to what extent the state ought to permit, support, or
relegate to the private specific cultural practices in order to preserve the neu-
trality and homogeneity of the public. Justice then becomes an issue of public
matters where public implies only state representative institutions.
Many of the problems described in this chapter generate exclusion and
marginalization for immigrant groups in a way that they are not likely to be
addressed as problems by state institutions and legislators. Processes of segre-
gation and normalization, for instance, are enacted through social backgrounds
in a way that they cannot be confronted merely from institutional places. It is
often enormously difficult for these groups’ oppression to be expressed in pub-
lic discourses coming from high-level spheres of bureaucracy and state policy.
On the other hand, the production and reproduction of structural inequalities
such as racism against cultural minorities continues to arise in social networks
in spite of laws guaranteeing equal rights when immigrants become natural-
ized. For that reason, many of these marginalized groups have found alternative
ways of expression in order to articulate their experiences and social perspec-
tives. Thus, civil society has become a useful space of intervention through aes-
thetic and political discourses built on affirmative expressions for denigrated
groups. These social groups have invented new political imaginaries and cre-
ated new strategies of action in which cultural artifacts as well as aesthetic and
political discourses have made possible political platforms of resistance and
destabilization from normative codes that produce inequalities, exclusion, and
marginalization.
Young follows Seyla Benhabib’s insights on that topic to affirm that it is
in this domain also where multicultural conflicts ought to have a place, to the
226 justice: democracy and inclusion

extent that approaching these issues under a liberal paradigm usually supposes
“to solve (them) through a juridical calculus of liberal rights.”8 Liberal political
theory very often ignores the unofficial public sphere as a vital site for delibera-
tion and communicative interaction, as a sphere of political contestation and
action. What Young calls communicative democracy (Young 1993, pp. 23–42)
aims to solve this displacement of civil society from political liberalism by rec-
ognizing both state representative institutions and civic institutions “as poten-
tial sites for democratic communication among citizens, and between citizens
and public officials” (Young 2000, p. 167). This framework for communicative
democracy is analogous in many ways to the dual-track approach to politics that
Seyla Benhabib mentions in order to distinguish deliberative democracy from
political liberalism, where the public sphere normally ignores non-state dimen-
sions of politics (Benhabib 2002, p. 119). Benhabib’s proposal to conceptualize
the domain of the unofficial public sphere as the terrain in which deliberative
and communicative democracy focus on solving multicultural conflicts is help-
ful to make this distinction. I do agree with Young, however, that demands for
cultural recognition and expression, such as the claims Muslims in European
cities make to wear the veil, should not be divorced from the marginalized sta-
tus of the members of these groups.

Conclusion

It is widely agreed among scholars that Young’s notion of social group probably
represents one of the most controversial contributions of her work. It is strik-
ing that in Justice and Politics of Difference “social group” defines identity, and in
Inclusion and Democracy “social group” has an empirical character that empties
the concept of any reference to identity. Group-differentiated domination and
oppression are central to a politics that aims to solve problems of inclusion of
immigrants. But immigrant social groups are also culturally different and have
“incommensurable perspectives” that do not result just from experiences of
oppression and domination.
Young does not directly address the question of the inclusion of immi-
grants in much detail but she highlights very interesting keys for doing so. In
this chapter I take some of these keys to argue that problems of immigrant
inclusion arise primarily from structural social group differences, and the pro-
cesses of normalization, racialization, and subordination that accompany them.
I argue that we should consider immigrants as social groups with differences
originally generated from structures of power and social positions rather than

8 Benhabib (2002, pp. 21–22) references the following liberal approaches: Rawls’s model of overlapping
liberal consensus, the model of liberal egalitarianism of Brian Barry, and the model of pluralist interlocking
power hierarchies of Ayelet Shachar among others.
 on immigration politics 227

from ethnic or religious affiliations. I have tried to use this idea also as a way to
endorse a political public where difference does not remain in an enclosed set
of attributes of social groups, but rather in a fluid and changing set of relations
from which people express and develop their subjectivities.
I believe, however, that considering immigrant social groups as structural
groups risks ignoring or repressing the significance of culture for some of
them. It seems to me that sometimes culture and structure are in Young’s
writings oppositional categories that imply an exclusionary election. I think
that public space ought to be the place for dealing with difference in a context
of dialogue that allows the best conditions for inclusion, where inclusion is
political participation and political participation means that the voices of all
the members of immigrant groups are heard on differences of social position
and cultural affiliation. I do agree with Young that this dialogue should escape
from homogeneous tendencies that suppose a degree of transparency between
subjects while paradoxically many of them remain invisible.
I have centered this chapter on four aspects of the Structural Inequality
Model, but I do not claim that they are definitive in providing an account that
gives us a different way of looking at social justice for immigrants. I do hope
they show that the political vocabulary about immigration very often implies
euphemisms that hide problems of racism when they speak about “conflicts
of ethnicity,” processes of normalization when they speak about problems of
tolerance and its limits, or processes of gender socialization that many times
are hidden by religious issues.
I have tried to use my imagination for other interpretations of social reali-
ties when speaking about immigration conflicts because from Young’s work
I have come to appreciate that imagination may be a tool from which to start to
identify and open up possibilities for thinking. That is probably the reason why
she was a teacher in critical thinking, although those of us who had the chance
of meeting her know that the masterpiece was not just her work but herself.
This page intentionally left blank
 18
4

Women’s Work Trips and

Multifaceted Oppression

Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo

Being employed is an essential aspect of meaningful participation in society for

most people. Access to jobs for different social groups is thus a relevant topic
of inquiry. Since, like men, a majority of employed women work outside the
home, an examination of women’s commuting is one way to appraise women’s
access to jobs.
This chapter will give a conceptual and empirical analysis of women’s
work trips, using analysis of the multiple faces of oppression posited by Iris
Young (1990a). The premise of the chapter is that this situation of many work-
ing women, that they have more difficulty in getting to work, denies equitable
access, and therefore can be tied to social structures of oppression.
Based on evidence from empirical research in a variety of U.S. cities,
I present an analysis of women’s commuting using Iris Young’s conceptual
framework of different types of oppression which she identifies as marginal-
ization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, exploitation, and violence. The
chapter focuses on problems faced by women working outside the home in
the context of pervasive de facto residential segregation. Their socioeconomic,
locational, and mobility characteristics are analyzed to understand the nature
of the oppression associated with their work trips. For instance, to what extent
does the stereotype that connects motherhood with short trips uphold or under-
mine the claim that cultural imperialism is involved in judging these women’s
oppression? How might a multifactorial investigation of job type, monetary
compensation, and trip length underscore the intricate links between power-
lessness and exploitation for working women? What, if any, form of violence
do women encounter while commuting?
I synthesize findings to these questions and show that the conceptual
framework of Iris Young’s (1990a) faces of oppression is both versatile and
230 justice: democracy and inclusion

relevant for interpreting racial and gender differences in employment access.

Housing-jobs mismatches and transportation constraints that restrict women’s
access to jobs contribute to their marginalization in the labor market. The sam-
ple of findings reveals that many African American women continue to endure
relatively long commutes to get to work because of, and in spite of, transpor-
tation, locational and socioeconomic hindrances. I conclude this chapter by
discussing the implications of multifaceted oppression in analyses of women’s
work trips.

Connecting Commuting with Multiple Faces of Oppression

Do people have jobs? What are some constraints on people’s access to jobs?
What jobs do people do? Where do they work? How much do they earn? How
do they get to their workplace? These are all questions that can be addressed
within a framework that examines connections between commuting and
multiple faces of oppression. Young cites unemployment as a form of oppres-
sion she terms marginalization because jobless people may be confined to
lives of social marginality (Young 1990a). Inadequate access to jobs because
of the location of one’s home can lead to joblessness. Since the length of the
separation between the home and the workplace is an indicator of access to
employment, a focus on the work trip can reveal expedient job access or lack
thereof.
Another form of oppression, powerlessness, refers to social class injus-
tices wherein the powerless group lacks the authority or opportunity to negoti-
ate favorable conditions; while exploitation, a third face of oppression, occurs
when a group does not benefit from their labor while others do. According to
Young, powerlessness can be caused by the social division of labor between
nonprofessionals and professionals, with the later group represented in posi-
tions of power and privilege. And in her conceptualization of exploitation as
a face of oppression, Young emphasizes inadequate compensation, finan-
cial or otherwise, that benefits one group at the expense of another. Margin-
alization, powerlessness, and exploitation all refer to inequality within the
context of employment. They are the faces of oppression that place attention
on the resources to which people have access, the material benefits possible
from waged work, and the opportunities to exercise significant control in the
employment context. In essence, these faces of oppression are about which
group of workers benefits from whom, who is dispensable, and who gets to
work to start with. For powerlessness and exploitation, I look at conventional
labor market variables, occupation type, and employment earnings, to analyze
these two faces of oppression. Regarding work trips, the empirical literature
shows that high status workers are generally in a better position to afford long
commutes compared to low-waged workers (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Ihlanfeldt
1992; McLafferty and Preston 1997).
 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 231

Cultural imperialism, a fourth face of oppression, involves the universal-

ization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as
the norm. The culturally dominated undergo a paradoxical oppression in that
they are both marked out by stereotypes and at the same time rendered invis-
ible (Young 1990a). Young uses the stereotype that women are good with chil-
dren as an example of group marking. This example shows the dominance of a
patriarchal ideology such that motherhood as a pervasive gender role will influ-
ence women’s commuting behavior. However, the experience of motherhood
is not necessarily a universal one for all women if one considers a race–gender
nexus. Indeed Collins (1991) emphasizes that African American women have
long integrated economic self-reliance with mothering. She states that “in
contrast to the cult of true womanhood, in which work is defined as being in
opposition to and incompatible with motherhood, work for Black women has
been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of Black
motherhood” (p. 124). Since Black women’s mothering attributes do not con-
form to white cultural standards, and women may differ then in the degree to
which their status as mothers influences their commutes, I compare the influ-
ence of household responsibility on women’s commute between white and
Black working mothers. Although empirical evidence on the role of household
responsibility on trip length is mixed (Sultana 2003), a study by Preston et al.
(1993) found that Black mothers had longer trip times than white mothers,
a finding that suggests that the touted norm of short commutes for working
mothers applies more to white women.
Last but not least, Young states that violence is a systemic form of social
injustice and she identifies it as a fifth face of oppression. Although my own
studies do not include empirical measures of violence, I address the relevance
of violence in women’s commuting later in my concluding remarks. Finally,
any attempt to conceptually or empirically link commuting with the faces of
oppression must also recognize the insidious milieu of U.S. residential segre-
gation that Young describes (Young 2000).

