Ann Ferguson. Dancing With Iris

Dancing with Iris
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PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES:
Abortion and Social Responsibility: Womens 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
Youve 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 Martn 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
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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 sciencePhilosophy.
I. Ferguson, Ann. II. Nagel, Mechthild.
HQ1190.D36 2009
305.42092dc22 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 Jalusic 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 Youngs 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. LImagination au pouvoir : Comparing John Rawlss Method of Ideal
Theory with Iris Marion Youngs 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 Youngs 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 Youngs Deliberative
Democracy, 173
Desire 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
Mriam Martnez
18. Womens 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 Womens 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 womens studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her
elds 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 womens 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 Genocides 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 Womens 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 Womens
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 afliate 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: Ballets 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 Marxs 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 Jalusic 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, womens 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 Womens 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 womens move-
ment, she now teaches feminist philosophy and lives with her partner and four
daughters in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of Womens Liberation and the
Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (2006) and a cofounder of the
Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology.
Mriam Martnez 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 20062007 academic
year. She is the author of Iris Marion Youngs Political Thinking: Feminism
and Politics of Difference from a Difference Perspective in Contemporary
x contributors
Political Thinking (2008). She is nishing her dissertation, called On Desire and
Difference: The Feminist Approach of Iris Marion Young to the Political.
Desire 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 Morrisons 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 Womens 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 Americas Tradition of Religious Equal-
ity (2008).
Mojca Pajnik is a scientic 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
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1
4
Introduction
Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel
In Homage to Iris Marion Young
Iris Marion Young was a brilliant, creative, and prolic 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 inuential 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 beneted 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 rst 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 reection 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 transmogried into SOFPHIA (SocialistFeminist 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 inuenced by both Gayle Rubins
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 socialistfeminist analy-
sis of womens 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 identied as a socialistfeminist, 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 rst paper was
published (Young 1981)! This was just the rst 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 womens 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. governments reac-
tion to Hurricane Katrina (2006d). As I indicate in chapter 15, my own work
continues to be inuenced 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 Jalusic 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 nd 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 lifeNew York City where she
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.
Youngs 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 conict engendered by a politics of difference when it is not rooted in
democratic constitutionalism (p. 442). We imagine that Youngs 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 conict
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 afrms group differences and gives specic representation to
oppressed groups is, I believe, immediately relevant to each of these
situations. An ideal of community as shared nal ends and mutual
identication 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, Youngs inuence on politi-
cal philosophers has spread beyond North America, which suggests that her
analysis has global import since local scholaractivists have been encouraged
to translate her U.S.-centered analysis into their own non-U.S.-based contexts.
Youngs work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, and Swedish.
Furthermore, Youngs 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 Youngs last travel to Europe in May 2006 that contributors
Vlasta Jalusic and Mojca Pajnik were able to interview her at the Peace Insti-
tute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In her interview with them she addresses Benhab-
ibs and other critics concerns about how best to address conict 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 Habermass
and Derridas 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). Struhls 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, Youngs theoretical reections are aimed at allowing us to better under-
stand our specic 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 experienceand
performfeminine embodiment as a feminist activist?
Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Gender
Under the inuence 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 nds 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 Beauvoirs
critique of Merleau-Pontys privileging of the masculine body as the quintes-
sential human body, she rejects her characterization of the feminine body as
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 ones 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.
Youngs phenomenological analysis of feminine body styles and experi-
ences has inuenced trends in dance and performance theory, including the
poststructuralist gender theory of Judith Butler (1990). Her meditations on the
different type of selfother 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). Youngs analysis of the feminine habitus of spatiality was part
of the inspiration for further feminist scholarship by corporeal feminists as
evinced in Elizabeth Groszs work (1994). Susan Bordo (1993), also known for
her philosophy of the body, acknowledges that
Youngs 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 Youngs impact on dance and
performance theory, while Sandra Bartky explores the relevance of Youngs
early papers on throwing like a girl and breasted experience for her early
work. Inuenced by Youngs 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 Youngs
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 Youngs 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 readers to authors 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 womens 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 womens 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 ght 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
Anzalda (1983) and the Combahee River Collective (1977) ) and theorists work-
ing in legal theory (Crenshaw 1991) and sociology (Collins 2000) challenged
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
Reection 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 cultures denition of women as lacking and decient 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 specically 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. Youngs essay Gen-
der as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective (1994) develops
Sartres 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 objectication 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 womens 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.
Youngs more recent article on the relation of gender to the lived experi-
ence of women is Lived body vs. gender: Reections on social structure and
introduction 11
reexivity (2005). Here she responds to Toril Mois Sexual Difference position
that rejects social sciences 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 Youngs theory has the resources to
retain its theoretical mix of phenomenological and critical social structural
analysis of gender in spite of Youngs worries. Her own approach develops
farther than Young did with the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of the femi-
nine imaginary, and argues that it is Youngs implicit account of the feminine
imaginary domain that makes her body essays the most important contribution
to a feminist political phenomenology since Beauvoirs Second Sex. Mann sees
the connection between womens 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 Andersons trope of imagined
communities that connect individuals to potential collectivities. In this way,
imaginary processes can be said to provide links for possible political identica-
tions and dis-identications, which explain the layers of difference in the lived
experiences of women and women-identied 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
of goods, and argued for a paradigm of justice that involved government and
public political and economic processes that allowed for the development of
peoples 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
Rawlss 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 Rawlss the-
ory is ideal in several interrelated methodological senses: he prioritizes prin-
ciple over practice; he relies on a ctional reasoning process; and his theory is
designed for an imagined world that lacks many problematic aspects of human
nature and human society. By contrast, Youngs 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 Youngs methodology enable her to
develop a theory of justice that is more comprehensive, relevant, and norma-
tively acceptable than Rawls.
Youngs nonidealist approach also challenges Habermass rational-
ist deliberative ideals, in particular, in his construction of an ideal homoge-
neous public. In Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young enlarges Habermass
ideal public sphere with social, messy concepts, which have a productive
role even as they reect 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 Youngs 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: Reections 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 ofcial 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 Youngs criticisms of ofcial 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-states 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 peoples 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 Youngs open
border self-determination ideal. One of our contributors, Margaret Denike,
also draws on Youngs paper The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reections
on the Current Security State. Denikes contribution Engendering [in]secu-
rity and terror: On the protection racket of security states (chapter 10) takes
as its inspiration Youngs descriptive exposition of the security state, and the
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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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. 3133). Most democracy theorists do not
focus on self-development but instead build models of self-determination of a
societys members. Youngs work creatively weaves these two strands together.
Youngs 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 specic
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 nds 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 specic example of Black
reparations in the nal 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 Youngs 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. Youngs view of the possibility of oppression as the prod-
uct of structural injustice without culpability is contrasted with Cards 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, Cards view of oppression as a
moral evil will have to be qualied.
While oppression does not constitute a major category in Youngs recent
workoppression received no entry in the 2007 book index as opposed to the
category of violencemany theorists and teachers still nd valuable Youngs
(1990a) famous essay The ve faces of oppression and are able to apply it
to the different circumstances, from childrens 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 Youngs categories of exploitation,
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 excludeda
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 Youngs deliberative democracy (chapter 14),
Desire 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 ones dependence on the other for dignity, a recogni-
tion of ones 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
ones 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
Youngs 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 Benhabibs goal
of communicative democracy to t 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 todays 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 conict-
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 Youngs discussions of solidarity and the structural
positioning of groups by institutional racism, sexism, class exploitation, and

imperialism to show how Youngs 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 benet from
these processes. She argues that although Youngs 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 fulllment 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 rectication 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 eeing
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. Mriam Martnez 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 Youngs last writings about the nar-
rowing of multicultural conicts to issues of nationality, ethnicity, and religion
by applying Youngs denition 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 conicts 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.
Martnez argues that a structural power analysis of immigrant groups position-
ing should trump considerations of differences generated by ethnic, national,
and religious afliations.
Finally, it is striking how Youngs work on the politics of difference, since
it was based on her activist work in U.S.-based social movements such as those
for womens 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. Youngs 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 Womens work trips and multifaceted oppression (chapter 18) applies
Youngs 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 Youngs 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.
2
4
When I Think about Myself as Politically

Engaged, I Think of Myself as a Citizen:
Interview with Iris Marion Young
Vlasta Jalusic and Mojca Pajnik
I (VJ) met Iris for the rst 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
shed 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 shed be traveling to Europe in spring 2006,
and that shed love to come to Ljubljana before she traveled to a conference
in Prague.
We were really happy when she nally 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 GirlOn 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.
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. Youngs own words and the oral avor of the exchange.
VJ My rst 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 Mois 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, lets 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 Ill talk about two things: Its true that in the last fteen 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 dened
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 womens
oppression and feminist visions were founded, almost all of them were
called Womens Studies. And they were womens 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 fullled 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 Womens 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 dont 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 Womens Studies? Politically, this is not
very smart. . . . And theres 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 Womens Studies. And Id say that now the majority
of universities that Im familiar with in the United States have made
this shift between an old way of thinking about this disciplinary issue of
womens 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 itit was founded before I came
there, which was late in the game as these things goin 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 thats the rst 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 unspecic, and also that when people would talk about the
attributes of a woman they would have a bias in the denition 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 denition 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 Butlers important questioning of the category
of woman as necessary for a feminist movement. As I read it, Butler
argues that a movement doesnt require a single category around which
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 isnt 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 Butlers 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: its 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 denitions 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 everyonepeople are located in different positions in
the structure of normative heterosexualityand 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).

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

thinking about the category of gender, and trying to trace it backwe
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 womens movement or lets 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, its 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 gure out what gender is all about because it
is so much intersected with class, race, sexuality, etc. And one can easily say
that its 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 mainstreamingin the United States you dont have thiswhich
has become a public policy issue. And it can be an empty signier, so to
speak. It can be lled with anything. Its usually lled 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, its
interesting to see how the concept travels through structures and through
different countries and how its meanings are very much changing, although
feminist theorists ght hard to push forward a distinctive denition.
IMY I guess Im 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 dont think there are particularly other settings for the use of the term.
Its still a kind of specialized term. Its not a term that affects much of
ordinary life. You wouldnt go to the movies and say: I want to see a
good gender lm, 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
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 dont
have them then all we can talk about is individuals and their specicity.
And if we talk only about individuals and their specicity, then we cant
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 doesnt 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 womens
and gay and lesbians movements for politicians to think they have to
use the term at all. And, of course, it is an empty signier. Just about
everything in politics is an empty signier. Its up to people who are
in the struggle for certain results to ll it with the meanings that they
think are most important. But I dont 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 cant 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 ll in democracy as an empty signier, for example,
with issues of migration, lets 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.
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 dont see, for example, Bonnie Honigs book Democracy and the
Foreigner (2001) or even in my own book Inclusion and Democracy (2000),
or, say, in Seyla Benhabibs book The Claims of Culture (2002) or even
Anne Phillipss 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 theorythat
doesnt mean that the books that theyve written about democracy are
attempting to give a specically feminist account of democracy. I dont
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 wouldnt say that that book offers a theory
of what democracy is that is going to be specically 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
exclusioninclusion elements in the concept of democracy.
IMY But you can have numbers of writers that aim to do that, who
dont think of themselves as feminist, though they are probably not
against feminism, Will Kymlicka, for example. He supports feminism,
he is certainly interested in exclusioninclusion, and one could name a
whole bunch of others, for example, James Bohmans books Deliberative
Democracy (1997) and Public Deliberation (1996). I dont think there is the
word women . . . well they might refer to women as an example, once or
twice in the book. But its all about, or signicantly about, inclusion and
exclusion. What makes an issue feminist, in my view, is still that were
calling attention to specic oppressions of women who suffer because
of their social location. And if we start to extend the term feminist to
everything thats challenging marginalization, then I think it loses its
meaning. And I also think that has happened to a signicant degree,
more than it should, and so we risk that people will stop focusing on the
specic 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
befeminism might be a part of itsomething that grows larger or . . .?
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 Theyre very close.
VJ Still close to thisyouve been really ghting 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 wasas I understood ityour 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 dont 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 nd me theorizing identity. I think when I talk
about women as a social groupboth in the essay that I wrote Gender
as seriality (Young 1994a) and the more recent essay that weve just
discussed, Lived body vs. gender (Young 2002)Im saying: Its not
an identity. An identity is about . . . you can make a list of attributes that a
person has, and then you compare itthis is Aristotle, rightyou 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 its not about the attributes that a person has, as such. Its about the
positioning of individuals within relationships. And thats how I think
about women as a category and women as a group. And thats 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 its
always going to be something much more specic than women. It will be
a specic 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 thats 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,
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,
lets 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 debatesin 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, rst
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. Thats what its
calling for. This assumes that you can only have a strong political entity
if you rst have a political identity thats like a nation. It seems to me that
this has always been problematic especially when were talking about the
possibilities of the European Union as a political entity. Its especially
problematic here. Its calling on members, citizens of the European
Union or citizens of member states of the European Union to say: OK,
Ive grown up Slovenian, or Ive 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. Its one of the resistances that weve 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 its 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 theres 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.
I want to address what you say, about my response to Habermass