Social Justice, Residential Segregation, and Locational

Access to Jobs

If members of any given group of workers encounter difficulty in transporta-

tion due to their locational access to work, this constitutes a significant form of
inequity because they could be excluded from being full functioning members
of society. Unemployment or other conditions of not having access to useful
participation in life are forms of social injustice because the people affected are
potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and related marginal status.
Jobless people experience marginalization, and inadequate locational access to
jobs can lead to joblessness, which in turn can lead to poverty. As an indicator
232 justice: democracy and inclusion

of access to employment, the separation between the home and the workplace
is appropriate for analyzing equitable job access. A brief review of the literature
on housing patterns and commuting follows.
There has been little change in patterns of racial residential segregation in the
United States (Denton 1994; Massey and Hajnal 1995). Because of their relative
concentration in central cities, the growth of employment in suburbs impacts Black
workers’ access to jobs, and increasing numbers of African Americans are com-
muting outward to suburban workplaces (Pisarski 2006). Since there continue
to be residential differences between whites and Blacks (Jencks and Mayer 1990;
Young 2000), an important dimension in geographical access to employment is
the experience of workers who commute from inner city residences to suburban
workplaces (i.e., “reverse commuting”). The combination of constrained access to
suburban housing and to suburban employment for African Americans connects
the reality of residential immobility with adverse employment outcomes. Some
researchers conclude that persistent racial disparities in access to employment
still limit the full economic participation of Black workers in U.S. metropolitan
areas (e.g., Dickerson 2007), a situation which is contrary to the ideal of inclusion
that Young advocates in a democratic society (Young 2000).
A variety of reasons underlies the geographies of home and work for
African Americans. They range from preference, poverty, and prejudice to
a host of discriminatory exclusionary policies. Some of these include avoid-
ance, hostility, and direct attacks from neighbors; or negative selling and steer-
ing by landlords and real estate agents; or loan denials by banks. All of these
behaviors are examples of Young’s faces of oppression in that they represent
harmful consequences, disrespectful behaviors, and systematic restrictions or
limits on housing choices for people of color. In spite of the 40 year old Fair
Housing Act, a combination of subtle and blatant unfair practices including
white flight, redlining, and/or predatory lending continue to make residential
location patterns strongly differentiated along racial lines. Thus research find-
ings on workplace access can best be understood in cognizance of the struc-
tural character of residential segregation in the United States (Darden and
Kamel 2000, Young 2000).
Meanwhile, there is some debate about whether women’s relatively shorter
work trips when compared to men’s should be interpreted as advantageous or
not (Hanson and Pratt 1995; England 1993). A parallel debate evaluates the
extent to which ethnic minorities in U.S. cities suffer greater job accessibility
constraints than do nonminorities. Inquiries about racial disparities in employ-
ment accessibility are central to the spatial mismatch hypothesis. First proposed
by Kain (1968), the hypothesis contended that, compared to white residents,
inner-city ethnic minorities have poorer access to jobs because of their con-
centration in segregated residential areas that are distant from, and poorly
connected to, major suburban centers of employment growth. Poor access
leads to high rates of unemployment and, for those persons able to overcome
 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 233

varied barriers and find work, poor access is reflected in long journeys to work
(see Holzer 1991; Kain 1992; McLafferty and Preston 1997; and Preston and
McLafferty 1999 for some thorough reviews).
However, the evidence from the literature is ambiguous largely because
of key shortcomings in empirical analyses; for example, some studies inad-
equately control for ethnic and racial differences in the locational and socioeco-
nomic factors known to influence work trips, while others tend to exclude the
impact of suburban workplace location. In correcting for these shortcomings,
studies that have examined the role of suburban residence versus inner city
residence on the labor market outcomes of Blacks and whites or the degree of
racial differences in access to transportation, employment location, residential
mobility, and unemployment levels (e.g., Stoll 1996; Mouw 2000) generally
support the spatial mismatch hypothesis. Even though early research on the
effect of the exodus of jobs to suburban locations on the workplace accessibility
of inner city African Americans rarely included female workers, later studies
have investigated spatial mismatch concerns and commuting constraints of
women (e.g., McLafferty and Preston 1992, 1997; Sultana 2003; Thompson
1997). In the next section, I synthesize results from a set of studies on wom-
en’s commuting (Johnston-Anumonwo 1995, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004;
Johnston-Anumonwo and Sultana 2006) as the empirical basis for applying
the intersections of different faces of oppression recognized by Iris Young.

Empirical Analysis and Findings

Are there significant racial and gender differences in work trip behavior? Do
people of color spend a longer time commuting than whites? Does unequal
access to private automobiles lead to differences in the time spent traveling to
work? Is location of the workplace responsible for any difference in work trip
length? Is there any difference in the commute times of workers with similar
socioeconomic attributes? The range of factors necessary for answers about
work trip disparities makes a database like the U.S. Census Public Use Micro-
data Samples (PUMS) appropriate because it contains information on indi-
viduals’ socioeconomic characteristics and their work trips. In 1980, for the
first time, the database included information on work-trip length (i.e., minutes
spent traveling from home to work as reported by the respondent), so as of the
2000 census, it is possible to conduct some longitudinal analysis over a period
of 20 years. The travel mode is the means of transportation that the worker
uses to get to work e.g., public transit or private automobile. Residence and
workplace location is either central city or noncentral city (i.e., suburban). I use
the standard information on race/ethnicity, occupation, presence of children,
and employment earnings that are available in census sources. The cities that
I examine are Rochester, New York, Kansas City, Detroit, Miami, and Buffalo,
234 justice: democracy and inclusion

and I include only respondents who are 16 years and older. In the rest of the
chapter, I collate and interpret the empirical findings on ethnic inequalities in
commuting as evidence of multiple and overlapping faces of oppression.

Marginalization: Transportation and Locational Access

Findings of three aspects of work trips—travel mode, trip length, and suburban
destination show marginalization.

travel mode: women of color rely more on public transportation.

The results for Buffalo and Kansas City in 1980 show a clear and anticipated pat-
tern of Blacks depending on public transportation more than whites. Also, in
1990, higher percentages of Blacks use public transit in Kansas City and Detroit;
as well as in Miami where Latina women depend more on public transportation
than do white women (Table 18.1). Since much research attest to the relatively
lengthening effect of public transportation (especially bus transportation) on travel
times (e.g., McLafferty and Preston 1992), greater public transit use by people of
color is expected to increase their average work-trip time; hence one should rightly
compare the travel times of workers with the same travel mode only.

work trip length: auto use reduces travel time. When the work-trip
times of private automobile users are examined, the racial difference is small
(and is rarely statistically significant). As shown in Table 18.2 (unlike the overall
trip length of workers in the full samples), the difference among women auto
users is minimal—around 1 minute. Taylor and Ong (1995) found that among
workers with automobiles, there is no racial difference in commuting time,
and on this basis they suggest the importance of an “automobile mismatch”
in the sense that people of color are less likely to have cars and to use private
automobiles for their work trips. Next, I summarize differences in travel time
among auto users with similar location or socioeconomic profiles.

suburban workplace: black reverse commuters spend a longer time

getting to work. Focusing on those workers with suburban destinations,
the findings show that among reverse commuters, Black women spend a longer

table 18.1. Women’s Use of Public Transportation (percent)

1980 1980 1990 1990 1990

Buffalo Kansas Kansas Detroit Miami

White Black White Black White Black White Black White Latino

9.9 33.6 3.5 21.5 1.4 12.7 0.8 10.9 3.2 6.7

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (1995, 2000, 2001, 2003).

 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 235

table 18.2. Women’s Average Work-Trip Time (minutes)

1990 1990 1980 1990 2000

Kansas Detroit Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

White Black White Black White Black White Black White Black

Full sample 20.2 22.6 21.1 23.9 18.1 22.8 17.8 21.2 19.5 23.7
Auto users 20.3 21.2 21.2 22.3 17.1 18.5 17.5 18.1 19.3 20.4

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (1995, 2000, 2001); Johnston-Anumonwo and Sultana (2006).

table 18.3. Reverse Commutes of Women Auto Users (minutes)

1980 1990 1980 1990 2000

Kansas Detroit Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

White Black White Black White Black White Black White Black

Auto Users 20.0 26.0 23.5 25.4 20.3 26.1 19.2 23.5 20.7 23.7

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (1995, 2000, 2001); Johnston-Anumonwo and Sultana (2006).

time than white women. The difference in 1980 was 6 minutes in Kansas City
(Table 18.3). Table 18.3 also displays trends for Buffalo in 1980, 1990, and
2000 where the gap between Black and white reverse commuters has reduced
from almost 6 minutes in 1980 to 3 minutes in 2000. The results are con-
sistent with the spatial mismatch hypothesis that inner city Blacks have long
commutes to suburban work destinations, and the specific finding for Buffalo
is evidence of remaining travel time differences among inner city women auto
users even in 2000. In short, both cross-sectional and longitudinal data show
that women of color have relatively less access to both adequate transportation
modes and suburban workplaces.
The empirical findings that I have summarized thus far document the
restricted workplace access of African American women, observations that can
be interpreted as marginalization. Regarding the three socioeconomic factors
that I examine, occupation, child status, and income (to verify powerlessness,
cultural imperialism, and exploitation, respectively), the common expectations
are that low-status, low-wage workers will be less able to afford long commutes.
In fact Black women can be expected to have shorter commutes since their
lower earnings or more domestic obligations would disallow long commutes.
First I compare differences in women’s trip length by occupation, followed by
child status and by income.

Powerlessness, Cultural Imperialism, and Commute Length

Powerlessness can be illustrated through differences between nonprofession-
als and professionals, the latter being the privileged social group. One indicator
236 justice: democracy and inclusion

table 18.4. Differences in Women’s Trip Time by Occupation

1990 1990

Buffalo Detroit

(Minutes) White Black White Black

Service occupations 14.8 19.6 17.0 21.5

Clerical, sales, and technical occupations 17.3 17.4 21.2 21.8
Professional/managerial occupations 19.6 16.7 23.3 22.7

Note: Auto users only.

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (1995, 2000).

of this face of oppression is occupation status or position at the workplace.

I focus on service workers.

service workers: african american women service workers spend a lon-

ger time getting to work. It is only among service workers that the longer com-
mutes of African American women are significant. Whereas there are no differences
between Black and white women who are in clerical, sales, and technical occupa-
tions, African American women service workers spend more than 4 minutes longer
than white service workers (see Table 18.4 for data on Buffalo and Detroit). Also,
Black professionals do not have longer travel times—a finding that fits Iris Young’s
claim that professionals are privileged in relation to nonprofessionals.
These results are similar to those reported for 1980 by McLafferty and
Preston (1991) and Johnston-Anumonwo (2000) for service workers in metro-
politan New York City and Detroit respectively. In those studies, African Amer-
ican women spend over 7 minutes and up to 10 minutes longer on average for
their home-to-work trip than European American women. Although the time
difference has reduced between 1980 and 1990, a significant fraction of work-
ing women are still employed in service occupations (Ehrenreich 2001); thus
if the occupational and locational elements of the restructured metropolitan
labor market continue to evolve as they have over the past two decades, such
that African American women remain concentrated in service jobs, and service
jobs continue to suburbanize, then compared to European American women
or to other groups of workers, African American women (even when they use a
car) are the ones most likely to experience the disadvantage of long commutes
to relatively low-waged service jobs in suburban locations.

working mothers: african american mothers spend a longer time

getting to work. In the study areas where child status was examined, Black
mothers spend a longer time than white mothers (available results shown for
Rochester and Buffalo in 1980, as well as for Detroit in 1990—see Table 18.5).
One would expect no racial difference among women with the same child sta-
tus. On the contrary, this finding underscores the paradox inherent in cultural
 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 237

table 18.5. Work Trip Time of Mothers

1980 1980 1990

Rochester Buffalo Detroit

(Minutes) White Black White Black White Black

15.4 20.6 16.0 19.7 20.8 23.0

Note: Auto users only.

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (2000, 2004).

imperialism because Black mothers’ commuting does not conform to an uncon-

tested expectation of convenient short trips among women with children.
As employed women who combine motherhood with waged employment,
the case of these African American mothers with longer travel times than white
counterparts exposes the inaccurate universalization of women’s motherhood
experiences. Further, women on welfare are stereotyped as Black women who
are lazy and do not work, but precisely because the analysis is about gainfully
employed mothers, this finding also undermines the stereotype of Black wel-
fare mother which is a controlling image that is designed to oppress (Young
1990a; Collins 1991). But Young is clear about the overlapping and interlock-
ing character of the multiple faces of oppression. It is in this light that I jointly
examine indicators of powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and exploitation in
the next section.

women with long commuting times: qualitative contrasts. The

20-minute one-way commute is a standard cutoff mark in national-level sum-
maries of commuting statistics. For instance, Pisarski (2006) differentiates
between relatively short commutes (under 20 minutes), and those exceeding
20 minutes, or even much significantly longer commutes that exceed 60 min-
utes. In the metropolitan areas studied, women with relatively “long” com-
muting times (over 20 minutes) are generally those with opposite direction
commutes. They are white women who live in the suburbs but work in the
central city, and Black women who live in the central city but work in suburban
locations. To clarify the situation of these women with above average commut-
ing times, I compare characteristics of the two groups of opposite direction
commuters and find significant contrasts in occupations, income, and child
status. Specifically, the white women with long suburb-to-city commutes are far
more likely to be in managerial/professional jobs, and less likely to be mothers;
while Black women with city-to-suburb commutes (reverse commuters) are
more likely to be in service jobs and earn lower average incomes (Table 18.6).
These are crucial qualitative differences. Other than their long average
travel time, white suburb-to-city commuters are relatively well-placed by their
higher socioeconomic status and fewer dependent children. The findings
238 justice: democracy and inclusion

table 18.6. Differences among Women with Long Commutes

1990 1990

Buffalo Detroit

White women Black women White women Black women

Suburb to city City to suburb Suburb to city City to suburb

Travel time 24.7 23.5 30.6 25.4

(minutes)
Percent managers/ 39.3 11.8 41.9 16.8
professionals
Percent service 7.8 32.9 7.5 17.4
workers
Percent mothers 32.3 43.4 29.3 41.5
Full time annual 22,296 20,927 26,967 21,770
income ($)

Note: Auto users only.

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo (1995, 2000).

that Black reverse commuters earn less and appear to have greater child care
responsibilities amplifies the interpretation that the long work trips of Black
reverse commuters are more constrained than the long trips of whites with
suburb-to-city commutes. Indeed corroborating earlier evidence exists showing
that long commutes by whites who live in suburbs are compensated by higher
wages while this is less likely to be the case for inner city Blacks (Ihlanfeldt
and Young 1994). It is thus appropriate to check whether women’s wages cor-
respond with trip length.

Exploitation: Constrained Commutes for African American Women

For exploitation as a face of oppression, Iris Young stresses compensation,
including monetary remuneration. I investigate the element of exploitation
in commuting by comparing commuting time differences vis-à-vis employ-
ment earnings in Buffalo. For the present purpose, a simple typology of four
commute types classifies workers on the basis of short versus long commutes,
and low versus high incomes. I include only full-time workers (those who
worked 35 hours or more a week) in the analysis in order to remove the effects
of reduced income due to part-time employment. Respondents with earnings
below $25,000 are considered low-income workers; while trips shorter than 20
minutes in 2000 are considered short trips.
In the typology (Table 18.7), I differentiate “convenient” and “compensa-
tory” commutes from “compromised” and “constrained” commutes, the former
pair being commutes to high-wage jobs. Compromised commutes are those in
which either the worker forgoes a higher income for a shorter commute or the
 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 239

table 18.7. Typology of Commutes

Short commute (<20 min) Long commute (=>20 min)

High income (=>$25,000) Convenient Compensatory

Low income (<$25,000) Compromised Constrained

worker’s low income makes a long commute uneconomical. Compromised com-

mutes differ from constrained commutes that are typified by long commutes to
low-wage jobs. Rutherford and Wekerle (1988) present a similar combination
(long commutes and low wages) for “disadvantaged commutes.” Convenient
commutes combine the advantages of short trips and high wages, and are con-
sidered the best of the four possibilities (Johnston-Anumonwo 1997). How do
Blacks and whites differ in their commute times relative to their earnings? To
shift the inquiry from a preoccupation with the plight of inner city residents,
and permit an analysis of middle class workers, I focus on suburban residents.

suburban residents’ commutes: racial and gender differences in

earnings. Suburban residents generally have higher incomes, hence a size-
able proportion are in the two high income commute types. However there
are some racial differences. A lower proportion of suburban Black women
than white women have compensatory commutes, while a higher proportion
of Black women have constrained commutes compared to white women.
Among men, suburban Black men have fewer compensatory trips and more
compromised commutes than do white men. The 2000 data solidly show that
(a) more suburban Black women than white women undergo the constraint
of long commutes to low-wage jobs, and (b) the long commutes of suburban
Black men are less likely to be compensated with high wages compared to sub-
urban white men.
There are also obvious gender differences (Table 18.8). Men are more
likely than women to have convenient commutes (i.e., the “best” commute
types), and compensatory ones. Women are more likely than men to have com-
promised commutes and constrained commutes. These findings suggest the
following: (a) they support claims of a well-known wage gap associated with the
gender-segregated labor force, since they show that the commutes of women
are similar in their disproportionate concentration in the two low-income cat-
egories; (b) however, they contest common expectations that low status work-
ers who earn low incomes will have shorter commutes since they show that
many women, especially Black women, are enduring relatively long commutes
to low-income jobs.
In the final section of the chapter I elaborate on some implications of all
these findings for a conceptual understanding of women’s commutes as mani-
festing intersecting faces of oppression.
240 justice: democracy and inclusion

table 18.8. Commute Types of Suburban Residents in Buffalo 2000

Women Men

Percent White Black White Black

Convenient trips 32.9 32.2 45.7 44.4

Compensatory trips 21.3 11.9 30.8 25.2
Compromised trips 32.4 32.2 15.7 20.5
Constrained trips 13.4 23.7 7.9 9.8

Note: Auto users; full-time workers only.

Source: Johnston-Anumonwo and Sultana (2006).

A Multifaceted Oppression Analysis of Women’s Commuting

From this selection of cross-sectional and longitudinal results, an inclusive

interpretation of women’s work trips is possible. Clearly, women’s commutes
are not invariably short; and not all African American women face the con-
straints of long trips to low-paying jobs. My interpretation is that long com-
mutes are disconcerting and therefore oppressive when the job at the end of
the work trip is a low-wage job.
Work trips to suburban destinations (i.e., outside the central city) impose
a disproportionate commuting time burden on inner city Black women, a find-
ing that illustrates restricted access and thereby explicates the face of oppres-
sion that Young identifies as marginalization. Documenting the inadequate
monetary compensation for the journey to work effort, establishes exploitation
as a face of oppression especially for Black women—the group with a dispro-
portionate volume of constrained commutes. The particular case of service
workers (representing low status occupations as distinct from professionals)
with longer work trips than white counterparts demonstrate the coincidence
of powerlessness and exploitation. The counterintuitive finding of longer work
trips for African American mothers exemplifies the paradox of cultural impe-
rialism. The underlying context of residential segregation in the study areas
attest to the important connection between race and place that Young empha-
sizes in her discussion on segregation and inclusion (Young 2000). Lastly, the
various findings corroborate the earlier conclusions of McLafferty and Preston
(1991) that many African American women experience a very insidious form
of spatial mismatch and face significant transportation and locational barriers
in traveling to work.
Keeping in mind that most of the comparisons are restricted to auto users,
the findings show that even when access to an automobile is not a hindrance,
many African American workers still bear a bigger time cost than European
Americans. Although there is greater reliance by African Americans on pub-
lic transportation, the slightly longer times spent by Black workers may be
 women’s work trips and multifaceted oppression 241

expected to decrease if Black workers continue to have more access to private

automobiles. However, findings of the multifactorial comparison of women
with long commutes suggest that it is reasonable to speculate that as employ-
ment opportunities expand more in suburban locations and less in central city
locations, African American women are still likely to suffer the inconvenience
of long commutes to suburban workplaces. Turner (1997) presents evidence
of spatial mismatch as well as evidence of the negative treatment of Blacks by
suburban police officers and white residents as testimony of the multiple bar-
riers facing African Americans in gaining access to employment opportunities
in suburban Detroit.
In Buffalo, the reality of both a spatial mismatch and an automobile mis-
match for African American women proved tragically true in the case of an
African American woman who was killed while crossing an expressway in
suburban Buffalo on her way to the shopping mall where she was employed.
In this outrageous 1995 incident, Cynthia Wiggins was killed in Buffalo, New
York, when forced to cross a seven-lane highway in order to get from the bus
stop to her job in a suburban mall because the mall barred city buses from driv-
ing into its parking lot (although suburban and tourist buses were permitted).
This particular case had racist underpinnings because the management of the
suburban mall seemed to have pursued explicit policy decisions preventing
buses coming from inner city Buffalo from stopping at the mall. My empirical
analysis did not consider indicators of violence as part of women’s work trips,
but this case can be interpreted as evidence of structural violence, the fifth face
of oppression discussed by Young.
If more jobs were available in central cities, there would be less need to
reverse commute to reach suburban jobs. Alternatively, if African Americans
face less discrimination for suburban housing, the racial disparity in access to
suburban jobs may reduce. Yet, even for those who reside in suburban loca-
tions of U.S. metropolitan areas, African Americans still experience segrega-
tion (e.g., Darden 1990; Darden and Kamel 2000). At present, it is wrong to
understate the importance of locational access to Black employment outcomes
(see, e.g., Martin 2004).
One should stress that like all studies that use commuting data, these results
understate the general problem of access to jobs since the empirical analyses
exclude the unemployed (or imprisoned), many of whom are unemployed pos-
sibly because of location and transportation reasons. However, examining the
work trip with the focus on travel time in particular is appropriate. Time is a
resource. In some instances, time is money; therefore lost time is lost money.
Although the travel time differences may appear small, the cumulative time
cost of the two-way work trip over a long period of time could be considerable,
and it amounts to time lost from other tasks. Much of the extra time that Black
workers in the respective study areas spend longer than whites is generally 3
minutes or more, which extrapolates into 25 hours a year—equivalent to an
242 justice: democracy and inclusion

ample portion of a work week. Cast in this light, the longer commute times of
Black workers can be interpreted as constituting a racial tax burden.
In conclusion, this analysis of work trips complements the empirical litera-
ture on commuting with a conceptual interpretation that highlights the over-
lapping and multiple faces of oppression that Young expounds. Indeed, these
findings which extend to the work trips of twenty-first century employed Afri-
can American women, counter continuing stereotypes and overgeneralizations
that Black women are welfare dependent, and underscore the continuing sig-
nificance of multiple forms of oppression in the locational and socioeconomic
job inaccessibility of U.S. ethnic minorities or immigrant workers.
 Works of Iris Marion Young

1980. Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment,

motility, and spatiality. Human Studies, 3, 137–56. Reprinted in Young 1990b.
1981. Beyond the unhappy marriage: A critique of dual systems theory. In L. Sargent
(Ed.), Women and revolution (pp. 43–70). Boston, MA: South End Press. Reprinted
in Young 1990b.
1984. Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and alienation. Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy, 9(1), January, 45–62. Reprinted in Young 1990b.
1985. Humanism, gynocentrism, and feminist politics. Women’s Studies International
Forum, 8(3), 173–85. Reprinted in Young 1990b.
1986. Impartiality and the civic public: Some implications of feminist critiques of
moral and political theory. Praxis International, 5(4), January, 381–401.
1988. The five faces of oppression. Philosophical Forum, 19(4), Summer, 270–90.
Reprinted in Young 1990a.
1990a. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
1990b. “Throwing like a girl” and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
1990c. Abjection and oppression: Dynamics of unconscious racism, sexism, and
homophobia. In A. Dallery and C. Scott (Eds.), The crisis in continental philosophy:
Selected studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy (pp. 201–14). Albany,
NY: SUNY Press.
1993. Justice and communicative democracy. In R. S. Gottlieb (Ed.), Philosophy:
Tradition, counter-tradition, politics (pp. 23–42). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
1994a. Gender as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective. Signs, 19(3),
Spring, 713–38. Reprinted in Young 1997a.
1994b. Punishment, treatment, empowerment. Feminist Studies, 20(1), Spring, 33–57.
1995. Polity and group difference: A critique of the ideal of universal citizenship. In
R. Beiner (Ed.), Theorizing citizenship (pp. 175–207). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
244 works of iris marion young