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 Habermass on May 31, which was cosigned by Jacques Derrida,
he calls upon EuropeI dont remember that Habermas actually in
that essay calls for European identity or thinks that it is a requirement
of what hes 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 its appropriate to do so, that is when its 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 thatthe 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 thats where its 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 Romeand probably
Ljubljanaand he just didnt 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 onthe 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. Its not true in the world today, and so I wanted to criticize
and claim: No, we dont 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
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 politicsit was a strong claim, so to speak. How do you see
this jumping from, lets say, from the sphere of thought to the sphere of
politics?
IMY If its done well it is not . . . philosophy when they do it, I would
say. Its a political speech spoken from a position of fame, if you will. But
I dont think its 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 theyve been wrong, but theyve
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; theres a different kind of discourse involved: you
have a purpose, you are partisan. Theres 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] Eurocentismtaking 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. Isnt it true that such criticism applies to Western philosophy
in general terms? In the sense that the concepts, for example, the public
sphere, inclusionexclusion, 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 youve referred to before, i.e., transnational movements and
activities.
IMY Certainly the concept of democracy has been taken over by people
all over the world and they think its theirs. They dont 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 isnt 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
its my understanding from reading Habermas, but even if Im wrong
this is what I thinkthe public sphere is evanescence: it comes to be, it
surfaces and then it oats 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 ofcials, 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 dont 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 thats what the concept
is about. Everyday politics isnt 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 Reections 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 eveningthe
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 fulll. But
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 rst 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 Marcuses 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 rst blush of Peros-
toika faded, the prevailing mood in Russia was one of cynicism. You revisited
Marcuses 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-Pontys 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 beforeand
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 reections were aimed at allowing us to better understand our spe-
cic social reality and become agents for political intervention.
One of my most signicant 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 intentto
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. Im trying to say goodbye now, but
nding it very difcult. Here I am at another RPA Conference, and it is very
hard to accept that I wont 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 lled with people who learned from you, who were
engaged in dialogue with you, who taught your books in their classes, and who
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 rst 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-
losophers 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 signicance 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 11September 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 11Septem-
ber 11, 1906, when Gandhi initiated his rst 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 peoples 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 administrations 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 Im 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 rst 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 signicant 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 reections on womens 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 mothers 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 rst 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
womens oppression? Did the bureaucrats who had your mother arrested and
removed you from the home become the prototypes of the systematic injustice
of our society? Did your mothers being arrested because she did not fulll
the standards of home cleanliness demanded by the suburbs, because she and
your family were different, begin the seeds of your afrmation 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 ll 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 briey 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
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 onesurely an
example of the logic of identity of which Iris Young has been so criticali.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 specicities of womans body:
the body of the sexually mature woman bleeds periodically; it has breasts,
it can become pregnant. Insofar as these specicities 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 specicities 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 identied 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 reec-
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 persons 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 womens 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 objectication of women,
breasts are the primary things (p. 190). This reication of breasts is at the
heart of the reication of women: we are identied without breasts (Im an ass
man, says one; Im a tits man, says another). Breasts are the most visible sign
of a womans femininity; the signal of her sexuality (p. 191). Young character-
izes briey but eloquently the range of womens 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 ash, that my breasts were clearly visible under my
t-shirt. I felt a powerful rush of rage and shame; I slapped the boys 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?
Youngs 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 deciencies; the proof of the enormous
social importance attached to womens 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 ow 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 womens 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 uid being of breasts is more apparent. They change their shape
with body position. Many womens breasts are much more like a uid than a
solid; in movement, they sway, jiggle, bounce, ripple even when the movement
is small (1990b, p. 195).
Young identies 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 uids, that such a metaphysics is more reective 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 uids and touch.
For many women, breasts are a multiple and uid 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
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
sexualitye.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 rst staretreating 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 womans 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 selsh (p. 199).
Iriss 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 rst phenomenological study of
pregnancy in the philosophical literature. What Iris chooses to make primary
in the pregnant womans experience of her own body is the way in which it
dees the positing of a unied subject: pregnancy, she claims, challenges the
assumption, so prominent, perhaps even denitive of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition, of a transparent unity of self. In pregnancy, a womans conscious-
ness is split, decentered or doubled, in a variety of ways: rst, she experiences
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
mothers body; fourth, her bodily boundaries alter rapidly so that the pregnant
body-subject has difculty locating her own boundaries and fth, 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 uid 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 rst movements of the fetus produce this sense of the
splitting subject; the fetus movements are its own, yet within me. I have some
difculty with this analysis: while it must be the case that early in pregnancy
one doesnt know whether internal sensations are entirely ones 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 womans consciousness? Early on, the pregnant woman
doesnt 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 isnt 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 doesnt 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 ux. In pregnancy I literally do
not have a rm sense of where my body ends and the world begins (p. 163).
I nd this perplexing too. Wouldnt 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 inuenced 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 ones 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 balanceits immanencethis awareness is understood for the most part
as cutting me off from the enactment of my projects. Iris takes issue with this
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 womans sense of power. Moreover, the cul-
tures 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. 16667).
Young identies 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 unied 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 nd it difcult 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 rst
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: Youngs 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 womans experience in pregnancy is often an experience
of alienation because her condition tends to be dened 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
at, 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 womens 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 doesnt 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 rst that the whole body is not put into uid and
directed motion, rather, the motion is concentrated in one body part and sec-
ond, the womans 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 womens movement; for example, in walking, the female
stride is shorter in proportion to her body size than is the males. 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 signicant 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 rmly and make their thighs carry the major portion of the weight
(pp. 14546). 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
produced by human transcendence. But womens 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-
ans inhibited intentionality disrupts what Young, following Merleau-Ponty,
believes should be the bodys unied and unifying being-in-the-world. The sub-
ject, in realizing its intentions reveals the worlds 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 womans 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 womans status as object but also her restricted inten-
tionality, i.e., her restricted freedom, that produces in us a sense that we are
conned 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: womens 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 denition
that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited,
conned, positioned and objectied. 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
womens movement, girls and womens participation in sports has expanded
enormously. Since the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments
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 womens 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 conned and limited experience of
space and movement (p. 15). I agree. The appearance of a womans 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 Beauvoirs analysis of femininity as the
doubled experience of being an objectied 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 inuenced by French poststructuralism, an inuence 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 specicities 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
specic 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).
What Iris seems to be saying is that while the language of some of these
essays appears to be humanist (in the sense dened above), their intention
is not.
I am strongly inclined to defend Throwing like a girl from some of Iris
own charges against it, rst that it construes women only as victims. Women
are, sad to say, often victimized, hence the need for a womens politics of lib-
eration. One of the differences between feminism and the black liberation
movement is that womens 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 recongure 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 nd a silver lining in every cloud. The pleasures of feminin-
ity, at least as mass culture congures 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 womens spatial restrictions without recom-
mending the tendency on the part of many men to monopolize the best chairs
in the household (Daddys chair), to have space in the home (Daddys study,
or workshop) to which children do not have automatic access even while they
have such access, whatever she is doing, to Mothers 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 Youngs descriptions actually apply to all women in Western societ-
ies, they function very efciently 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 Youngs 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
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 Youngs suggestion that there is
a historically specic 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 regure the
limiting and disempowering ways in which our bodily subjectivity has been
formed.
5
4
Resonance and Dissonance: The Role

of Personal Experience in Iris Marion
Youngs Feminist Phenomenology
Michaele L. Ferguson
As a philosopher deeply inuenced by phenomenology and by feminist con-

sciousness-raising activism, personal experience plays a very important role in
Iris Youngs feminist and democratic thinking. Even so, I nd 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 rst
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 mothers struggle with grief and suburban isolation, her familys
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 nd this story uncomfortable
to read for different reasons. It makes me angry at the suburban welfare state
bureaucracy that felt entitled to punish Youngs 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 Youngs 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 Youngs philosophy by thinking about what role her own personal experi-
ences play in these essays? Within these three pieces, I argue that Youngs
personal narratives function as synecdochesrepresenting each essays 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 signicant 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 womans experi-
ences are unique).
Among the most important contributions of Youngs 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 subjectivethey sound familiar to us. Nor do they lay
claim to universal validitywe 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 useven when they fail to
do sodemand 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 afrms her choice of subject matter and lays bare her motivations for
pursuing a particular line of inquiry. Insofar as her experiences conrm 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 rst example I want to consider is the peculiar rst-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 Womens Room. For the
rst time in fteen months that warm red ow 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 nding one womans face and
another and another. Fervently we converse about the days papers
and one anothers questions. We catch up on the news about one
anothers 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 Youngs response to debates over the cat-
egory of womenthe concept of gender as serialityis importantly different from Zerillis insofar as it focuses
on structural commonalities rather than political claims (Young 1997a).
2 In one of her regrettably few moments of reection 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. 1213).
That night in my restless sleep, I dream. A ballroom lled with

women, hundreds under the chandeliers, a reception after business
at the Society for Women in Philosophy. I it from one group of
women to another in smiling comfort. As I turn to nd another
friend I see her tall gure 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 reec-
tions of the remainder of this piece. And it is a storynot 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).
Youngs 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 Beauvoirs 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.
However, just as in the opening story, Young in the essay does not reject
Beauvoirs humanism altogether in favor of a gynocentric feminism that reval-
ues femininity and the particularities of womens bodily experiences. Even
after a delightful gynocentric day, Young nds 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. 8586).
Youngs 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 pregure its larger argumentnone
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 storys position at the very beginning of the
essay models how personal experiences can be an important starting point
for theoretical reections and innovations. Young suggests that Beauvoirs
lack of experience with pregnancy and childbirth shaped Beauvoirs theoreti-
cal vision. Similarly, Youngs 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 reect 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. 1314). 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. 99103). On
the other hand, she engages in the difcult 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.
Beauvoirs writings about periods, Young suggests that the (more or less) punc-
tual return of our menstrual ows 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 ow mundanely organizes our everyday adult
memory. Without meaning to, I nd 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 difcult during times when I hope
I will not be menstruating. (p. 121)
The repetition of periods orients women towards a kind of mundane self-
reection 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 reections
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 reect
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 reect 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 nal section of this chapter.