1997a. Intersecting voices: Dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
1997b. Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On moral respect, wonder, and enlarged thought.
Constellations, 3(3), 340–63. Reprinted in Young 1997a.
1998. “Throwing like a girl”: Twenty years later. In D. Welton (Ed.), Body and flesh:
A philosophical reader (pp. 286–90). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
2000. Inclusion and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2001a. Equality of whom? Social groups and judgments of injustice. Journal of Political
Philosophy, 9(1), March, 1–18.
2001b. Power, violence, and legitimacy: A reading of Hannah Arendt in an age of
police brutality and humanitarian intervention. In D. Ingram (Ed.), The political
(pp. 87–105). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Republished in I. M. Young (2007).
2002. Lived body vs. gender: Reflections on social structure and subjectivity. Ratio,
15(4), 410–28. Reprinted in Young 2005a.
2002. Toward a global rule of law. Dissent, 49(2), Spring, 27–32 (with D. Archibugi).
2003. The logic of masculinist protection: Reflections on the current security state.
Signs, 29(1), 1–25. Republished in I. M. Young (2007).
2004. Responsibility and global labor justice, Journal of Political Philosophy, 12(4),
365–88.
2005a. On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Oxford
University Press.
2005b. De-centering the project of global democracy. In D. Levy, M. Pensky, and
J. Torepy (Eds.), Old Europe, new Europe, core Europe (pp. 153–59). London: Verso.
2006a. Taking the basic structure seriously. Perspectives on politics. Cambridge Journals,
4(1), March, 91–7.
2006b. Education in the context of structural injustice: A symposium response.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1), 94–103.
2006c. Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model. Social Philosophy
and Policy, 23(1), Winter, 102–30.
2006d. Katrina: Too much blame, not enough responsibility. Dissent, 53(1), Winter,
41–6.
2007. Global challenges: War, self-determination, and responsibility for justice. Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press.
2007. “Responsibility for justice” (unpublished work).
 General Bibliography

Abdelmalek, S. (1999). La double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de

l’immigré. Préface by P. Bourdieu. Paris: Editions Seuil, Collections Liber.
Adams, C. (1990). The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory.
New York: Continuum.
Adams, C. and Donovan, J. (Eds.). (1995). Animals and women: Feminist theoretical
explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception (K. Attell, Trans.). Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
Ahmad, M. (2004). A rage shared by law: Post–September 11 racial violence as crimes
of passion. California Law Review, 92, 1259–1330.
Albright, A. C. (1997). Choreographing difference: Body and identity in contemporary
dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Allen, A. (1999). The power of feminist theory: Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder,
CO: Westview.
Alperovitz, G. (2006). Another world is possible. Mother Jones, January/February, 66.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism. London: Verso.
Anghie, A. (2004). Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Archibugi, D. and Young, I. M. (2002). Toward a global rule of law. Dissent, 49(2),
Spring, 27–32.
Arendt, H. (1969). On violence. New York: Harcourt Brace.
——— . (1968). On humanity in dark times: Some thoughts about Lessing. In
H. Arendt, Men in dark times (pp. 3–31). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Aristotle. (1925). The Nicomachean ethics (Sir D. Ross., Trans.). London: Oxford
University Press.
Bahdi, R. (2003). No exit: Racial profiling and Canada’s war against terrorism. Osgoode
Hall Law Journal, 41, Summer/Fall, 293–314.
246 general bibliography

Balibar, É. (2002). Politics and the other scene. London: Verso.

Banks, W. C. (2005). United States responses to September 11. In V. V. Ramraj,
M. Hor, and K. Roach (Eds.) Global anti-terrorism law and policy (pp. 490–510).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bar On, B.-A. (2004). Politics and prioritization of evil. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, 19(4): 194–98.
Barry, B. (2001). Culture and equality: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bartenieff, I. (1980). Body movement, coping with the environment. New York: Gordon &
Breach.
Bartky, S. (1990a). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of
oppression. New York: Routledge.
——— . (1990b). Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power. In
Femininity and domination (pp. 63–82). New York: Routledge.
——— . (2002). “Sympathy and solidarity” and other essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Bayertz, K. (1999). Four uses of “solidarity.” In K. Bayertz (Ed.), Solidarity (pp. 3–28).
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Beauvoir, S. de. (1953). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans. and Ed.). London:
Jonathan Cape.
Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in
contemporary ethics. New York: Routledge.
——— . (2002). The claims of culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
——— . (2004). The rights of others: Aliens, residents and citizens. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
——— . (2006). In memoriam Iris Young 1949–2006. Constellations, 13(4), 441–43.
Bohman, J. (1996). Public deliberation: Pluralism, complexity, and democracy.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
——— . (2005). From demos to demoi: Democracy across borders. Ratio Juris, 18(3),
293–314.
Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (Eds.). (1997). Deliberative democracy: Essays on reason and
politics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Boothby, Richard. 1991. Death and desire in Lacan’s return to Freud. New York:
Routledge.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1999). Préface. In S. Abdelmalek La double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré
aux souffrances de l’immigré (pp. 9–13). Paris: Editions Seuil, Collections Liber.
Bowman, E. and R. Stone. (2004). Cooperativization on the Mondragón model:
As alternative to globalizing capitalism. Humanity and Society, 28(3), October,
272–97.
——— . (2006). Latin America’s solidarity economy (in 3 parts): “Argentina’s crisis”;
“Venezuela and Argentina” and “The meek want the earth now: The solidarity
economies of Brazil & Mexico.” At http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/news.htm.
Briginshaw, V. (1995–96). Getting the glamour on our own terms. Dance Theatre
Journal, 12(3), 36–39.
 general bibliography 247

Brown, C. (1981). Mothers, fathers, and children: From private to public patriarchy. In
Lydia Sargent (Ed.), Women and revolution: A discussion of the unhappy marriage of
Marxism and feminism (pp. 239–68). Boston, MA: South End Press.
Brown, W. (1996). States of injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burt, R. (1995). The male dancer: Bodies, spectacle and sexualities. New York: Routledge.
——— . (1998). Alien bodies: Representations of modernity, “race,” and nation in early
modern dance. New York: Routledge.
Bush, G. W. (2002a). State of the union address. At http://www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html.
——— . (2002b). The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. At
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssal.html.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. and Scott, J. (Eds.). (2000). Feminists theorize the political, 2nd edn. London:
Routledge.
Card, C. (1996). The unnatural lottery: Character and moral luck. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
——— . (2002). The atrocity paradigm: A theory of evil. New York: Oxford University Press.
——— . (2007). Ticking bombs and interrogations. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2(1),
1–15.
Castaldi, F. (2006). Choreographies of African identities: Négritude, dance, and the
National Ballet of Senegal. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Certeau, M. d. (1980). L’Invention du quotidien, Vol. 1: Arts de faire. Paris: Union
générale d’éditions.
——— . (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Chandler, D. (2002). From Kosovo to Kabul: Human rights and international intervention.
Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.
Charlesworth, H. (2005). The missing voice: Women and the war in Iraq. Remarks
given at the University of Oregon School of Law on January 26, 2005, Oregon
Review of International Law, 7, Spring, 5–12.
Chatterjea, A. (2004). Butting out: Reading resistive choreographies through works by
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press.
Chinkin, C., Wright, S. and Charlesworth, C. (2005). Feminist approaches to
international law: Reflections from another century. In D. Buss and A. Manji
(Eds.), International law: Modern feminist approaches (pp. 17–45). Portland,
OR: Hart Publishing.
Cohen, J. L. and Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Collins, P. H. (1991). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.
——— . (2000). Black feminist thought, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Combahee River Collective. (1983). The Combahee river collective statement. In B. Smith
(Ed.), Home girls: A black feminist anthology. New York: Kitchen Table Press.
Conniff, R. 1998. The joy of women’s sports [effects of Title IX]. The Nation, 267(5),
August 17, 26–28.
248 general bibliography

Cooke, T. J. and Shumway, J. M. (1991). Developing the spatial mismatch hypothesis:

Problems of accessibility to employment for low wage central city labor. Urban
Geography, 12, 310–23.
Cornell, D. (1995). The Imaginary domain: Abortion, pornography and sexual
harrassment. New York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1997). Intersectional and identity politics: Learning from violence
against women of color. In M. Lyndon Shanley and U. Narayan (Eds.),
Reconstructing political theory: Feminist perspectives (pp. 174–93). University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cuomo, C. and Gruen, L. (1997). Animals, intimacy and moral distance. In
A. Ferguson and B. A. Bar On (Eds.), Daring to be good: Essays in feminist
ethico-politics (pp. 129–42). New York: Routledge.
Daly, A. (1994). Done into dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Darden, J. T. (1990). Differential access to housing in the suburbs. Journal of Black
Studies, 21, 15–22.
Darden, J. T. and Kamel, S. (2000). Black residential segregation in the city and
suburbs of Detroit: Does socioeconomic status matter? Journal of Urban Affairs,
22, 1–13.
De Frantz, T. F. (Ed.). (2001). Dancing many drums: Excavations in African American
dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
——— . (2006). Dancing revelations: Alvin Ailey’s embodiment of African American
culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Denton, N. A. (1994). Are African Americans still hypersegregated? In R. D. Bullard,
J. E. Grigsby III, and C. Lee (Eds.), Residential apartheid: The American legacy
(pp. 49–81). Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of
California.
Derrida, J. (1992). Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority’. In D. Cornell,
M. Rosenfeld, and D. G. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice.
New York: Routledge.
Desmond, J. C. (Ed.). (1997). Meaning in motion: New cultural studies of dance. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Dickerson, N. T. (2007). Black employment, segregation, and the social organization
of metropolitan labor markets. Economic Geography, 83(3), 283–308.
Dodds, S. (2001). Breaking the boundaries of high art. Dancing Times, 91, 433–39.
Donovan, J. (1990). Animal rights and feminist theory. Signs, 15(2), 350–75.
Douzinas, C. (2002). Postmodern just wars: Kosovo, Afghanistan and the new
world order. In J. Strawson (Ed.), Law after ground zero (pp. 20–36). Portland:
Glasshouse Press.
Duggan, L. 2002. The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neoliberalism. In
R. Castronovo and D. Nelson (Eds.), Materializing democracy: Toward a revitalized
cultural politics (pp. 175–94). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America. New York:
Henry Holt.
England, K. (1993). Suburban pink collar ghettos: The spatial entrapment of women?
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83, 225–42.
 general bibliography 249

Engle, K. (2004) Constructing good aliens and good citizens: Legitimizing the war on
terror. University of Colorado Law Review, 75, Winter, 59–114.
——— . (2005). Liberal internationalism, feminism, and the suppression of
critique: contemporary approaches to global order in the United States. Harvard
International Law Journal, 46, 427–39.
Eveline, J. and C. Bacchi. (2005). What are we mainstreaming when we mainstream
gender? International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7(4): 496–512.
Ferguson, A. (1989). Blood at the root: Motherhood, sexuality and male dominance.
London: Pandora/Unwin & Hyman.
——— . (1991). Sexual democracy: Women, oppression, and revolution. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
——— . (1995). Feminist communities and moral revolution. In P. Weiss and
M. Friedman (Eds.), Feminism and community (pp. 367–98). Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
——— . (1998). Resisting the veil of privilege: Building bridge identities as an ethico-
politics of global feminism. Hypatia, 13(3), Fall, 95–113.
——— . (2006). Women organizing for global justice. At http://www.
globaljusticecenter.org/papers2006/ferguson2ENG.htm.
——— . (2007). Socialist-feminism: A cooperative vision and a right to care. In
A. Anton and R. Schmitt (Eds.), Toward a new socialism (pp. 99–116). Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books.
Ferguson, A. and Folbre, N. (1981). The unhappy marriage of capitalism and
patriarchy. In L. Sargent (Ed.), Women and revolution (pp. 313–38). Boston,
MA: South End Press.
Fisk, M. (2007). Social feelings and the morality of socialism. In A. Anton and
R. Schmitt (Eds.), Toward a new socialism (pp. 117–44). Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books.
Foster, S. L. (1998). Choreography and narrative: Ballet’s staging of story and desire.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
——— . (2002). Dances that describe themselves: The improvised choreography of Richard
Bull. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.).
New York: Pantheon.
——— . (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. I. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Pantheon.
——— . (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977
(C. Gordon, Ed.) New York: Pantheon Books.
Francione, G. (2000). Introduction to animal rights. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Franko, M. (2002). The work of dance: Labor, movement, and identity in the 1930s.
Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Trumansburg,
NY: Crossing Press.
——— . (1992). Willful virgin: Essays in feminism, 1976–1992. Freedom, CA: The
Crossing Press.
Gaard, G. (Ed.). (1993). Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
250 general bibliography