5 Youngs three collections of essays in feminism also provide her readers with a similar opportunity. She
invites us to reect 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-rst century; they
may also reect an evolution in the way a number of theorists have approached themes of gender and sexual dif-
ference (2005a, pp. 45).
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 reections about Beauvoir that form the
basis for much of Menstrual meditations.
Coming Home
The other personal narrative in Youngs work that I want to consider appears
in the middle of the essay, House and home: Feminist variations on a theme
(1997a, pp. 14447). In the midst of a discussion of dwelling and being-in-the-
world, she interjects an Interlude: My mothers 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 Youngs 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 conned her to the home (p. 145). Her family
moved from Flushing to the suburbs of New Jersey. Then, Young tells us,
my daddy diedquickly, quietly, of a brain tumor (ibid.).
Now a single mother consumed with grief and isolated in the suburbs,
Youngs mothers 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 behaviornarrowly understood in terms of keep-
ing house and maintaining sobriety. Her mothers failure to conform to the
states 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
re. There was not much damage to the house, they had caught the re early,
but when breaking in to douse it they had seen the papers strewn about and
dust on the oor and beer cans. My mother was arrested again (p. 146). This
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 neighbors]
phone to call a family friend to come and get us kidsI wasnt 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 themeas the subtitle of the essay
suggests.
The story, after all, is a story about home: the home that Youngs 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 nally the home that she found with her rehabilitated mother.
Homefraught, incomplete, unstable, unkempt, but home nonethelessis at
the heart of this essay, we might say. It is a resting point between the bookends
of theorizing in the rst 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-
culties 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
specic 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.
That it should be specically a story of home that plays this role in her work
should not surprise Youngs 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. 14950).
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 nds 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 uid 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 ux). 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
activistresisting 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. 16064;
2005a, pp. 15570).
But even if specic stories have the home-like function of grounding our
theoretical reections 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 activismensuring 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 reections 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 essays introduction, The purpose of this ges-
ture is to commemoratea motivation which is deeply personalbut also
to describe in concrete terms how disciplinary standards of orderly housework
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 familyand 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 Youngs 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 uswe
who have no personal memory of Youngs history of homeof 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 storieswhich 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 reecting 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 experiencewhether 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
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 reect 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 womens 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 qualied 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.
of her own experience would then mirror the kind of move made by Mara
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 Youngs vociferous critique of the use of experience to
claim authentic knowledge in the introduction to the volume containing this
essay, I nd this reading implausible. Drawing on postmodern critiques of
the traditional subject of philosophywho is gured as a self-transparent and
authentic source of knowledgeYoung 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 womens 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 reect 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
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 Youngs 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 denition of
the word, however, draws attention to the embodiedness of this repetition: it
denes 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 Youngs 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 weekthe
movement here is not always one that can be described as recognition (thats
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 specically 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. 3941) 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 nds 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.
However, the languages of recognition and resonance both seem to point

to an authentic originan original thought that is recognized, an original
sound that is resounded. This notion of the origin is at odds with Youngs 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 structuresay 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 iswe
could sayto 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 waysin 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 meaningof 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 nal 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 reect on our own stories.
Yet ideally these stories also move us in another way. When we come to see
through our sharing of experience the structures that constrain and enable us,
this moves us to engage in collective action. Youngs personal stories are, there-
fore, attempts at political persuasion: is it like this at all for you, too? Then let us
work together to x 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.
Youngs 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.
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

Youngs Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body com-
portment, motility, and spatiality, initially published in 1980.1 I argue that
Youngs 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 Youngs unique and per-
ceptive insight to consider movement patterns as part of those structures and
conditions that dene 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 womans 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 identies three principal features of this engagement with space: rst,
an ambiguous transcendence evidenced in the lack of forthrightness in wom-
ens gait and stride, and in a smallness in extending toward the limits of their
reach; second, an inhibited intentionality, exemplied 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 Youngs essay was reprinted in 1990. All quotations are taken from this latter publication.
parts of the body toward a single intended action. In identifying these features
of spatial engagement, Young implements criteria of sizethe length of the
strideas well as of effortthe concentrated energy mobilized to execute a
task. And she distinguishes between the whole bodys interactivity with its sur-
roundings and the organization within the body of its various parts.
Citing Merleau-Pontys 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 condent 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, conned, positioned and objectied
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 societys 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-Pontys claims for a singular
relationship between body and consciousness, Young also insists on the histor-
ical specicity of the patriarchal authority that pressures womens 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 reexive comments on her own
situatedness within the contemporary rst-world patriarchy infuse her inquiry
with modest particularity and also a lively sense of curiosity about ones own
life in relation to the world.
Locating Throwing
Youngs essay, from this early twenty-rst 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-
caults 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 elds of inquiry are seen in opposition to
one another, yet Youngs visionary approach provides a model for synthesizing
these two distinctive forms of inquiry.2 In her analysis, she builds out from the
individuals perceptual experience, while at the same time observing general
trends in socialization. By focusing on the bodys 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 specically at the decades just prior to the essays publica-
tion, the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 70s gave new momentum
to studies of the body as did the emerging eld 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 womens unique biological capaci-
ties, and to claim the rights to speak about the body publicly and without shame.
Feminist inquiries focused on womens experience as a sexual and procreative
being, with much research interrogating the bodys status in intercourse, preg-
nancy, birth, motherhood, etc. The rest of womans repertoire of physical behav-
iors and movements received very little attention. Young was among the rst to
investigate movement as one of the specic propensities of female physicality.
During these same years in the allied elds of psychology and sociol-
ogy, nonverbal communication studies identied 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-
specic or as manifesting a style of execution that was allied with a particu-
lar gender. Furthermore, the bodys movement, always conceptualized as the
effect or execution of the psyches will, was never accorded agency. It remained
a mute and dumb thing, capable only of exhibiting the results of a persons
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. 79.
Catching Throwing
Focusing on the construction of gender, Young anticipates the work of three more
recent and inuential philosophers concerned with corporeality, Sandra Bartky,
Susan Bordo, and Judith Butler. Writing a decade after Youngs 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 societys diverse mandates
for realizing proper femininity, connecting ways of moving to the grooming
and appearance of the body specied 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 itselfthe fashion and beauty industries, physical educa-
tion, the media, popular culture, and all those who participate in themthat
maintains and perpetuates the specications of the feminine. In this regard
she strengthens Youngs 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 womens 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 womens 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 signicant 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 signicant. And here it
functions tacitly, as a potential site of resistance to the normative.
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. Youngs concern, however, is rst 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
nds it necessary to excavate the hegemonic structurings of power before theo-
rizing resistance to them.
Reecting 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 Beauvoirs distinction between immanence and transcendence, Young
casts the feminine into a subordinate relationship with the masculine, one
that is dened only by its negation of the transcendent nature of male iden-
tity. Indeed, Youngs 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 gures as embedded within and xed 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 positivenegative 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 signicance 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 eld of dance studies, it is the constructed and historically
specic status of Youngs claims about movement that is so theoretically per-
tinent. As early as the 1930s, movement analyst Rudolph von Laban identi-
ed primary features of movement, its directionality, speed, tensility, and
ow through which any and all motions could be analyzed and categorized
(Bartenieff 1980, pp. 5859, 9293). For Laban these featuresits uni- or
multi-focused direction, its quick or slow speed, its light or bound tensility, and
its restrained or free owconstituted universal attributes, self-evident in all
motion. Laban further asserted that maleness and femaleness could be identi-
ed 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 Labans 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 worlds dances using criteria inspired by Laban to analyze motion capture
documentation of various performances. Where Young looks at the extent of
reach given a specic bodys 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 nally, although her analysis is specic 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 dances
signicance along just these lines.3
Reading a Feminist Choreographers Dance

as a Feminist Philosopher Might
In her essay from 1998 reecting 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), OShea (2007), and Tomko (1999).
opportunities, Youngs daughter and her friends move and carry themselves
with more openness, more reach, more active condence, than many of
Youngs cohort (1998, p. 286). Yet, Young nds that her essay remains perti-
nent to a signicant number of undergraduate readers. How might the femi-
nine have transformed so as to allow more openness yet still exercise the
oppressive inuence that would make a new generation of feminists enthusi-
astic about Youngs critique? For one answer to this question, I turn not to the
everyday pedestrian events for signs of genders 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 Andersons 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 nakedcovered 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 oor, 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
identiable: each scene is a takeoff on lmed 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
(199596). And for a lucid analysis of her choreographic strategies, see Hargreaves (2002).
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 lm or photo-
graphs. Even though the dancers precisely execute eighty-year old choreogra-
phy, they lack the accoutrements of the lmic 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 femininitys parts apart.
In all the obsessive repetition that overows 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 gures 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 Youngs initial observations
about female comportment, these dancers cant 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-
ce. 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 dancers
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 dancers 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.
How to describe this peculiar quality of restraint? Normally, restrained

movement signies 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 wont. The
restraint evident in this performance does not suggest a willful subject. It is,
to use Youngs 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.
Andersons choreographic process of copying and then splicing together
movement sequences from other sources also produces Youngs third prin-
ciple of feminine movementdiscontinuous unity. Because of the process of
copying the action, the dancers appear to wear the movement. Motions do not
originate in the bodys interiority, but instead get placed on the bodys surface.
The bodies execute the next action, as non-sequitur as it might be, without any
organic ow, any sense of movements purposefulness.
The second half of the performance turns darker. The happy jumping
becomes obsessive, meaninglessa 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. Andersons 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
ones 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 lm. 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.
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 nale, 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 nal image produces no
climax, no ta-da. As if to reassert, once again, the irony of the dances title, the
ending is as lame as the femininity which it celebrates is oppressive.
Yippee!we can be any gender we want. Yippee!its so much fun to play
with the codes. But the trope of the feminine, now uploaded into a sci- 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 seasons 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 avor of
the feminine.
Andersons pungent and incisive critique of the feminine in contemporary
society, like Youngs earlier analysis, integrates psychological and sociologi-
cal formations within the dancing body. Together, Youngs visionary insights
into movement and Andersons 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 Womens Movement
since Youngs essay, Anderson shows how womens experience of bodiliness
remains ambivalent in a male dominated world. Like the globally circulating
ow 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 departments 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 specic 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 nd ourselves
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 Youngs 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
cant 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 cant grasp the lived mean-
ings of structural injustice. But Youngs worries arent 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 Youngs 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 rst
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
womens 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 womens 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. 349). 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 nave sciences
that phenomenology had long since recognized as an abstraction from the life-
world (Moi 1999, pp. 3120; Heinmaa 1996; Mann 2006, pp. 113129). These
feminists have insisted that the lived-body is what feminists need in order to
overcome the entrenched tendencies toward the objectication of the body, as
well as the poststructuralists inability to afrm 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. Inuenced by poststructuralist treatments of
1 For a more complex account, see Heinmaa 1996.

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 nd another way of talking about gender that afrms 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 subjects 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 signicantly 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 denition 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 rst. 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 Youngs descriptions of female body experience, which disclose an imagi-
nary domain that is the place of the relation between our living of gender and
genders 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 rst animated.
Youngs Imaginary Domain
In Youngs rst 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 specic 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 bodys 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). Youngs 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.
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
denes the relation of the subject to its world (2005a, p. 30), so her descriptive
account of these modalities will reveal something important about womens
situation and lived experience as a whole (p. 30). What they reveal, Young
claims, is that womens particular situation, understood in Beauvoirs sense of
the term, is at the root of the modalities of body comportment and motility that
we recognize as feminine. The most signicant characteristic of this situation
is that a cultural requirement mandates that womens very self-identication
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 Youngs 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-
ed 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 Youngs account, I will use examples from
my own recent experience as the volunteer coach of my 8-year old daughters
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 ones 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 Youngs
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.
At the heart of Youngs account are certain modalities of feminine bodily

comportment and motility which she identies 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 didnt 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 eld 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 rst 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 rst time I used this phrase,
one of the parents joked that the boys wouldnt 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 didnt need to). The
rst 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 didnt 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.
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 gure out, as a rst-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 inch 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-Pontys 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 rst 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 denes 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
objectied 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-subjects 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 Bartkys (1990a) development and extension of Iris Youngs thinking on objectication.
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 outsideas 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 oor, 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-objectication as it did at the time of Youngs 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 denition, 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 xed 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

isnt yet the account of gender as an aesthetic relation between lived experience
and social structure that Youngs 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 afrm 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 womens situation. For many
girls an extensive process of re-habituation through continued practice is the only thing that is effective against
such imaginary barriers.
traditionssocial theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenologyto begin to ll

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 efcacy 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 irted 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
Andersons notion to talk about other kinds of commitments animated by a
more generally conceived social imaginary.
In Andersons classic denition 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. 1314),
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 ctions, 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).
Taylors social imaginary expands Andersons 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 t 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,
Id 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, wrongnessbroadly, 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 nd 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 ctional 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).
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 afrms, 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 identications.
These secondary identications, too, are forged in the res of a conagration 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 signicance through style. For Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is
unied 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).
an expressive gesture, which is an extension of the bodys 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 rst place in the interface with the worldwhich is
to say, in the body. A phenomenology like Youngs 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 hosts 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 womanand 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.
Youngs essays on female body experience came rst, 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 Boothbys claim that Binding appears to be the process by which
psychic energy becomes denitely attached to specic mental representations. The function of such binding of
energy with denite ideational elements is presumably to prepare instinctual energies for controlled discharge
(1991, p. 82).
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 didnt distract
us from the project of thinking structural injustice, she led us into it.
4
PART III
THEORIZING THE STATE:

METHOD, VIOLENCE,
AND RESISTANCE
8
4
LImagination au pouvoir: Comparing

John Rawlss Method of Ideal Theory
with Iris Marion Youngs Method
of Critical Theory
Alison M. Jaggar
After Iris Marion Youngs 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 Rawlss world. In this paper, I suggest that Youngs transforma-
tive contributions were made possiblethough certainly not guaranteedby
her method of critical theory.
Rawlss Method of Ideal Theory
The 1971 publication of John Rawlss 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 claried 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. Rawlss 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 reection 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 reective 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.
Rawlss methodological approach is also ideal in the sense that he argues
from a hypothetical reasoning situation, which he calls the original position. In
this ctional situation, the reasoners or parties are imagined to be free, equal,
and motivated exclusively by rational self-interest. Their reections 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 Rawlss 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, Rawlss 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 ction 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. 45). 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 signicant 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
limagination au pouvoir 97
life (Rawls 1971, pp. 89). 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).
Youngs Method of Critical Theory
Youngs overall philosophical project, like Rawlss, is to provide overarching nor-

mative ideals capable of clarifying specic 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 Youngs 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 Rawlss aspiration, in his earlier work, to
develop a theory of justice that is analogous to a scientic 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 reection 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
deciencies in contemporary . . . societies and at the same time to envision trans-
formative possibilities in those societies (Young 2000, pp. 89). So on Youngs
view, the political ideals developed by philosophers should not be imagined to be
universally applicable but instead should be tailored to specic social contexts.
Because ideal and critical theorists of justice conceive their philosophi-
cal projects differently, so their methods differ. Rather than reecting on the
nature and aims of a perfectly just society, the critical theorist reects 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 Rawlss 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
reecting 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 philosophers approach is exclu-
sively deductive or exclusively inductive because both use the method of reec-
tive equilibrium. Instead, this rst methodological contrast between Rawls and
Young is better seen as a difference in philosophical priorities. Rawls focuses
on developing a general ideal of justice, condent that it will illuminate particu-
lar injustices, though he says relatively little about these. Young begins with
particular injustices and draws on her knowledge of these in developing her

general ideals. Thus, Rawlss method of argumentation tends to be top-down,
in a logical sense, moving from general to particular; Youngs 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 ctional; 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 ction intended to transcend the partial and imperfect reasoning of situated
individuals, Youngs 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 reectively 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, Youngs 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
nonhumaneven inhumanbeings in an impossible situation might recom-
mend for a world that could never exist. Instead, she reects on what is actually
valued by real people struggling with specic existing injustices.
Some Advantages of Youngs 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.
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 elds. 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 sufcient 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 Rawlss and
Youngs 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 accounts 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 elds but especially in ethics and politics. Nevertheless, many people would
agree that Youngs account of justice is more comprehensive than Rawlss. For
instance, Young directly challenges the limits of Rawlss 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, Youngs
account of the ve 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
conceptions ability to address the most signicant issues of justice facing a
given society. A number of critics have noted that Rawlss 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 denes 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
her last work, she addressed consumers political responsibility for the foreign
sweatshop conditions in which many of their products were manufactured.
Thus, Youngs work is far more relevant than Rawlss to many pressing injus-
tices. The greater relevance of Youngs 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 signicant injustices, just as a good conception of democracy should not
obscure or rationalize signicant political exclusions. Among other problem-
atic features, Rawlss 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) Youngs 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 Rawlss and Youngs theories of justice but I hope they
show how Youngs work is at least arguably more comprehensive, relevant,
and normatively acceptable than Rawlss. 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-
ples 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 Rawlss 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 reection about justice in a world that at present is still
discouragingly unjust.
The Limits of Method or Limagination au pouvoir
Although Youngs use of a critical nonidealizing method helps in understand-

ing her ability to make powerful philosophical contributions, it certainly does
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 scientic methods have often been invoked to produce con-
clusions that are quite mistaken.
An additional factor enabling Youngs philosophical contributions may
well have been her experience as a woman in a world of male dominance and
in a discipline where womens 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 gods
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 sufcient. Many women scholars never notice male
bias in the philosophical canon or prejudice in academic lifeand increasing
numbers of men are able to recognize these. Young was a woman but she
was also white, heterosexual, and Americanand 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 Youngs 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 limagination 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.
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, reec-
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 administrations 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: Reections 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 ofcial violencethe
violence perpetrated by agents of the state as means to achieve their mission
of law enforcement (2007, p. 95) either domestically or internationallyand
of the rhetoric that is deployed to mobilize support for ofcial 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 Youngs 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.
I think that Youngs criticisms of ofcial 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-
tiable means to acceptable ends as in the case of some military humanitarian
interventions.1 In order to both bring out the value of Youngs insights and
examine the problems with her approach, I rst offer an analysis of Youngs
three essays on violence that brings out the main lines of her position. I fol-
low this analysis with a comparison between Young and Jrgen 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 Youngs position. Youngs position, though, can be modied and I end by
building on Youngs insights and modifying them in light of the comparison
with Habermas to offer a more productive view of the possibility of a justiable
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 reections 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 Arendts
On Violence (1969)3 along with a few additional texts by Arendt that helped her
clarify some of Arendts claims with regard to violence.
What Young nds useful in On Violence is the Arendtian distinction between
violence and power. While suggesting that Arendts 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 reect
a claimed justicatory 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 reecting 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 Arendts 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 Arendts 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 Arendts 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 eeting 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 Arendts differentiation between the justication 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 justication. The need for jus-
tication 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 justication. The justica-
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 justication of violence that is very signicant to her own thinking about
violence, which is that each act of violence must be justied 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).
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 ofcial, 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 justied on a case
by case basis. The justication itself should not invoke legitimacy, for example,
the legal authorization of this or that ofce 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 justications 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 Arendts only guideline for the justication of violence as a
forward looking consequentialist justication into a guideline regarding the
relation of means and ends, Young questions the tness of the two in each of
the cases that she analyzes. According to her, the justication of the threats or
uses of violence in each one of the cases does not succeed due to a lack of t-
ness between means and ends.
The rst 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 justiable
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 inicted (Young 2007,
p. 99). Limitations on the scope of violence, immediacy, and containment of
effects, and the balancing of harms inicted 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.
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 specic 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 specic
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 ofcial violence.
Young makes this very clear in her examination of NATOs 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 decit7 in the international arena. And,
though Young does not make connections between her Arendtian based theo-
retical reection 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
Youngs analysis of the security state, which is the most directly femi-
nist of her analyses of specic cases of violence, can also be read through the
9
lens of her Arendtian based theoretical reection 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 decit is mine. I use it as a parallel
to the term democratic decit 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 Youngs Envisioning a global rule of law (2007b) differently of course, and thus as
basically repeating, reafrming, 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.
enables Young to demonstrate how the security state undermines democratic

politics and since such an undermining contributes to the production of a
power decit, the connections between her feminist analysis of the security
state and her Arendtian based theoretical reections on violence seem concep-
tually straight forward.
Youngs 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 specic 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 mens 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)
Jrgen Habermas is less of a populist than Young and, as is implied by Youngs

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
Youngs, 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 NATOs 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 nds the two to be different from
each other in some signicant ways.
10 I nd 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 Bohmans work (2005) on the concept of the demos and its developments in Habermas and
Habermasians claries the importance of the distinction between a people and the demos or demoi.
In his 1999 Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legal-
ity and Morality, Habermas cautiously yet unequivocally defends NATOs
intervention in Yugoslavia. NATO began bombing Serb targets on March 24,
1999 after the failure of the United States envoy, Richard Holbrookes, last visit
to Belgrade, where he attempted to convince Slobodan Milosevic, President of
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to agree to NATOs 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 ceasere 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, Kosovos 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 NATOs 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 NATOs 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 peoples resources.
The Left has also been critical of the legality and morality of NATOs action
when taken as independent of possible machinations by the United States.14
Habermas attends to a specic version of the debates about Kosovo as they
were developing in the Federal Republic of Germany, the parties to which he
classies as pacists by conviction and legal pacists (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-
sms should prevail in the international arena.
German pacists by conviction opposed NATOs intervention in Kosovo
on principle. German legal pacists supported NATOs 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. NATOs 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 afrms questions of legality see Rodely and ali (2007).
to intervene in Kosovo.15 Habermas aligns himself with the legal pacists.

Legal pacism 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 afliation 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, exemplies 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 Kants 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 nds
steps by the UN that exemplify at least a striving toward the goal of protecting
individual human rights, such as the UN Charters 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 rst 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).
With his two amendments of Kant, Habermas revises and updates Kan-
tian legal pacism 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 Habermass criteria while NATOs 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 t 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. 270271). 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 NATOs self-
authorization. Cases should be examined in their historical specicity. Whether
or not one can invoke necessity to justify military action in other cases remains
an open question. A historically specic 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
Habermass and Youngs positions are not as far apart from each other as
they may seem at rst 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 worlds peoples. All of this is important since it means
that Youngs and Habermass sense of how nonideal the political environment
within which violence is currently deployed in public affairs is similar, though

the specic vocabularies that they use differ from each other. And yet, Young
and Habermas disagree about NATOs military humanitarian intervention in
Kosovo. For me the importance of the disagreement is that it points at what
I think are utopian elements in Youngs thinking.
Youngs and Habermass disagreement concerns the justication of
NATOs intervention. Habermas appeals to legal pacism 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 Serbias 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
NATOs military humanitarian intervention and nds 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).
Youngs opposition to NATOs intervention in Kosovo involves suspicions
of the kind that Habermas tries to displace by positioning NATOs 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 crisisto what ought to be done when, to use Habermass
phrase, thugs take over. Youngs appeal to only the consequences of NATOs
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 powerits generation, renewal, aug-
mentation, or institutional stabilization. Young does say that NATOs turn to
violence indicates an impotence or, to use my preferred expression, power
decit 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 NATOs 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
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 Arendts endorsement is qualied 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 NATOs 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.
NATOs action, in this respect, represents a deployment of violence by power
that is justied by the compelling importance of intervening with violence and
in Kosovos case, a violence of a particularly pernicious kind.
Still, given Youngs 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 decit that
Young is concerned with is extensive, no protective use of violence in the inter-
national arena, no matter how strong its justication, can be accepted without
deep worries about its disempowering effects.
I am, however, not sure that one could claim that NATOs 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, NATOs 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
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 Kosovos declaration of inde-
pendence in February 2008.
Cautious Justications
By including KFORs post-bombing presence in Kosovo as part of what I am