Gardam, J. and Jarvis, M. (2000). Women and armed conflict: The international
response to the Beijing Platform for Action. Columbia Human Rights Law Review,
32, 1–65.
Gere, D. (2004). How to make dances in an epidemic: Tracking choreography in the age of
AIDS. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gilligan, C. (1993). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Global Security (2008). Operation Joint Guardian Kosovo Force (KFOR). At http://
www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/joint_guardian.htm. Accessed July 2008.
Golshani, F., Vissicaro, P., and Park, Y. (2004). A multimedia information repository
for cross cultural dance studies. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 24, 89–103.
Gonzales, A. ([2002] 2004). Memorandum for the President of January 25, 2002,
Re: Application of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, in M. Ratner and
E. Ray (Eds.), Guantanamo: What the world should know (pp. 117–123). White River
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Gooding-Williams, R. (1998). Race, multiculturalism and democracy. Constellations,
5(1) March, 18–41.
Gottschild, B. D. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance
and other contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
——— . (2005). Black dancing body: Geography from coon to cool. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Gould, C. (1978). Marx’s social ontology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
——— . (1980). Contemporary legal conceptions of property and their implications for
democracy. Journal of Philosophy, 78(11), November, 716–29.
——— . (1981). Socialism and democracy. Praxis International, 1(1), 49–63; reprinted
(1993) in Philip Green (Ed.), Democracy: Key Concepts in Critical Theory
(pp. 246–56). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
——— . (1988). Rethinking democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
——— . (2004). Globalizing democracy and human rights. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
——— . (2007a). Coercion, care, and corporations: Omissions and commissions in
Thomas Pogge’s political philosophy. Journal of Global Ethics, 3(3), 381–93.
——— . (2007b). Transnational solidarities. Journal of Social Philosophy, 38(1), 146–62.
Special issue: Solidarity, C. Gould and S. J. Stolz (Eds.).
Graff, E. (1997). Stepping left: Dance and politics in New York city, 1928–1942. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Gruen, L. (1993). Dismantling oppression: An analysis of the connection between
women and animals. In G. Gaard, (Ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature
(pp. 60–90). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Reprinted in A. Jaggar
(Ed.), (1994), Living with contradictions (pp. 537–48). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
——— . (1996). On the oppression of women and animals. Environmental Ethics, 18(4)
(Winter), 441–44.
——— . (2003). The moral status of animals. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. At http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/moral-animal.
Guillamin, C. (1995). Racism, sexism, power and ideology. New York: Routledge.
 general bibliography 251

Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law
and democracy. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
——— . (1998). Kant’s idea of perpetual peace. In C. Cronin and P. De Greiff (Eds.),
The inclusion of the other: Studies in political theory (pp. 165–202). Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
——— . (1999). Bestiality and humanity: A war on the border between legality and
morality. Constellations, 6(3), 263–72.
——— . (2004). Interview with Eduardo Mendieta: America and the world. Logos, 3(3),
101–22.
Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, work, and space. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, M and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— . (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
Hargreaves, M. (2002). The cut-up pleasure and politics of Lea Anderson’s
choreography. Dance Theatre Journal, 18(3), 16–19.
Hartsock, N. (1983). Money, sex, and power. New York: Longman.
Hawthorne, S. and Winter, B. (Eds.). (2003). After shock: September 11, 2001—global
feminist perspectives. Vancouver: Raincoast Books.
Heinämaa, S. (1996). Woman—nature, product, style? Rethinking the foundations
of feminist philosophy of science. In L. Hankinson Nelson and J. Nelson (Eds.),
Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science (pp. 281–308). Dordrecht/Boston/
London: Kluwer.
——— . (2003). Toward a phenomenology of sexual difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty,
Beauvoir. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Held, D. Violence, law, and justice in a global age. Constellations, 9(1), 74–88.
Hoagland, S. L. (1988). Lesbian ethics: Toward new value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of
Lesbian Studies.
Hoeller, K. (Ed.). (1993). Merleau-Ponty and psychology. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press.
Holzer, H. J. (1991). The spatial mismatch hypothesis: What has the evidence shown?
Urban Studies, 28(1), 105–122.
Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
hooks, b. (1984a). Feminist theory from margin to center. Boston, MA: South End.
——— . (1984b). Sisterhood: Political solidarity between women. In b. hooks, Feminist
theory from margin to center (pp. 44–65). Boston, MA: South End Press.
Ihlanfeldt, K. R. (1992). Intraurban wage gradients: Evidence by race, gender,
occupational class, and sector. Journal of Urban Economics, 32, 70–91.
——— . (1998). The spatial mismatch hypothesis: A review of recent studies and their
implications for welfare reform. Housing Policy Debate, 9, 849–92.
Ihlanfeldt, K. R., and Young, M. V. (1994). Housing segregation and the wages and
commutes of urban blacks: The case of Atlanta fast-food restaurant workers.
Review of Economics and Statistics, 76, 425–33.
Jackson, N. (2002). Converging movements: Dance and Jewish culture at the 92nd Street
Y. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Jaggar, A. M. (1993). Taking consent seriously: Feminist practical ethics and actual
moral dialogue. In E. Winkler and J. Coombs (Eds.), The applied ethics reader
(pp. 69–86). Oxford: Blackwell.
252 general bibliography

Jencks, C. S. and Mayer, S. E. (1990). Residential segregation, job proximity, and black
job opportunities. In L. E. Lynn, Jr. and M. G. H. McGeary (Eds.), Inner-City Poverty
in the United States (pp. 187–222). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Johnson, K. (2004). Racial profiling after September 11: The Department of Justice’s
2003 Guidelines, Loyola Law Review, 50, 67–87.
Johnson, R. (2008). The flight that fought back: Mark Bingham and the heroes of
flight 93. At http://gaylife.about.com/od/moviestheatre/fr/flight93.htm.
Johnston-Anumonwo, I. (1995). Racial differences in the commuting behavior of
women in Buffalo, NY, 1980–1990. Urban Geography, 16, 23–45.
——— . (1997). Race, gender, and constrained work trips in Buffalo, New York, 1990.
Professional Geographer, 49, 306–17.
——— . (2000). Commuting constraints of black women: Evidence from Detroit. The
Great Lakes Geographer, 7(2), 66–75.
——— . (2001). Persistent racial differences in the commutes of Kansas City workers.
Journal of Black Studies, 31(5), 651–70.
——— . (2003). Commuting and locational access to employment in urban America:
Ethnic and racial disparities in three cities. In J. Frazier, F. Margai, and E. Tettey-
Fio, Race and place: Equity issues in urban America, (pp. 229–51). Cambridge, MA:
Westview Press.
——— . (2004). Getting to work in spite of the odds: Commuting patterns of African
Americans in Rochester and Buffalo, New York. Afro-Americans in New York Life
and History, 28(1), 73–98.
Johnston-Anumonwo, I. and Sultana, S. (2006). Race, location, and access to
employment in Buffalo, NY. In J. W. Frazier and E. L. Tettey-Fio (Eds.), Race,
ethnicity and place in a changing America (pp. 115–30). Binghamton, NY: Global
Academic Publishing, Binghamton University.
Johnstone, D. (2008). Independence in the brave new world order. At http://www.
counterpunch.org/johnstone02182008.html. Accessed July 2008.
——— . (2002). Fool’s crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and western delusions. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Jónasdóttir, A. (1994). Why women are oppressed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University.
Kain, J. F. (1968). Housing segregation, Negro employment, and metropolitan
decentralization. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 82, 175–97.
Kain, J. F. (1992). The spatial mismatch hypothesis: Three decades later. Housing
Policy Debate, 2, 371–460.
Kant, I. (1996). Practical philosophy (M. J. Gregor, Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kapur, R. (2006). Human rights in the 21st century: Take a walk on the dark side.
Sydney Law Review, 28, 665–88.
Kekes, J. (2005). The roots of evil. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kittay, E. (1999). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality, and dependency. New York:
Routledge.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York:
Metropolitan Books/Holt.
Kruks, S. (2001). Retrieving experience: Subjectivity and recognition in feminist politics.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
 general bibliography 253

Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lacan, J. (1996). The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in
psychoanalytic experience. Écrits (B. Fink, Trans., with H. Fink and R. Grigg).
New York and London: WW Norton (Original work presented in 1949).
Le Doeuff, M. (1989). The philosophical imaginary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Leider, J. P. (2006) Animal rights activist Peter Singer explains his views, The
Minnesota Daily, March 23. At http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/interviews-
debates/20060323.htm.
Loury, G. (2002). Anatomy of racial inequality. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, world traveling and loving perception. Hypatia,
2(2), Summer, pp. 3–19.
——— . (1994). Purity, impurity, and separation. In Signs, 19(2), Winter, 458–79.
Lugones, M. and Spelman, E. V. 1983. Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory,
cultural imperialism and the demand for “the woman’s voice.” Women’s Studies
International Forum, 6(6), 573–81.
MacKinnon, C. A. (2006). Are women human? and other international dialogues.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (1973). Democratic theory: Essays in retrieval. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Mann, B. (2006). Women’s liberation and the sublime: Feminism, postmodernism,
environment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Manning, S. (1993). Ecstasy and the demon: The dances of Mary Wigman. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
——— . (2004). Modern dance, Negro dance: Race in motion. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Marcuse, P. (1997). The enclave, the citadel, and the ghetto: What has changed in the
post-Fordist U.S city. Urban Affairs Review, 33/2, Nov., 228–64.
Markell, P. (2003). Bound by recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Martin, R. (1998). Critical moves: Dance studies in theory and politics. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
——— . (2004). Can black workers escape spatial mismatch? Employment shifts,
population shifts, and black unemployment in American cities. Journal of Urban
Economics, 49, 179–194.
Marx, K. (1967). Capital: A critique of political economy, 3 vols. Frederick Engels (Ed.).
New York: International Publishers.
——— . (1844/1977). The economic and philosophic manuscripts. In David McLellan
(Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 75–112). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— . (1875/1977). Critique of the Gotha program. In David McLellan (Ed.), Karl
Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 564–70). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massey, D. and N. Denton (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the
underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Massey, D. S. and Hajnal, Z. L. (1995). The changing geographic structure of black-
white segregation in the United States. Social Science Quarterly, 76(3), 527–42.
Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–87.
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), Winter,
11–40.
254 general bibliography

McLafferty, S., and Preston, V. (1991). Gender, race and commuting among service
sector workers. Professional Geographer, 43, 1–15.
——— . (1992). Spatial mismatch and labor market segmentation for African
American and Latina women. Economic Geography, 68, 406–431.
——— . (1997). Gender, race, and the determinants of commuting New York in 1990.
Urban Geography, 18, 192–212.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London and Henley: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
——— . (1993a). Indirect language and the voices of silence. In M. B. Smith, (Ed.),
The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader (pp. 76–120). Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
——— . (1993b). Eye and mind. In M. B. Smith (Ed.), The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics
reader (pp. 35–55). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
——— . (2004). “Ideal theory” as ideology. In P. DesAutels and M. Urban Walker
(Eds.), Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory (pp. 163–81). Lanham,
Md: Rowman & Littlefield. Reprinted in Hypatia, 20(3), Summer 2005,
pp. 165–84.
——— . (2007). White ignorance. In S. Sullivan and N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and
epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 13–38). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Minow, M. (1990). Making all the difference: Inclusion, exclusion and American law.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mitchell, J. (2004). Procreative mothers (sexual difference) and child-free sisters
(gender): Feminism and Fertility. European Journal of Women’s Studies,
11(4), 415–16.
Moane, G. (1999). Gender and colonialism: A psychological analysis of oppression and
liberation. London: MacMillan.
Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism without borders. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.
Moi, T. (1999). What is a woman and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moraga, C., and Anzaldúa, G. (1983). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical
women of color. New York: Kitchen Table Press.
Morgan, R. (1996). Sisterhood is global: The international women’s movement anthology.
New York: Feminist Press/CUNY Press.
Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso.
Mouw, T. (2000). Job relocation and the racial gap in unemployment in Detroit and
Chicago 1980–1990. American Sociological Review, 65, 730–53.
Mutua, M. (2002). Savages, victims, saviors. Harvard International Law Journal, 41(1),
Winter, 201–45.
Nagel, M. (1993). Of monsters and transgression. Alterity, excess, community,
Proceedings of the seventh annual Strategies of Critique conference (pp. 113–22).
Toronto: York University.
Narayan, U. (1997). Contesting cultures: “Westernization,” respect for cultures, and
third-world feminists. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), The second wave: A reader in feminist
theory (pp. 396–414). New York: Routledge.
——— . (2007). Confronting global capitalism—Problems and prospects for feminist
politics. At http:www.umass.edu/wost/events/feministphilosophy.htm.
 general bibliography 255

NATO (2008). Kosovo Force (KFOR). At http://www.nato.int/kfor. Accessed July 2008.