taking as NATOs military humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, I am creating
the possibility of expanding on the consequences that are considered when
analyzing the justicatory 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 decit 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.
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 conicts, 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
Orends 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 peoples power, that Young relies on. Jus post bellum principles should be this
demanding rather than minimalist in their interpretation.
It is, I think, Youngs 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 justicatory 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 Negris 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 justiable 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
ltered through and modied 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 States imperial presidency (for example, Schlesinger 2004; Savage
2008) is conned.
19 I refer to Hardt and Negris optimism regarding peoples power as formulaic since it seems to reect
in very modied form the Marxist hopes for a proletariat revolution.
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 Youngs writings on social justice are questions con-
cerning powerquestions such as what power is; what forms it takes; how it
operates in different contexts; how it produces or modies 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. Specically, I trace her interest in, and
application of, what she refers to as Michel Foucaults paradigm shifting
accounts of productive and disciplinary power, that is, of the approach that
1 Young denes 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).
has reverberated widely in feminist and queer theories on the nature of

the normativeand especially heteronormativeinstitutional, disciplinary
practices that engender the bodys movements, comportment, desires, and
that shape, manage, and determine behavior in accordance with certain het-
erosexual norms.
In the rst part of this chapter, I trace Youngs 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 reecting on her analysis of the machi-
nations of security states, such as these, I briey 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 Youngs
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 Foucaults critical approach to

technologies of modern disciplinary power, which inect 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 injusticeoften as the acts of
an individual perpetrator or as the unethical distribution of goodsimpedes
our ability to see the faces of oppression or get a sense of our complicity in
producing them, much less nd 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 rst 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-
ed (Puar 2007) with nationhood and citizenship. Weve 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 proling;
heightened restrictions for immigrants and refugees; a proliferation of excep-
tional justications 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. 2526).
To capture the conditions and causes of social inequality, Youngs Justice
and the Politics of Difference (1990a) gives us what amounts to a composite de-
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 womenfrom 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 Youngs 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
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. 2526); 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 reected 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-
vidualsthe saviors and those who are grateful to be savedin 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, Youngs 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 nd men and women complicit in sustaining gender and racial hierarchies
and practices of exclusion and marginalization. In her 2003 essay on the sub-
ject, Youngs 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 exemplied 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 states 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
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. 34).
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 nds masculine power metaphorized through
the trope of sexual predator or tyrant of the sort that enslaves and brutalizes
women.2 Against such gures, 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

Exemplied 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 nds
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.
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 Bushs 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 justications (such as ghting 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 proling; 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 conrmed 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 Bushs 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 justication 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.
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 deecting 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 didnt 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 dening character is fear, and which will be based on the right
of the worlds 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 Administrations 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 conict 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. 122123). 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 rst challenges brought by
the prisoners detained under Bushs 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).
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 ght-
ing the good ght 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 justication for
war, the reforms to immigration policies that tighten the nations 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. 187190).
The engendered colonization of the Muslim womens 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 justication 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 indenite
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).
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
enemys evil, and a moral justication 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 rst taste of freedom
diverts attention from the damage that the devastation of armed conict 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 conict, 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
womens lack of education and training make it difcult 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 protectionisms glorication of military vio-
lence, and the patriotism, nationalism, and racism that is produced by it.
The Enemy Within: Racial Proling

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 proling 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, Were seeing women take their rightful place in societies that were
once incredibly oppressive and closed. Were seeing the power and appeal of liberty in every single culture. And
were proud once againthis nation is proudto advance the cause of human rights and human freedom (cited
in Engle 2005, pp. 42930).
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 codication of racial proling in several areas of law,11 fostering sup-
port for discriminatory treatment against visible minorities. Racial proling, as
Reem Bahdi puts it, entails the use of race as a proxy for risk (2003, p. 295);
as the states 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 proling, 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 nations borders,12 authorizing federal law enforcement
ofcials, 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 Ofce 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 Ofce 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.
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 rst 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 inde-
nitely detained; security certicates, which allow for the indenite 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 persons presence is a threat to national security (cited in Roach and
Trotter 2005, p. 971); or the public interest immunity provisions of Canadas
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 conict. Their effect, rather, is
to expand the legislative and institutional means to prole, 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 Canadas Anti-Terrorism Act.

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 nd 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 prole, 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 notand to what extentthey
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 reection on Youngs analy-
ses. Despite her sensitivity to many of the human costs of protectionist power,
we could do further justice to Youngs approach by eshing 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 bodiesour enemies bodies and those
who look like themare marked, not for being lived, but for imminent death
(Puar 2007, p. xxiv). The dictum of the Bush administration that youre 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 dyingIraqi detainees accused of terrorist
afliationsin 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 nding grateful women among
the disciplined docile patriots of the nation and among the victims of the
others 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
a necropolitics (Mbembe 2003, cited in Puar 2007, p. 96) looms in the bio-
political fostering and management of life.
Jasbir Puars 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 Youngs 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, lm 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 bodyhomosexuality, 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
ight that fought back16), embraced as an American hero, a good son and
team player, rehabilitated by protectionisms 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 Youngs 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 ight, 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/ight93.htm for one of many blogs and Web sites that cel-
ebrate Mark as a gay national hero.
complicities by which new regulatory normative apparatusesand related

rules, laws, and practicesare 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 ner details
are revealing of the systemic forms of power and structural injustices that dont
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,
nd femininity aligned with passivity and dependence, helplessness, and mal-
function; and the glorication of male violence in renewed justications for
attacks against evil others and alien threats. Attention to both the shifting
forms and more permanent structures that protectionist power takesand to
who benets and who pays the price for thembrings 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
11
4
Iris Youngs 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 lled in. One crucial chapter still takes the form of an
independent paper on Hannah Arendt, and it was Iriss plan to integrate the
argument of that paper fully into the book, with a consequently diminished
focus on the exegesis of Arendts 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 nd 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, rst, 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 books 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 Iriss work very well to ll 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 Youngs 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 lling in those page references.
134 justice: ethics and responsibility
between guilt and responsibility; and nally, third, to puzzle over that distinc-
tion and to suggest an alternative formulation, since I think that the best way to
honor Iriss daring and provocative contribution is to wrestle with it. My main
aim throughout, however, is to allow you all to hear Iriss 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 ofcials, 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 rst 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
nds 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-
ers 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 rst 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 difcult 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 deecting
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 rst 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 Dworkins theory
and to the related theory of John Roemer, which, unlike Dworkins, makes
room for structural injustice.
Youngs second chapter, entitled Structure as the Subject of Justice, pres-
ents Youngs 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 Sandys situation,
including her earlier educational choices, her choice to get divorced, and her
choice to value highly her childrens education. Nonetheless, we also feel that
something has gone badly wrong when a person like Sandy cannot nd a place
to live that she can afford.
Can we blame Sandys situation on specic individuals with whom she

has come into contact? Going through the available options, Young argues that
we really cant. No particular agent she encounters has done her a specic
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 its 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 Rawlss 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 Rawlss 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
Im 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 briey, 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
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 Arendts 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 societys 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 Sandys situation are not helpfully analyzed
in terms of guilt. Pinning guilt on someone is not appropriate, rst, 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 signicantly 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 ofcials . . . . The power of some actors is improperly inated and that
of many others is ignored. We also deect 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
unproductive blame-switching. Even when people do acknowledge guilt,

nally, 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 rst 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 Youngs 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 specic parameters: First, an agents
power, her position, within structural processes, for actual inuence over those
processes. People who have greater inuence have greater responsibility.

Second, we ought to consider an agents privilege. Privilege and power usu-
ally go together, but in most such situations there are some privileged agents
who dont have much causal inuence: nonetheless, simply because of their
privileged lives, they have greater responsibility than others. Third, we must
consider an agents 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 rst is reication, 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, Ive done nothing wrong and
so how can you ask me to take responsibility for improving these conditions?
Drawing on Onora ONeills 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 rst place.
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 innite 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, havent
done anything wrong. Here Young discusses critically Bob Goodins 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 governments
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 Youngs argument.
In Youngs 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 briey 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.
Young does not tightly dene 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 sufcient 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 rst two conditions) that a given agent can be said to
be responsible. I dont think that this third condition creates any obscurity in
Youngs 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 rst 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 Youngs ve pragmatic arguments. Young argues, rst, that focus-
ing on xing 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, fth, 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 Youngs 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 difcult 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 cant be right to say, well, looking back
on it, she did nothing wrong at t, and we should now forget about t and focus
exclusively on what lies ahead of her at t + 1. If we take that line, preserving the
clean distinction between retrospective guilt (which were 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 indenitely, 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 doesnt 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 de-
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 agents task is within a general scheme of shared
responsibility. Indeed, Youngs various criteria (power, privilege, interest, col-
lective ability) give us a good way of thinking about the size of a given agents
share, whether in the end we endorse exactly this account of how the shares
divide or some other similar account. So, we dont 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 peoples failure. So, I must
now confront those ve 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
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 selsh 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 doesnt learn about fairness, since she
doesnt learn what she did unfairly just now. Indeed, she doesnt 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 ones own obviously quite harmful acts.
Youngs 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 persons 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 lms.
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 Gores An
Inconvenient Truth3 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.
culpable inattention. So Youngs 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 difcult 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 wont
get the ascription of blame right.
Youngs 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 insufcient 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 nd the full text of this speech is www.americanrhetoric.
com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.
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 cant sincere self-examination be a very important ingredient
in the process of genuinely turning outward toward others? It seems to me
that its 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. Gandhis 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 condent 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 Gandhis view of political struggle,
or my related, but rather psychoanalytically inuenced, 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.
12
4
Injustice, Evil, and Oppression
Claudia Card
A New Paradigm
Iris Youngs 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 inuenced by
John Rawlss idea of justice as fairness in distributing benets and burdens
of social cooperation. Rawlsian approaches tend to begin from and become
xated on economic and political conict resolution under ideal conditions.
Young does not take justices primary concern to be adjudicating conicts 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 benets 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 Fryes Oppression (Frye 1983,
pp. 116).
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. Youngs 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 claries 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 casesagency, 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 Youngs argument in ID is that
inclusion of diverse social groups in a societys 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 ve
faces: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and
violence (Young 1990a, p. 40, pp. 4863). Of these ve 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 JPDs rejection of a distributive paradigm of justice. Developing
agency, in Youngs 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 Youngs 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. 99102). 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 ones 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 ones starting points in life (and often ones 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. 610). 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
signicant 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 dening 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 Youngs 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 politicssuch 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 books title. Yet the groups indi-
cated by these names actually form an odd list, as she soon realized. Women,
ethnic groups, and people identied by sexual orientation, not to mention age
groups and religious groups (added a few pages later, pp. 4243), are not all
groups of the same order, even though none of them is a mere aggregate.
Their structures are signicantly different. Members of such groups are related
to one another in signicantly 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 specic afnity 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 specic afnity 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,
and so on. And yet, afnities 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 Sartres Critique of Dialectical Rea-
son (1976), becomingas she put itone of Linda Singers 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 afnity 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 identied 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 womens
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 signicant others (usually male). When we published, many of us
used initials instead of giving our rst 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
structuresincluding sexual divisions of labor and enforced heterosexuality
that had made us into what Young initially calls a serial collectivity.
In ID Young moves further from Sartre and articulates her own vocab-
ulary to mark differences among collectivities. She rst 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 dened by interactive relationships
among their members. All the philosophers in the world form an aggregate,
not unied by any external structures or materials. But some of us belong to
associations of philosophers. Associationssuch as the American Philosophi-
cal Associationare purposefully constituted for specic 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 dened. 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 Fryes claim, in her essay The Possibility of Feminist Theory,
that what unify women are overlapping patterns, rather than common charac-
teristics (1992, pp. 5975). 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 ts well with Fryes
observation that the term oppression embeds the term press, which sug-
gests reduce, mold, and immobilize (1983, pp. 27). 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 signicant 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 unied 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
womens 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. Youngs 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
rst espoused it, that lesbians are not women, that a lesbian has to be a not-
woman (Wittig 1992, pp. 920). Sarah Hoaglands lesbian ethics was very
inuenced 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
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 benet 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 waysfor
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 inu-
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
afrm, tolerably coherent identities that are relatively stable, that have integrity,
and that support self-esteem and self-respect.
To appreciate how her conception of oppression evolved, let us revisit

Youngs ve faces of oppression in light of her later work on social groups, trac-
ing some of the modications that the later work requires in her earlier work.
The faces, recall, are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural
imperialism, and violence (Young 1990a, pp. 40, 4863).
In JPD Young invokes Marxs (1967) account of exploitation as appro-
priation. The capitalist appropriates the powers of workers. Politically, this is
more on target than Kants view of exploitation (Kant 1996; pp. 7981). It is an
understatement to say that oppressive exploiters fail to respect others as ends
in themselves. Marxs 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 Sartres paradigm of serial collectivity.
Exploited workers are robbed of control over their powers and of benets
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 workers labor does stunt the workers growth as an interactive social
agent. The result is apt to be a stultifying lifeno hope or vision for the future,
not much different from being a long-term prisoner. The working poor who
resist Marxs view or who nd it offensive tend to emphasize kinds of control
and forms of culture that are less dependent on economicshumor, 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
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 individuals 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 nally 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 ones capacities for
agency (ones 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 denazication. Denazication
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 Youngs ve 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 Youngs faces of oppression are best
seen not as analytic of the concept of oppression but as characteristic forms
that injustice takes. Injustices include many forms of domination as well as

oppression. Youngs aim was never to offer an analysis, in the sense of a set of
necessary and sufcient 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 Rawlss 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 ofce. 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 Rawlss
theory between basic liberties and income or wealth. In Youngs 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 ones 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 Youngs 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 ones
sense of justice as part of ones moral sense.
Youngs 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,
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 denable independently of the psychologi-
cal states of individuals. Oppression is dened 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-
totles narrow sense of that concept (Aristotle 1925, pp. 10636): not receiving
ones due. What counts as ones due is denable 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. 12528).
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 gures promi-
nently. For a while I was inclined to reconcile Youngs 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
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 selshness 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 denition of evils is that the new denition 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 dene, or structure, the practice are not even partially
justied, morally speaking. That is, there are no good moral reasons in favor of
those norms. That view is compatible with Youngs 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.
has recently reminded me (2004), is a primarily moral category, not primarily

a political one. Justice straddles both ethics and politics. If a specically 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, Youngs lifelong work on oppression bears a certain analogy or
parallel to my own focus on evil, despite our differences.
13
4
The Faces of Animal Oppression
Lori Gruen
About fteen 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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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.
much the same. Humans dictate how nonhuman animals in human environ-
ments will fare. Given that human environments are continuously expanding,
that human behaviorsi.e., emitting green house gases and polluting water and
aircannot 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 Youngs 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 benet
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 difcult 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 inammation of the mammary glands,
or mastitis. Sows are conned for their entire lives and repeatedly articially
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 widethey literally
have no room to move. Hens are kept in battery cages stacked tier upon tier in
huge warehouses. Conned 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 ve billion animals
annually in the United States alone are intensively conned, manipulated, and
ultimately slaughtered to produce the greatest prot 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 prot. The animals are exploited and when their labor is thor-
oughly extracted, they are killed.
Youngs 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, denes 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 ofces 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 68 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 dont 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.
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 whales 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 benets that are gained by both
the companion animals and their human companions in domesticated rela-
tionships that are thoughtful and compassionate,5 the potential benets 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).

injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character,
its existence as a social practice (Young 1990a, pp. 6162). The assembly-line
method of intensive agribusiness is violent from start to gruesome nish. 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 wont 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 ones life is
conned 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 ight,
but which, by their relations to each other, are as conning as the
solid walls of a dungeon. . . . (Frye 1983, pp. 45)
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 Youngs 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.
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
y away, only humans can understand the structures that prevent her ight.
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 beneting 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 benet from them, even in cases where the individuals being
oppressed may also be said to benet. For example, if becoming a sexual servant
gets one out of conditions of horrible poverty, then there may be at least some
benet for the sexual slave, but that doesnt mean the conditions in which she
exists are not oppressive. There are those who benet (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
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-
ties are objective. They provide a means of refuting some peoples 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
afliations that members of the group share. The group nonhuman animals
seem to be based on a taxonomical distinctionthe 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 classication 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, uid and shifting (Young 1990a,
p. 48), but insofar as they are identiable to those in positions of power, they
can be subject to oppression. Unlike unied analyses of oppression, one of the
virtues of Youngs 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.
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. Youngs 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 Youngs 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 dont 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 specically to this question.
The Signicance 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 animals 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.
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 identied 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 identication 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
viewthey 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 abolitioniststhey 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 doesnt see the contrast between abolition
and regulation in such stark terms. He argues:
Its absurd to say that because we do one thing that is arguably bad
for [animals] therefore it doesnt 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 shouldnt 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 hereCarol 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.
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, Ive 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 lled,
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 lled dark sheds. The hens are still debeakeda painful
process that involves using a hot blade to cut through the complex horn, bone,
and sensitive tissue of the hens 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 conate 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
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 signicant prots 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 conicts 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 ones 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 nd 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).
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 justication 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 Youngs analysis of the faces of
oppression provides a valuable way to begin this long-overdue process.
14
4
Making Character Disposition Matter

in Iris Youngs Deliberative Democracy
Desire 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 aws, 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 aws. 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 unintentionalyet 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.
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 Youngs project is
seemingly straightforwardthe 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 Youngs, 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 Youngs proposals
1 Youngs project of inclusion has its critics. Mara Lugones (1994), for one, has been critical of Youngs
past attempts at using social difference as a resource, particularly Youngs 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
briey 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 rened 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
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 identies 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 isnt 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-noseit 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
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. Specically, she
focuses on the way deliberators greet one another (greeting or public acknowl-
edgment), the way ones preferences and thoughts are shared (rhetoric), and
the form ones 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 afrm 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
ones week has been, having food and drink together, etc., before deliberation
begins. This period of informal chatting has been pejoratively called soften-
ing uppacifying to increase agreeabilitybut it neednt 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 communicationespecially persua-
sive communicationby 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 ones 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.
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,
supercial (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 theyre in ofce 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 attery, 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 others 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. 5861, my emphasis)
Youngs 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
Youngs greeting is a political acknowledgment. By addressing others before

deliberation begins, individuals soften up one another and bring about a calm
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 correctivesit requires a certain
kind of acknowledgment that comes from a certain kind of disposition.
Youngs 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 anothers 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 reects in
ones 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 others particular interests,
problems, desires, or needs.
After all, democratic deliberation is more than an arena for discussion
across differencein deliberation individuals expect to make a decision on
some issue after what can be difcult 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 anothers 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.
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, supercial 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 articial 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 neednt 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 ones 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 ones own is a well-known stimulant for self-reection.
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 Fisks 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? Reec-
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
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 actionsthey 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, ofcials, 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 Fisks and Schmitts,
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 ones community. For example, one would feel compas-
sion toward ones black neighbors when they suffer from discriminatory social
and political structures and would appropriately feel outrage at the structures
that cause it.
Conclusion
Democracys 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 democracys 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
of political involvementbut 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
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 unnished 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 Youngs 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 Youngs
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 rst prepared for the Feminist Philosophy Conference May 1112, 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. governments 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 ODonnell
(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 Youngs 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 identied as the leading cause of the harm or damage
done to a specic person or persons, for example, when someone has damaged
or stolen someone elses 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 conicting 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 ofcial 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.
Youngs 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: rst, I shall raise a puzzle over
the issue of whether practices which violate what could be taken to be the
universal principle of respecting womens 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 nd a way to construe Youngs
political responsibility paradigm to cover these cases, we may want to argue
that her paradigm, while necessary, is not sufcient to cover all cases of global
injustice not covered by the Liability paradigm.
Secondly, I shall argue that we need to broaden Youngs 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.
Womens Rights as Human Rights
Do people in other countries have a moral obligation in any sense, or a politi-

cal responsibility in Youngs sense, to try to intervene in another country in
order to avoid a systemic institutional injustice which violates womens 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 womens human rights from
a cosmopolitan point of view, would argue that we do have such obligations, for
our obligations to protect peoples 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 justications for imperialist interventions, as in the case of Laura
Bushs 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. Youngs political responsibility paradigm wont help us with these
cases, although it can help us with duties within the nation-state to oppose
violations of womens 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 benet 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
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
conicts 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 benecial 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 inuential book on Justice, that we must include rights to self-development,
to freely exercising and developing ones 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.
Youngs approach is distinctive not only in its emphasis on different cen-
tral valuesself- and collective-development and democratic inclusionthat
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-dened 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.
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: rst, 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 identication 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 nds Bayertzs 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
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 Bartkys (2002) con-
ception of solidarity, it is problematic whether such a claim is plausible, given
the empirical difculties involved in getting people who dont 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 ones 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 nds oneself in an internationally competitive market-
place where ones own low paid job requires one to nd low cost consumer
goods, one might feel ones solidarity with the group interests of ones own
family members if the household economy trumps any solidarity owed to those
not ones 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 womens 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 identied as a woman by ones 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
ones own.
Carol Gould (2007b) argues that we can develop a notion of transna-
tional solidarity which would be premised on the existence of overlapping
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 groups
priorities to ght oppressions promoted by those very social institutions or
processes in which the rst group may garner privileges. This then can lead
to a moral/political commitment to challenge these other oppressions as if
they were ones own, as a way to promote the common collective good of
other relevant groups of women. This will rst 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 dene ones 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 ones 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 ones transformational moral identity based on the collective
good of all women.
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 redenition 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 redene this as transforma-
tional solidarity.
While hooks and Allens rearticulation of a sisterhood as transformational
solidarity may avoid the problems faced by Morgans 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 ght for a collective good for women that
includes challenging all structural social injustices. Doesnt this suppose the
leisure time and resources to meet and dialogue with women across national
borders that only relatively privileged women have? Dont 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 Jonsdttir (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 specic 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 Arendts 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 ght relations of subor-
dination (Allen 1999, p. 109).
various areas of lifepolitical, 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 conict. 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 womans position vis--vis the men in the polity or
more specic social grouping. An empirical argument for an inclusive social
justice solidarity could be based on the need for a massive womens movement
across race, class, and other social domination differences to achieve womens
formal interests. The popular way of putting this interest-based argument in
the U.S. second-wave socialist feminist movement was the slogan: we cant be
free until everyone else is free2.
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 others 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 afnities,
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 conicts 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 benet
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.
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 prot. 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 womens 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 justications 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 ones 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 womens organization. These spaces are operating
under the principle of Justice as solidarity, that is, from each according to their
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). Womens rights and womens groups with other social justice foci, for example women for peace
such as Women in Black, Code Pink, and Madre, or global womens rights groups such as Women Living Under
Muslim Laws, have been organizing womens delegations and global conferences to form solidarity networks.
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 ones perspective toward that of
different othersare able to empathize, bond, and struggle along with those
oppressed by such structures.4
To conclude, we might connect this transformed understanding of ones
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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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 ght for social justice.
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. 365388; Young 2006c, pp. 102130). 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 Youngs 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 responsibilityparticu-
larly in regard to fullling peoples human rightsthat 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.
Youngs nal papers t well with, and carry forward, her overall trajec-
tory in social and political theory, and exemplify her usual courage in tack-
ling directly the difcult 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 nally, 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, Pacic Division, April 7, 2007. I would like to thank the participants in that
session, as well as Francis Raven, for helpful comments and suggestions.
Young worked through numerous difcult 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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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.
Youngs Social Connection Model
Youngs 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 peoples
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 guring 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 specic
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 Marxs
theory of alienation, in which he transformed Hegels more general notion
of objectication 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. Macphersons (1973) earlier one, Young proposes
that the problem with such structural domination lies in the ways in which the
lack of access to conditions restricts peoples development and exercise of their