Novack, C. J. (1990). Sharing the dance: Contact improvisation and American culture.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
O’Donnell, C. (2007). A philosophical account of feminist solidarity between women,
honors thesis, Mt. Holyoke College.
Okin, S. M. (1989). Justice, gender and the family. New York: Basic Books.
——— . (1999). Is multiculturalism bad for women? In J. Cohen, M. Howard and
M. C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Is multiculturalism bad for women? (pp. 9–24) Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Orend, B. (2002). Justice after war. Ethics and International Affairs, 16(1), 43–56.
——— . (2004). Kant’s ethics of war and peace. Journal of Military Ethics, 3(2),
161–77.
Orford, A. (2003). Reading humanitarian intervention: Human rights and the use of force
in international law. Cambridge University Press.
O’Shea, J. (2007). At home in the world? The Bharatanatyam dancer as transnational
interpreter. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Parekh, B. (2000). Rethinking multiculturalism: Cultural diversity and political theory.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Phillips, A. (1991). Engendering democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
——— . (1995). The politics of presence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pisarski, A. (2006). Commuting in America III: The third national report on commuting
patterns and trends. Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board.
Pollan, M. (2007). The omnivore’s dilemma. New York: Penguin.
Powell, C. (2005). Lifting our veil of ignorance: Culture constitutionalism, and
women’s human rights in post-September 11 America. Hastings Law Journal,
57, December, 331–83.
Preston, V. and McLaferty, S. (1999). Spatial mismatch research in the 1990s:
Progress and potential. Papers in Regional Science, 78, 387–402.
Preston, V. McLafferty, S. and Hamilton, E. (1993). The impact of family status on
black, white, and Hispanic women’s commuting. Urban Geography, 14, 228–50.
Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Puar, J. K., and Rai, A. S. (2002). Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the
production of docile patriots, in Social Text, 20, Fall, 117–48.
Ramraj, V. V., Hor, M. and Roach, K. (Eds.). (2005). Global anti-terrorism law and
policy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— . Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
——— . (1999a). Law of peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
——— . (1999b). A theory of justice. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Razak, S. H. (2004). Dark threats and white nights: The Somalia affair, peacekeeping and
the new imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Rich, A. (1979). On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton.
256 general bibliography

Roach, K. and Trotter, G. (2005). Miscarriages of justice in the war against terror. Penn
State Law Review, 109, 967–1041.
Robinson, M. (2005). Connecting human rights, human development and human
security. In R. A. Wilson (Ed.), Human rights in the ‘war on terror’ (pp. 308–16).
Cambridge University Press.
Rodley, N. S. and Çali, B. 2007. Kosovo revisited: Humanitarian intervention on the
fault lines of international law. Human Rights Law Review, 7, 275–97.
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex.
In R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 157–210). New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Ruddick, S. (1989/1995). Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Rutherford, B. M. and Wekerle, G. R. (1988). Captive rider, captive labor: Spatial
constraints on women’s employment. Urban Geography, 9, 116–137.
Sartre, J.-P. (1976). Critique of dialectical reason. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey:
Humanities Press.
——— . (2004). The imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination.
London and New York: Routledge.
Satz, D. (2005). What do we owe the global poor? Ethics and International Affairs, 19(1),
47–54.
Savage, C. (2008). Takeover: The return of the imperial presidency and the subversion of
American democracy. New York: Backbay Books.
Sayad, A. (1999). La double absence. Paris: Seuil.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (2004). The imperial presidency. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin.
Schmitt, R. (2007). How do we get there from here? Reflections on fundamental social
and human change. In A. Anton and R. Schmitt (Eds.), Toward a new socialism
(pp. 145–60). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Schueller, M. J. (2007). Techno-dominance and torturegate: The making of U.S.
imperialism. In A. Dawson and M. J. Schueller (Eds.) Exceptional state: Contemporary
U.S. culture and the new imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Singer, L. (1993). Merleau Ponty on the concept of style. In G. A. Johnson (Ed.),
The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader (pp. 233–44.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Singer, P. and Mason, J. (2006). The way we eat. New York: Rodale Press.
Spelman, E. (1988). Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Spivak, G. (2004). Terror: A speech after 9/11. Boundary, 2, 31:2, Summer, 81–112.
Stoll, M. A. (1996). Distance or discrimination? The convergence of space and race
in understanding metropolitan racial differences in employment. SAGE Race
Relations, 21, 3–25.
Stoller, R. (1968). Sex and gender: On the development of masculinity and femininity.
New York: Science House.
Sultana, S. (2003). Commuting constraints of black female workers in Atlanta: an
examination of the spatial mismatch hypothesis in married-couple, dual-earner
households. Southeastern Geographer, 43(2), 249–59.
 general bibliography 257

Taylor, C. (1992). Multiculturalism and politics of recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.
——— . (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Taylor, B. D. and Ong, P. M. (1995). Spatial mismatch or automobile mismatch? An
examination of race, residence and commuting in US metropolitan areas. Urban
Studies, 32, 1453–1473.
Thompson, M. A. (1997). The impact of spatial mismatch on female labor force
participation. Economic Development Quarterly, 11, 138–45.
Tomko, L. J. (1999). Dancing class: Gender, ethnicity, and social divides in American
dance, 1890–1920 (Unnatural acts). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Turner, S. C. (1997). Barriers to a better break: Employer discrimination and spatial
mismatch in metropolitan Detroit. Journal of Urban Affairs, 19, 123–41.
Walker, M. (1998). Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York:
Routledge.
Wartenburg, T. E. (1989). The forms of power: An essay in social ontology. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Wittig, M. (1992a). The straight mind and other essays. Boston, MA: Beacon.
——— . (1992b). The category of sex. The straight mind and other essays (pp. 1–8).
Boston, MA: Beacon.
Wolfe, A. and Lausen, J. (1997). Identity politics and the welfare state. Social
Philosophy and Policy, 14(2), Summer, 231–55.
Zax, J. F. and Kain, J. F. (1996). Moving to the suburbs: Do relocating companies leave
their black employees behind? Journal of Labor Economics, 14(3), 472–504.
Zerilli, L. M. G. 1998. Doing without knowing: Feminism’s politics of the ordinary.
Political Theory 26(4), 435–58.
——— . 2005. Feminism and the abyss of freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
This page intentionally left blank
 Index

Ability-Need principle of Solidarity Bacchi, C., 25

Justice, 195–196 Bahdi, R., 126–127
Anderson, B., 11, 83, 87–88 risk of race, 126
Anderson, L., 75–78 Bartky, S. L., 8, 72, 196
abolitionists, 169–171 Bar On, B.A., 12–13, 23, 158
acknowledgment, 16, 175, 177–179, 182 Bayertz, K, 190–191
political vs. existential, 175, 177–179, Beauvoir, S. de, 7–9, 24, 36, 37, 49, 56,
182 57–59, 69, 79, 83, 90, 152
affair of the veil/affaire de la Benhabib, S., 5–6, 17, 26, 27, 100, 166,
foulard, 215 194, 222–226
Agamben, G., 122 Black reparations, 15
agency, 9, 37, 54, 60–61, 71, 81, 88, blame, 7, 14–15, 35, 135–138, 140–144, 153,
147–148, 155–156, 158, 158, 186–187, 206
202–204, 209 game, 138
Allen, A., 186, 193, 197 body, breasted. See embodiment, female,
Allende, S., 26 feminine
Archibugi, D., 13, 37, 103 body, lived. See lived body approach
alienation, 7–8, 42, 44, 46, 201 body, pregnant. See embodiment, female,
Alperovitz, G., 196 feminine
Anghie, A., 122, 123 body aesthetic, 217
Arato, A., 32 Bohman, J., 27
Arendt, H., 11, 13, 17, 21, 103–107, Boothby, R., 89–91
112–113, 133, 136–137, 141, 193, Bordo, S., 8, 72
194, 210 Bowman, E., and R. Stone, 196
Aristotle, 28, 157 Braidotti, R., 29
access to jobs, 229–232, 241 breasted experience, self. See
assimilation, 70, 72, 214, 221 embodiment, female, feminine
axes of structural inequality, 81 bridge identities, 197
260 index
Brownmiller, S., 25
Butler, J., 8, 22, 23, 24, 29, 72, 81–82,
219
capitalism, 4–5, 72, 201, 206
dual systems theory of, Young’s
critique, 5
care, right to, 196
city life as theorized by Young, 5
civil society, 12, 32, 111, 139, 216,
224–226
Card, C., 15, 148, 157
Certeau, M., 73
choreography, 73–78
class, 9–10, 12, 17–18, 25–26, 49–51,
63–64, 74, 81, 89, 126, 151, 154,
163, 185, 189–194, 203, 230, 239
Cohen, J., 12, 32
Collins, P. H., 231, 237
Connell, R. W., 24
commonwealth tier, 196
communication, modes of, 16–17, 71,
174–180, 226
communities
local, national, and transnational, 95,
195, 204, 210–211, 214, 219, 222
imagined. See imagined
communities
commutes, 230–231, 235–41
convenient and compensatory vs.
compromised and constrained,
238–239
racial and gender differences, 230
companion animals, 164
cooperatives. See worker-owned
cooperatives
cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism, 7, 13, 18,
29, 107, 110–113, 115, 121, 185–188,
190, 197
cultural imperialism, 16, 19, 99, 119, 148,
154–155, 161, 164, 229, 231, 235,
237, 240
culture, 42–44, 48, 50, 72, 77, 81–81, 91
as communicative action, 223
democratic, 181
cynicism as theorized by Young, 34, 36
dance studies, 73–74
deliberation, 6, 12, 16–17, 173–190,
200, 226
democracy, 3–7, 12–19, 21, 26–32, 33–35,
66, 100, 103–105, 108, 122, 147,
153, 155, 157, 173–176, 179–181,
189, 190, 194, 200, 202fn,
206–207, 211, 213, 224–226, 244
accountability, 7, 15, 32, 122, 153, 157,
206–207
aggregative, 175
and constitutionalism, 6
and feminism, 26–27
and gender difference, 27
and self-development, 189 (see also
self-development)
as aspect of justice, 12
communicative, 17, 194, 226
cosmopolitan, 29
deep, 12, 225
deliberative, 16–17, 27, 173–176,
190, 226
exclusion and. See exclusion and
inclusion, 4, 7, 12, 14, 16–17, 21,
27, 34, 66, 103, 147, 173, 190, 213,
226, 244
liberal, 13, 103
participatory, 17; 173
representative, 6, 155, 200, 211
Denike, M., 13–14
Derrida, J., 30–31
disabled, neglect of, 189
disabilities, 154
discrimination, 117, 182, 186–187, 215,
217, 241
disempowerment, 155
disposition, 16, 173, 175, 177–182, 196,
209–210
distributive paradigm of justice. See
justice; Rawls
domination, 5, 13–15, 19, 34, 43, 49, 50,
99–100, 117–119, 127, 130, 145,
147–148, 155–156, 159, 192, 194,
199–203, 205, 209, 226
and self-determination. See self-
determination
 index 261