capacities.1
Two questions immediately present themselves, however, in relation to
Youngs further claimexplicit in her modelthat 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 Youngs 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 benets 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
todays world, many of these structural processes extend beyond
nation-state boundaries to include globally dispersed persons.
(2006c, p. 119)
Youngs 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 difculty 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 Marxs 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):
716729; in Socialism and democracy, Praxis International, 1(1) (April, 1981): 4963, reprinted in Democracy:
Key concepts in critical theory (1993, pp. 246256), among other articles; and in Rethinking Democracy (1988), esp.
pp. 3839 and pp. 4243.
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 rst placenamely, that those
who are dominated or exploited specically 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
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 conation of two senses
of responsibility in Youngs analysis that might helpfully be kept distinct. The
rst would be responsibility arising from causing or contributing to some
action or processespecially 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 rst 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 ourish. (There are, of course, important
connections between these two senses, and I will briey 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 ourish-
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 ourishing, 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 rms, 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 identied as exploiting others through the
activities or institutions of which they are a part, or can be identied 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
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 nal section of
this chapter.
Young, Pogge, and the Role of Transnational Corporations
Youngs 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 Pogges
work on global justice. Like Pogge, Young calls our attention to eliminating
global harms and specically 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 Pogges case) or of leading to the oppression or
domination of groups of people (in Youngs account). Yet there is a signicant
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 fullling 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 fullling their human rights. In contrast,
Young sees Pogges 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 responsibilityone that applies to Youngs distinctive social
connection account and another that seems to apply to Pogges account as well
as to Youngs. As already intimated, a problem with Youngs approach is that
in her effort to avoid talking very much about liability, the important causal
connections that Pogge foregrounds may be relatively neglected. There seems

an element of truth in Pogges claims that Western nations are responsible
in the sense of liable for imposing exploitative institutional arrangements
on developing nations and for beneting from this (although Pogge himself
does not emphasis this factor of beneting). 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. 4754) 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 Youngs and
Pogges 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 Youngs 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
systemsconsumers, 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.
Youngs further proposal that what one should do to fulll ones 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
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 Pogges 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 fulll peoples human rights
(Gould 2007a). He seems to posit certain luxuriant societies that can be sup-
posed to be self-sufcient. Pogge of course does believe that there are positive
obligations that ow 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 sufcient to settle her position on whether there are independent
positive moral obligations to fulll human rights globally (since it is clearly pos-
sible to have positive obligations that ow from a negative dutyas in Pogges
duty to avoid depriving).
Beyond this, however, there is a substantial body of criticism, in my view
well-founded, directed at Pogges notion that avoiding depriving others of
rights fulllment 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,
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 fullling 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 fulll peoples
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 subsistencethen we simply cannot
help everyone to fulll 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 fulll 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 fulll 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 fulll 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 fulllment of human rights can only be accomplished through
delimited social, economic, and political systems, and thus the generality of the
claims have to be specied 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 ONeills 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
of work, is required for dealing with the sorts of exploitation that are Youngs
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 fulll peoples 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
peoples 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 specied 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 fulllment (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
ones 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 fulllment.
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 others 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 difculties 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
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 fullled 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 nds appealing in Hannah Arendts account, but which Young appro-
priates for her own social connection model (Young 2004, pp. 375377).2 I see
something like Arendts 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 inuence 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 Arendts 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
Youngs own model, and like the responsibility to foster institutions to realize
peoples human rights discussed earlier, it is future-oriented and social.
In the nal 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.
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 fulll 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 ones 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 reection, 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
Youngs manifold and important contributions to social philosophy.
17
4
On Immigration Politics in the Context

of European Societies and the Structural
Inequality Mode
Mriam Martnez
The concepts of exclusion and inclusion lose meaning if they are

used to label all problems of social conict 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, limmigr est atopos, sans lieu, dplac,
inclassable. () Ni citoyen, ni tranger, ni vraiment du ct du Mme,
ni totalement du ct de lAutre, il se situe en ce lieu btard dont parle
aussi Platon, la frontire de ltre et du non-tre social.
As Socrates said, according to Plato, the immigrant is atopos, without
place, transferred, unclassied. () 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 rst 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 guila 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, Anbal and Ramoni.
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 Youngs concept of social jus-
tice as the institutional conditions for promoting self-development and self-
determination of a societys members where self-development means access
to opportunities for developing capacities, and self-determination represents
being able to determine ones actions (Young 2000, pp. 3133). 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 nd 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 conicts 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 Youngs 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 rst 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. 23155, 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 afrming 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 afrms 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 dened 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)
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
Youngs account denote the conuence 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, rst, 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
womens 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 reects 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
through Youngs 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 identication
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. 1555; Young 2001a, pp. 118), 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 vilied. 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. 118; Young 2006a, pp. 9293;
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. 5394).
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 benets (Young 2000, pp. 196228).
Although Youngs 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. 201204). 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. 22864) and Douglas
Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (1993, pp. 17).
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 afnities, 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 Youngs 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. 9496). In this sense, Youngs 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 Youngs 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 Youngs 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).
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 mists 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 rst step for developing a positive sense of
the self 4.
In traditional approaches of politics of recognition such as those of Charles
Taylor (1992), conicts 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).
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 gured 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 conicts, 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. 26465). According
to Young, bringing these conicts 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 Youngs account in order to criticize the theo-
retical construction whereby tolerance is understood as the accommodation of
one group to anothers 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, womens 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
Minow pointed out, the multiple ramications 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 afrmation that women should have the same rights
as men, and so, for example, shouldnt 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 ones own.
What has been referred to as laffaire du foulard in France has been
approached as a specic practice of cultural membership in which religion has
gained more attention than specic 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 womens emancipation from their communities of birth in a paternal-
ist and oppressive position which, however, some women resisted (. . .) not to
afrm 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 specic 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 nd 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. 2223). 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
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).
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 dene 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 dened 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 nd in this article interesting insights about processes in which members
of privileged groupsin this case, menvery often try to represent the perspective of members of oppressed
groupsin this case, womenand 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).
the integration of immigration policy, in the specic 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. 15758). 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 signicant 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 specic 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 difcult 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 afrmative 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 Benhabibs insights on that topic to afrm that it is
in this domain also where multicultural conicts ought to have a place, to the
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 unofcial 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. 2342)
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 ofcials (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). Benhabibs proposal to conceptualize
the domain of the unofcial public sphere as the terrain in which deliberative
and communicative democracy focus on solving multicultural conicts 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 Youngs 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 denes 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. 2122) references the following liberal approaches: Rawlss 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.
from ethnic or religious afliations. 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 uid 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 signicance of culture for some of
them. It seems to me that sometimes culture and structure are in Youngs
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 afliation. 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 denitive 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 conicts
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 conicts because from Youngs 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.
18
4
Womens 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 womens commuting is one way to appraise womens
access to jobs.
This chapter will give a conceptual and empirical analysis of womens
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 difculty 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 womens commuting using Iris Youngs conceptual
framework of different types of oppression which she identies 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 womens
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 ndings to these questions and show that the conceptual
framework of Iris Youngs (1990a) faces of oppression is both versatile and
relevant for interpreting racial and gender differences in employment access.

Housing-jobs mismatches and transportation constraints that restrict womens
access to jobs contribute to their marginalization in the labor market. The sam-
ple of ndings 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 womens
work trips.
Connecting Commuting with Multiple Faces of Oppression

Do people have jobs? What are some constraints on peoples 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 conned to
lives of social marginality (Young 1990a). Inadequate access to jobs because
of the location of ones 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 benet 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, nan-
cial or otherwise, that benets 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 benets possible
from waged work, and the opportunities to exercise signicant control in the
employment context. In essence, these faces of oppression are about which
group of workers benets 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).
womens work trips and multifaceted oppression 231
Cultural imperialism, a fourth face of oppression, involves the universal-

ization of a dominant groups 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 inu-
ence womens commuting behavior. However, the experience of motherhood
is not necessarily a universal one for all women if one considers a racegender
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 dened as being in
opposition to and incompatible with motherhood, work for Black women has
been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric denitions of Black
motherhood (p. 124). Since Black womens mothering attributes do not con-
form to white cultural standards, and women may differ then in the degree to
which their status as mothers inuences their commutes, I compare the inu-
ence of household responsibility on womens 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 nding 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 identies it as a fth face of oppression. Although my own
studies do not include empirical measures of violence, I address the relevance
of violence in womens 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 difculty in transporta-

tion due to their locational access to work, this constitutes a signicant 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
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 Youngs 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 ight, redlining, and/or predatory lending continue to make residential
location patterns strongly differentiated along racial lines. Thus research nd-
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 womens relatively shorter
work trips when compared to mens 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
varied barriers and nd work, poor access is reected 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 inuence 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-
ens 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 signicant 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
rst 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,
and I include only respondents who are 16 years and older. In the rest of the
chapter, I collate and interpret the empirical ndings 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 tripstravel 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 signicant). As shown in Table 18.2 (unlike the overall
trip length of workers in the full samples), the difference among women auto
users is minimalaround 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 proles.
suburban workplace: black reverse commuters spend a longer time

getting to work. Focusing on those workers with suburban destinations,
the ndings show that among reverse commuters, Black women spend a longer
table 18.1. Womens 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).

table 18.2. Womens 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 specic nding 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 ndings 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 womens 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
table 18.4. Differences in Womens 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 signicant. 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 timesa nding that ts Iris Youngs
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 signicant 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 1990see Table 18.5).
One would expect no racial difference among women with the same child sta-
tus. On the contrary, this nding underscores the paradox inherent in cultural
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

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 womens 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 nding 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 signicantly 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 nd signicant contrasts in occupations, income, and child
status. Specically, 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 ndings
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 ($)

that Black reverse commuters earn less and appear to have greater child care
responsibilities amplies 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 womens 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--vis employ-
ment earnings in Buffalo. For the present purpose, a simple typology of four
commute types classies 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
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
workers low income makes a long commute uneconomical. Compromised com-

mutes differ from constrained commutes that are typied 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 ndings 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 nal section of the chapter I elaborate on some implications of all
these ndings for a conceptual understanding of womens commutes as mani-
festing intersecting faces of oppression.
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 Womens Commuting
From this selection of cross-sectional and longitudinal results, an inclusive

interpretation of womens work trips is possible. Clearly, womens 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 nd-
ing that illustrates restricted access and thereby explicates the face of oppres-
sion that Young identies as marginalization. Documenting the inadequate
monetary compensation for the journey to work effort, establishes exploitation
as a face of oppression especially for Black womenthe 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 nding of longer work
trips for African American mothers exemplies 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 ndings corroborate the earlier conclusions of McLafferty and Preston
(1991) that many African American women experience a very insidious form
of spatial mismatch and face signicant transportation and locational barriers
in traveling to work.
Keeping in mind that most of the comparisons are restricted to auto users,
the ndings 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
expected to decrease if Black workers continue to have more access to private