diversity. See multiculturalism feminine imaginary. See imaginary

duties, 15, 18, 188, 207 feminine spatiality, 47–50, 69, 83–86.
Dworkin, R., 7, 14, 134–135 See also space
femininity
embodiment as a body style, 8–10, 25, 42, 49, 62,
female, feminine, 7, 24, 41–51, 55–57, 78, 85, 90
62, 79–80. See also woman as a disciplinary practice, 8–10, 56–57,
breasted self-, as theorized by Young, 59, 72
41–44 vs. masculinity, 129–130
childbirth and labor, 46–47, 57 See also gender
in general, 41, 65–66, 79 feminism, 9–11, 15, 19, 21, 24, 27–29,
male, 41 50, 55–59, 80, 149, 185, 193,
menstruation, 53, 57–59 196–199
pregnancy, 7–8, 41–42, 44–47, 53 and democracy. See democracy
vs. sex and gender, 24 and gender theory, 27–29
empathy, 191, 209–210 Black, 23
equality as goal, 12, 107, 119–120, European, 29
174–175, 189, 209, 221–223 gynocentric, 10, 56–57
equal opportunity, 216, 221, 223 humanist, 49, 56–58
ethics of care, 8 identity politics and, 9–10
ethnicity, 18, 81, 126, 185, 191, 193, 214, intersectional, 192
216–217, 223, 227, 233 materialist, 80
European identity, 28–30 radical, 10
European Union, 6–7, 25–26, 29 sexual difference school of, 10–11, 22
nationalism. See nationalism socialist, 15, 195–196, 199 (see also
Eveline, J., 25 Socialist-Feminist
evil, 15, 121–125, 130, 147, 148, 151, Philosophers’ Association
155–159 [SOFPHIA])
exclusion, 16, 27, 31, 79, 98, 117, 119–120, Western, 9
155, 173–174, 176, 179, 213, 215, post-colonial critique of Western,
218–219, 223, 225 188
internal vs. external, 176 white, 23
experience Ferguson, A., 4–5, 17
and knowledge. See narrative; personal Ferguson, M., 9
experience Fisk, M., 180–181
breasted, 7–8, 41–44 Foster, S. L., 8
exploitation, 9, 15, 17–19, 99, 119, 148, Foucault, M., 8, 71–73, 118–119, 219
154, 161–162, 169, 186, 189–190, fraternity, 87, 189–190
197, 201, 203, 209, 211, 213, 221, freedom, 13, 18, 32, 48, 79, 121, 123–125,
229–230, 235, 238–240 155, 171, 181, 188–189, 194fn, 197,
class, economic, 186, 189–190, 213 203, 209, 216, 220
of animals, 161–162, 169 as goal, 188, 216, 220
as restricted by gender, 48, 79, 81–82,
Fair Housing Act, 232 194fn
false universalism, 54 from domination, 13, 209
female physicality, 71 negative and positive, 209
262 index

freedom (continued ) Golshani, F., 74

of choice, 18, 203 Goodall, J., 163
of expression, 220, 223 Goodin, R., 140
Frye, M., 119, 147, 151, 155, 165 Gore, A., 143
Gotha Program, 195
Gandhi, M., 36, 135, 145 Gould, C., 18, 119, 186, 190–192,
Gay and Lesbian Studies, 23 196–197
gender, 4–11, 17–19, 22–29, 34, 35, 42, Grosz, E., 8
46, 49–50, 55fn, 56–58, 71–91, Gruen, L., 19
107fn, 108, 117–120, 125–126, 130, group. See social groups
149–151, 172, 190, 192, 215–216, guilt, 134, 136–145
221–224, 227, 230–234, 239 and responsibility. See responsibility
abolition of, 22 backward-looking, 141
and feminism, 27 gynocentrism, 10
and identity politics, 28 gynocentric feminism. See feminism
and the sexual division of labor, 8, 10,
19, 81, 99, 120, 135, 151–153, 215, Habermas, J., 6, 12–13, 16–17, 28, 30–32,
217, 222–223 103–104, 108–114, 173, 225
and the World Bank, 26 Hardt, M., and Negri, A., 115
as a signifier, 25 Hartmann, H., 4
as aesthetic relation, 81 Hartsock, N., 8, 119
as performance, 78 Heidegger, M., 37, 41
as process. See genderization heterogeneous public as ideal, 6
as seriality, 10–11, 18, 28, 55fn, 150 heterosexism, 50, 101, 189
as structural injustice. See injustice, heterosexuality, 10, 14, 150–153
structural enforced/compulsory, 150–153
as totally inclusive. See Mitchell, J. normative, 10, 14
(male) domination, 5, 13–15, 19 Hoagland, S., 152
identity vs. structure, 6, 9–10, 24, Honig, B., 26–27, 37
86, 136 homelessness, 135–136
mainstreaming, 26 homonationalism, 130
sex vs. gender. See sex/gender homosexual panic defense, 87
social structures of, 9–11, 14–15, 24–25, homosexuality, 25, 129
64, 79, 120, 135, 190 hooks, b., 9, 17, 186, 192–193, 197
solidarity. See solidarity, house-home as theorized by Young,
transformational 58–62
studies/Gender Studies, 23 human rights, 7, 13, 18, 33, 100, 104fn,
vs. lived body. See lived body 107, 110–111, 119–120, 122–125,
gendered injustice. See justice 129, 181, 187–188, 195, 199, 201,
genderization, 25 205, 207–211
globalization, 5–6, 35, 186, 199–200, as a perspective, 18
203, 205–209 cosmopolitan, 7, 13, 18
corporate neo-liberal, 5, 186, 194 economic and social, 18, 208
global corporations. See transnational entailing positive duties. See duties
corporations women’s, 187–188
global responsibility. See responsibility humanism, 49, 56–57

humanist feminism. See feminism
humanitarian interventions, 13–14,
103–116
Husserl, E., 44
identity politics, 9–10, 28, 190, 194, 214
imaginary, 11, 12, 81–91, 98
feminine, 11–12, 81–86, 89–91
philosophical domain, 98
social, 87–88
imagination, 101
imagined communities, 11, 81, 87, 90, 193
immanence vs. transcendence, 8, 44–48,
73, 85fn
immigrants, 18, 99, 119, 122, 187, 196,
214–215, 217, 221, 225–227
immigration policies, 18, 26, 124, 214
imperial sovereignty, 115
inclusion, 12–17, 27, 31, 34, 66, 103,
147–148, 153, 155, 173–182, 189,
200, 213–214, 216, 220–221,
225–227, 232, 240. See also
democracy and inclusion
individualism
methodological, 136
inequality
social-structural, 12, 18, 81, 90, 98, 119,
125, 214–219, 221, 224–225, 227,
290
economic, 134
gender, 221. See injustice, structural
racial/ethnic, 18, 214–219
injustice, 5, 7, 11, 14–15, 18, 21, 34, 37, 60,
79–80, 86–91, 98, 100–101,
117–120, 133–142, 148, 156–158,
165–168, 186–189, 197, 199–209,
213–219, 225, 231
as base for theory of justice, 148
economic. See inequality, economic
gender. See inequality, gender
global. See justice, global
racial. See inequality, racial/ethnic
structural, 7, 11, 15, 18, 21, 35, 79–80,
86, 87–91, 100, 117, 130, 135,
137–140, 141–142, 197, 199–205,
215, 217–219, 225
index 263
interests, 85, 127, 137, 147, 167–168, 171,
175, 179–180, 190–194, 196, 201,
214, 223
and intersectionality p 190–191
and solidarity. See solidarity
enlightened, 196
of women as a group, 192–193
formal vs. content, 193–194
self- and transformation of, 192
Iraq, invasion of, 28, 30, 37, 106, 108, 111,
124, 125
Irigaray, L., 37, 43
Jaggar, A., 12, 14
Jalušič, V., 16
Jónasdóttir, A., 193
Johnson-Anumonwo, I., 19
jouissance, 46
justice
and gender. See gender
and multiculturalism. See
multiculturalism
as fairness. See Rawls
as human development according to
Young, 147
classical liberal conception of, 188
cosmopolitan conception of,
186–187, 197
critical conception of, 97–98
capabilities paradigm of Young, 12
democracy as aspect of, 12
distributive paradigm
as critiqued by Young, 119, 189 (see
also Rawls)
equality and, 188 (see also equality)
freedom from domination as aspect
of, 13
gendered, 100
goal of for Young. See self-development
global responsibility. See responsibility
ideal vs. nonideal models. See
methodology, nonideal
international/global, 5, 7, 14, 18, 30
liability conception of, 7, 14, 18,
186–187, 205
neo-liberal model of, 188
264 index
justice (continued )
political responsibility conception of,
186–188, 197, 210
racial, 99
and responsibility. See responsibility
self-development as goal of, 189, 197
social, 3–5, 13–14, 18, 117–119, 122, 156,
185–186, 188–189, 192–197,
214–216, 225, 227, 231
definition of social justice, 18
social connection model. See
responsibility
solidarity paradigm, principle of,
17–19, 186–187, 190, 195–197
welfare state model of, 188
Kant, I., 108, 110–111, 115, 154, 197
King, M. L., 144
Kittay, E., 100
knowledge and experience. See narrative;
personal experience
Kristeva, J., 46
Kymlicka, W., 21, 27, 224
Laban, R., 73–74
labor
gender/sexual division of. See gender
in childbirth. See embodiment
of animals, 162, 168
social division of, 190, 217, 219, 230
sweatshop, 138, 144, 200
Lacan, J., 11, 83, 88–89
language of resonance, 63, 65–66
1esbian, lesbians
concept of, 152–153
space, 44
Levinas, E., 139, 173
liability
conception of justice. See justice
rhetorics of blame. See blame
liberalism, political, 7, 189, 226
lived body approach, 10–11, 22, 24, 28,
49, 65, 79, 81, 89, 119
logic of identity as theorized by Young, 41
lottery
natural. See Rawls
unnatural, 148–149
Lugones, M., 63–64, 193
Lukacs, G., 139
Makah Nation, 164
male bias, 41, 101
male domination, 19. See also patriarchy
Mann, B., 11
marginalization, 16, 19, 27–28, 99, 117,
119–120, 138, 148, 154–155,
161–164, 166, 189, 215, 221, 225,
229, 230–231, 234–235, 240
of animals, 161–164, 166
Marcuse, H., 34
Martínez, M., 18–19
Marx, K., 34, 97, 115, 139, 154, 162, 190,
195, 197, 201–203.
Marxist Activist Philosophers (MAP), 4
masculinist protection as theorized by
Young, 13, 37, 103, 118, 120,
130–131.
masculinist security regime, 5
Mauss, M., 71
Mead, L., 134–135
Melton, D., 16
menstruation. See embodiment, feminine
merit, principle of, 186, 195
Merleau-Ponty, M., 7, 9, 70–71, 83–85, 89
metaphysics of solids as theorized by
Young, 43
methodology, nonideal, 11–12, 14, 96–97,
100, 188–189, 190, 197
migration. See immigration policies
Mills, C., 99–100, 189
mirror stage, 88–89
Mitchell, J., 22
Minow, M., 222
Mohanty, C., 186, 188, 196
Moi, T., 11, 22–24, 79, 81
moral respect, 17, 174, 178–180, 182, 184
Morgan, R, 192–193
motherhood, 44, 62, 71, 229, 231,
236–237
and sexuality. See sexuality
and Black women. See work and
motherhood

and working mothers, 231, 236–237
movement in space. See women
multiculturalism, 148, 221, 224
multinational corporations. See
transnational corporations
Murray, C., 134–135
Muslims, 129, 214–215, 217, 220, 226
Nagel, M., 3–4
Narayan, U., 188
Negri, A. See Hardt, M., and Negri, A.
narrative, 4, 53–63, 76, 125, 176–177
nationalism, 6, 29, 87, 125, 129, 130
non-ideal approach, theory. See
methodology, non-ideal
normative heterosexuality, 10, 24
normalization, 65fn, 128, 215, 217,
219–220, 225–227
Nussbaum, M., 7, 14–15; 221
objectivism, 80
O’Donnell, C., 186
Okin, S. M., 100, 188, 221
one dimensional man, 4, 34
O’Neill, O., 139, 208
oppression, 3–4, 8–10, 14–15, 17, 19, 22,
27, 34, 60, 70, 90, 99–100, 109,
119, 147–159, 161–172, 186, 189,
192, 199–200, 203, 205, 209,
216–220, 223, 225–226, 230, 240
animal, 15, 19, 161–172
and self-development. See self-
development
as structural injustice. See injustice,
structural
concept of, nature of, 153–154
five faces of, 15, 19, 99, 148, 151–155, 230
multiple, multifaceted, 19, 230, 240
racial and minority, 19, 217
women’s, 4, 8, 9, 19, 22, 27, 60, 70,
90, 119, 152–154
Orford, A., 124
original position. See Rawls
Pajnik, M., 6
Parekh, B., 21, 221, 224
index 265
Park, Y., 74
patriarchy, dual systems theory of, 5, 8
performance theory, 8, 56, 66, 69, 78
personal experience, 8–9, 53–66
epistemological importance of in
Young, 55, 63–64
depoliticizing subjectivism, 54
political importance of, 53–66
‘personal is the political’, 9
phallocentrism, 43
phenomenology, 3, 7, 11–12, 19; 41–51,
53–54, 69, 79–91
and pregnancy. See embodiment
feminine. See embodiment
feminist, 19, 50, 53
Phillips, A., 27
Pogge, T., 199, 205–208,
political equality, 12, 174–175
political responsibility. See global
responsibility; justice, political
responsibility conception of;
solidarity, practices as base for
political discourse, 174–175, 177, 225
political pluralism, 181
politics of difference, 5–6, 10–12, 14–15,
19; 34, 66, 118, 213–227
politics of recognition, 220
poor, the, 32, 134–135, 196
postcolonial critique. See feminism
post-structuralism, 8, 45, 50–51, 80–82
poverty, 134–35
power, 137–138, 142–145, 189
and violence. See violence
gendered hierarchies of. See injustice,
structural; the gender/sexual
division of labor
through collective ability, 142
powerlessness, 16, 99, 109, 148, 154–155,
161–163, 166, 229–230, 235,
237, 240
practico-inert. See Sartre
praxis philosophy, 7
pregnancy. See embodiment
Preston, V. and McLaferty, S., 231,
233–234, 236, 240
personal space. See space, personal
266 index

private space. See space, personal concept defined, 141

privilege, 9–10, 15–17, 23, 43, 50, 60, 101, forward-looking, 141
103, 119–120, 139, 142, 153–154, global, 185, 189, 191, 197, 199–200,
161, 176, 178, 182, 191–193, 203, 205, 210–211
206, 215, 218, 219fn, 230, 235–236 guilt and, 140–143
lack of, 182 liability model of. See justice
psychoanalysis, 3, 86–88 of international institutions, 139
Puar, J., 118, 127, 128, 129 personal, 134–135, 138
public space. See space political. See justice, political
public intellectual, 5, 31–32 responsibility conception of
public sphere, 6–7, 12, 27, 30–32, 103, shared, collective, 14, 15, 18, 142, 200,
199, 226 203, 205
social connection model, 7, 200, 202,
queer theory, 23 207–208
state, 139
race, 25–26, 66, 81, 89, 99, 126–127, 151, rhetoric of blame, 137. See also blame
181–182, 185, 191–194, 217, 231, game
233, 240 rights
risk of race. See Bahdi of animals, 161–172
racial inequality. See inequality; of humans. See human rights
segregation Robinson, M., 127
racial justice. See justice Roemer, J., 135–136
racism, 9, 18, 100–101, 119, 123–125, 169, Rubin, G., 4
189, 213, 215–219, 225, 227 Ruddick, S., 8
Radical Philosophy Association (RPA),
3–4 Sartre, J.P., 10, 36, 44, 83, 139, 150–151, 154
Rawls, J., 7, 12–14, 136, 95–101, 136, on the ‘practico-inert’, 10
147–149, 156, 186 Schmitt, R., 180–181
compared to Young, 95–101, 136 Scott, J., 22
conception of justice, 95–96 security state(s), 13, 103, 106–108, 113,
distributive paradigm of justice, 12, 99, 117–130. See also masculinist
118–119, 147–148, 189 security regime
justice as fairness, 147, 186 segregation, residential, 218–219, 225,
lottery, natural, unnatural, 149 229–232, 241–242
original position, 96, 98 self
well-ordered society, 96–97 decentered, 45
relational autonomy, ideal of, 13 split, 45
recognition, 9, 16, 34, 37, 58, 65–67 self-determination, 7, 13–14, 18, 148, 155,
right to, 166 214, 223
reparations, 133, 144 self-development, 14, 18, 56, 148, 155, 157,
resonance, 9, 63fn, 65–67 189, 214
responsibility, 7, 14–15, 17–18, 21, 33–35, self-interest. See interests
38, 100, 107fn, 116, 133–145, 148, self-other relations, 8
153, 177–180, 185–187, 189, 191, self-transformation. See solidarity,
197, 199–211, 231 transformational
and justice. See justice seriality, 10–11, 28, 55fn, 64, 150

serial collectivity, group, 150, 154, 190
sex/gender
distinction, 80–81
system, concept of, 4, 9, 11
sexism, 18, 121, 169, 189, 192, 194fn
sexual difference, 58fn, 91. See also
feminism, sexual difference
school of
sexual division of labor. See gender
sexual objectification, 43, 46, 47
sexuality, 23–26, 43–44, 46, 71, 80 120,
129, 150–153, 185, 191–192, 214
and homosexuality. See homosexuality
and motherhood, 44
double standard of, 44
SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s
Association), 195
Singer, L., 89–90, 150
Singer, P., 169, 171
social division of labor, 168, 217, 219,
230. See also gender and the sexual
division of labor
social groups, 18, 117, 119, 148–152, 154,
156, 167, 200, 214–218, 225–227,
229
essentialist vs. relational concept of, 6,
9–10, 148–152
Young’s conception of, 148–152
social justice. See justice, social
social movements, 7, 9, 12, 17, 19, 23, 26,
30, 32, 66, 98, 149, 191–192, 195,
201, 209, 221
anti-corporate globalization, 195, 205
New Left, 98
social structures, 9–11, 15, 24, 64, 79–80,
85, 90, 120, 135–138, 150–154,
157–158, 182, 185, 189, 190, 196,
216, 218, 229
racialist, 218
See also gender, social structures of
Socialist and Feminist Philosophers
Association (SOFPHIA), 4
solidarity, 5, 7, 12, 17–19, 185–197,
207–219
definitions and types of, 186, 190–191,
193, 211
index 267
differentiated, ideal of, 12, 17, 194, 219
economy, 194–195
empathy and. See empathy
feminist. See transformational
solidarity
interests and, 191
intersectional feminist view of, 192
networks, 195–197, 210
paradigm of justice. See justice
sisterhood solidarity of hooks. See
transformational solidarity
transformational, 17, 190, 192–194
transnational, 18, 190–192, 207, 209
political economy of, 17
space(s), 6, 8, 28, 31, 37, 42, 44, 45,
47–50, 61, 69, 75–77, 85–86, 115,
122, 125, 128, 137, 176, 180,
195–196, 205, 215, 218
access to, 220
and pregnancy, 45
as constituted in the imaginary. See
imaginary
ethnic, 218
feminine, 8, 37, 42, 47, 50, 69, 75–77,
85–86
lesbian, 44
personal, 61, 176
of political economy, 195–196
woman, 44
spatial mismatch hypothesis, 232–233,
235, 240–241
spatiality, feminine. See feminine
spatiality
speciesism, 169
Spelman, E., 9, 63–64
stigmatization, 217–223
style. see women
Stone, R. See Bowman, E., and R. Stone
Structural Inequality model of Young, 18,
214–227.
structural injustice. See injustice
structures, social. See social structures
Struhl, K., 5, 7
style of comportment. See women
subjectivity, 80
sweatshops, 187, 191, 203
268 index
Taylor, C., 83, 87, 88, 220, 224
theory
critical theory and Young, 3, 12, 100
dual systems. See dual systems
feminist. See feminism
of gender. See gender
ideal vs. nonideal. See methodology,
nonideal
performance. See performance theory
tolerance, 129, 213, 215, 219–221, 224, 227
logic of liberal, 215, 219–220, 224
transnational corporations, 18, 186–187,
203, 205
transcendence. See immanence
univeralism. See false universalism
utilitarian view, 169
veil. See affair of the veil
victimization, 49–50
violence, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 21, 87, 99,
103–116, 119–130, 145, 148,
154–155, 161, 164–165, 186, 188,
194, 215, 229, 231, 241
against animals, 164–165
against women, 186, 188, 194, 215,
229, 231, 241
and power as theorized by Arendt,
104–107
as a face of oppression, 12–13, 16, 19, 148,
154–155, 161, 164–165, 229, 231, 241
male. See violence against women
official, 13, 103, 107
racial/ethnic, 188
Vissicaro, P., 74
voices, silenced, 37, 66, 101, 121, 221,
224, 227
of girls/women, 37, 101, 176–179,
221, 224
war(s), 4–5, 28, 34, 36–37, 106–115,
121–125, 130, 149
just/unjust, 115, 186, 188
on terror, 37, 103–108, 121, 123,
126–127
Wittig, M., 81, 152
woman, womanhood, category of, 23–25,
28, 41–42, 44–50, 53–59, 69, 71,
77, 81, 85–90, 101, 150–153 154,
191, 194, 231. See also
embodiment, feminine; gender
women
and movement in space. See feminine
spatiality
and style of body comportment, 47,
83–85, 89–90
Black, 19, 33, 163fn, 231, 229–242
“ladylike” vs. “unladylike,” 50
of color, 9–10, 172, 191, 234–235
white, 10, 172, 194, 231, 235–239
See also gender; voices of girls/women;
woman
women’s
emancipation, 222
empowerment projects, 195
group interests. See interests
rights. See human rights
Women’s Studies, 22–23
work, workers, 9, 19, 44, 55, 59–62, 66,
100, 135, 154, 170–171, 186–187,
191, 195–196, 201, 203, 206, 214,
217, 229–242
and motherhood, 231 (see also
motherhood and working mothers)
caring, unpaid, 100, 196
housework, 59–62, 66
low status done by people of color,
217, 239
structures of, 214
sex-segregated, 135. See gender and the
sexual division of labor
trips, women’s, 19, 229–242
Black vs. white, 229–242
worker-owned cooperatives, 195
World Bank. See gender
World Social Forum, 30, 195
World Trade Organization, 32
world-traveling, 193
wrong-doing
culpable, 148, 154, 157–58
inexcusable, 158
See also blame