automobiles. However, ndings 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 ofcers 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 womens work trips,
but this case can be interpreted as evidence of structural violence, the fth 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 yearequivalent to an
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
ndings which extend to the work trips of twenty-rst century employed Afri-
can American women, counter continuing stereotypes and overgeneralizations
that Black women are welfare dependent, and underscore the continuing sig-
nicance 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, 13756. Reprinted in Young 1990b.
1981. Beyond the unhappy marriage: A critique of dual systems theory. In L. Sargent
(Ed.), Women and revolution (pp. 4370). Boston, MA: South End Press. Reprinted
in Young 1990b.
1984. Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and alienation. Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy, 9(1), January, 4562. Reprinted in Young 1990b.
1985. Humanism, gynocentrism, and feminist politics. Womens Studies International
Forum, 8(3), 17385. 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, 381401.
1988. The ve faces of oppression. Philosophical Forum, 19(4), Summer, 27090.
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. 20114). Albany,
NY: SUNY Press.
1993. Justice and communicative democracy. In R. S. Gottlieb (Ed.), Philosophy:
Tradition, counter-tradition, politics (pp. 2342). Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
1994a. Gender as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective. Signs, 19(3),
Spring, 71338. Reprinted in Young 1997a.
1994b. Punishment, treatment, empowerment. Feminist Studies, 20(1), Spring, 3357.
1995. Polity and group difference: A critique of the ideal of universal citizenship. In
R. Beiner (Ed.), Theorizing citizenship (pp. 175207). 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), 34063. Reprinted in Young 1997a.
1998. Throwing like a girl: Twenty years later. In D. Welton (Ed.), Body and esh:
A philosophical reader (pp. 28690). 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, 118.
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. 87105). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Republished in I. M. Young (2007).
2002. Lived body vs. gender: Reections on social structure and subjectivity. Ratio,
15(4), 41028. Reprinted in Young 2005a.
2002. Toward a global rule of law. Dissent, 49(2), Spring, 2732 (with D. Archibugi).
2003. The logic of masculinist protection: Reections on the current security state.
Signs, 29(1), 125. Republished in I. M. Young (2007).
2004. Responsibility and global labor justice, Journal of Political Philosophy, 12(4),
36588.
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. 15359). London: Verso.
2006a. Taking the basic structure seriously. Perspectives on politics. Cambridge Journals,
4(1), March, 917.
2006b. Education in the context of structural injustice: A symposium response.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1), 94103.
2006c. Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model. Social Philosophy
and Policy, 23(1), Winter, 10230.
2006d. Katrina: Too much blame, not enough responsibility. Dissent, 53(1), Winter,
416.
2007. Global challenges: War, self-determination, and responsibility for justice. Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press.
2007. Responsibility for justice (unpublished work).
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Index
Ability-Need principle of Solidarity Bacchi, C., 25

Justice, 195196 Bahdi, R., 126127
Anderson, B., 11, 83, 8788 risk of race, 126
Anderson, L., 7578 Bartky, S. L., 8, 72, 196
abolitionists, 169171 Bar On, B.A., 1213, 23, 158
acknowledgment, 16, 175, 177179, 182 Bayertz, K, 190191
political vs. existential, 175, 177179, Beauvoir, S. de, 79, 24, 36, 37, 49, 56,
182 5759, 69, 79, 83, 90, 152
affair of the veil/affaire de la Benhabib, S., 56, 17, 26, 27, 100, 166,
foulard, 215 194, 222226
Agamben, G., 122 Black reparations, 15
agency, 9, 37, 54, 6061, 71, 81, 88, blame, 7, 1415, 35, 135138, 140144, 153,
147148, 155156, 158, 158, 186187, 206
202204, 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, 78, 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, 103107, Boothby, R., 8991
112113, 133, 136137, 141, 193, Bordo, S., 8, 72
194, 210 Bowman, E., and R. Stone, 196
Aristotle, 28, 157 Braidotti, R., 29
access to jobs, 229232, 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 dance studies, 7374

Butler, J., 8, 22, 23, 24, 29, 72, 8182, deliberation, 6, 12, 1617, 173190,
219 200, 226
democracy, 37, 1219, 21, 2632, 3335,
capitalism, 45, 72, 201, 206 66, 100, 103105, 108, 122, 147,
dual systems theory of, Youngs 153, 155, 157, 173176, 179181,
critique, 5 189, 190, 194, 200, 202fn,
care, right to, 196 206207, 211, 213, 224226, 244
city life as theorized by Young, 5 accountability, 7, 15, 32, 122, 153, 157,
civil society, 12, 32, 111, 139, 216, 206207
224226 aggregative, 175
Card, C., 15, 148, 157 and constitutionalism, 6
Certeau, M., 73 and feminism, 2627
choreography, 7378 and gender difference, 27
class, 910, 12, 1718, 2526, 4951, and self-development, 189 (see also
6364, 74, 81, 89, 126, 151, 154, self-development)
163, 185, 189194, 203, 230, 239 as aspect of justice, 12
Cohen, J., 12, 32 communicative, 17, 194, 226
Collins, P. H., 231, 237 cosmopolitan, 29
Connell, R. W., 24 deep, 12, 225
commonwealth tier, 196 deliberative, 1617, 27, 173176,
communication, modes of, 1617, 71, 190, 226
174180, 226 exclusion and. See exclusion and
communities inclusion, 4, 7, 12, 14, 1617, 21,
local, national, and transnational, 95, 27, 34, 66, 103, 147, 173, 190, 213,
195, 204, 210211, 214, 219, 222 226, 244
imagined. See imagined liberal, 13, 103
communities participatory, 17; 173
commutes, 230231, 23541 representative, 6, 155, 200, 211
convenient and compensatory vs. Denike, M., 1314
compromised and constrained, Derrida, J., 3031
238239 disabled, neglect of, 189
racial and gender differences, 230 disabilities, 154
companion animals, 164 discrimination, 117, 182, 186187, 215,
cooperatives. See worker-owned 217, 241
cooperatives disempowerment, 155
cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism, 7, 13, 18, disposition, 16, 173, 175, 177182, 196,
29, 107, 110113, 115, 121, 185188, 209210
190, 197 distributive paradigm of justice. See
cultural imperialism, 16, 19, 99, 119, 148, justice; Rawls
154155, 161, 164, 229, 231, 235, domination, 5, 1315, 19, 34, 43, 49, 50,
237, 240 99100, 117119, 127, 130, 145,
culture, 4244, 48, 50, 72, 77, 8181, 91 147148, 155156, 159, 192, 194,
as communicative action, 223 199203, 205, 209, 226
democratic, 181 and self-determination. See self-
cynicism as theorized by Young, 34, 36 determination
index 261
diversity. See multiculturalism feminine imaginary. See imaginary

duties, 15, 18, 188, 207 feminine spatiality, 4750, 69, 8386.
Dworkin, R., 7, 14, 134135 See also space
femininity
embodiment as a body style, 810, 25, 42, 49, 62,
female, feminine, 7, 24, 4151, 5557, 78, 85, 90
62, 7980. See also woman as a disciplinary practice, 810, 5657,
breasted self-, as theorized by Young, 59, 72
4144 vs. masculinity, 129130
childbirth and labor, 4647, 57 See also gender
in general, 41, 6566, 79 feminism, 911, 15, 19, 21, 24, 2729,
male, 41 50, 5559, 80, 149, 185, 193,
menstruation, 53, 5759 196199
pregnancy, 78, 4142, 4447, 53 and democracy. See democracy
vs. sex and gender, 24 and gender theory, 2729
empathy, 191, 209210 Black, 23
equality as goal, 12, 107, 119120, European, 29
174175, 189, 209, 221223 gynocentric, 10, 5657
equal opportunity, 216, 221, 223 humanist, 49, 5658
ethics of care, 8 identity politics and, 910
ethnicity, 18, 81, 126, 185, 191, 193, 214, intersectional, 192
216217, 223, 227, 233 materialist, 80
European identity, 2830 radical, 10
European Union, 67, 2526, 29 sexual difference school of, 1011, 22
nationalism. See nationalism socialist, 15, 195196, 199 (see also
Eveline, J., 25 Socialist-Feminist
evil, 15, 121125, 130, 147, 148, 151, Philosophers Association
155159 [SOFPHIA])
exclusion, 16, 27, 31, 79, 98, 117, 119120, Western, 9
155, 173174, 176, 179, 213, 215, post-colonial critique of Western,
218219, 223, 225 188
internal vs. external, 176 white, 23
experience Ferguson, A., 45, 17
and knowledge. See narrative; personal Ferguson, M., 9
experience Fisk, M., 180181
breasted, 78, 4144 Foster, S. L., 8
exploitation, 9, 15, 1719, 99, 119, 148, Foucault, M., 8, 7173, 118119, 219
154, 161162, 169, 186, 189190, fraternity, 87, 189190
197, 201, 203, 209, 211, 213, 221, freedom, 13, 18, 32, 48, 79, 121, 123125,
229230, 235, 238240 155, 171, 181, 188189, 194fn, 197,
class, economic, 186, 189190, 213 203, 209, 216, 220
of animals, 161162, 169 as goal, 188, 216, 220
as restricted by gender, 48, 79, 8182,
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, 190192,
Gay and Lesbian Studies, 23 196197
gender, 411, 1719, 2229, 34, 35, 42, Grosz, E., 8
46, 4950, 55fn, 5658, 7191, Gruen, L., 19
107fn, 108, 117120, 125126, 130, group. See social groups
149151, 172, 190, 192, 215216, guilt, 134, 136145
221224, 227, 230234, 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, 151153, 215, Habermas, J., 6, 1213, 1617, 28, 3032,
217, 222223 103104, 108114, 173, 225
and the World Bank, 26 Hardt, M., and Negri, A., 115
as a signier, 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, 1011, 18, 28, 55fn, 150 heterosexism, 50, 101, 189
as structural injustice. See injustice, heterosexuality, 10, 14, 150153
structural enforced/compulsory, 150153
as totally inclusive. See Mitchell, J. normative, 10, 14
(male) domination, 5, 1315, 19 Hoagland, S., 152
identity vs. structure, 6, 910, 24, Honig, B., 2627, 37
86, 136 homelessness, 135136
mainstreaming, 26 homonationalism, 130
sex vs. gender. See sex/gender homosexual panic defense, 87
social structures of, 911, 1415, 2425, homosexuality, 25, 129
64, 79, 120, 135, 190 hooks, b., 9, 17, 186, 192193, 197
solidarity. See solidarity, house-home as theorized by Young,
transformational 5862
studies/Gender Studies, 23 human rights, 7, 13, 18, 33, 100, 104fn,
vs. lived body. See lived body 107, 110111, 119120, 122125,
gendered injustice. See justice 129, 181, 187188, 195, 199, 201,
genderization, 25 205, 207211
globalization, 56, 35, 186, 199200, as a perspective, 18
203, 205209 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 womens, 187188
global responsibility. See responsibility humanism, 49, 5657
index 263
humanist feminism. See feminism interests, 85, 127, 137, 147, 167168, 171,
humanitarian interventions, 1314, 175, 179180, 190194, 196, 201,
103116 214, 223
Husserl, E., 44 and intersectionality p 190191
and solidarity. See solidarity
identity politics, 910, 28, 190, 194, 214 enlightened, 196
imaginary, 11, 12, 8191, 98 of women as a group, 192193
feminine, 1112, 8186, 8991 formal vs. content, 193194
philosophical domain, 98 self- and transformation of, 192
social, 8788 Iraq, invasion of, 28, 30, 37, 106, 108, 111,
imagination, 101 124, 125
imagined communities, 11, 81, 87, 90, 193 Irigaray, L., 37, 43
immanence vs. transcendence, 8, 4448,
73, 85fn Jaggar, A., 12, 14
immigrants, 18, 99, 119, 122, 187, 196, Jalusic, V., 16
214215, 217, 221, 225227 Jnasdttir, A., 193
immigration policies, 18, 26, 124, 214 Johnson-Anumonwo, I., 19
imperial sovereignty, 115 jouissance, 46
inclusion, 1217, 27, 31, 34, 66, 103, justice
147148, 153, 155, 173182, 189, and gender. See gender
200, 213214, 216, 220221, and multiculturalism. See
225227, 232, 240. See also multiculturalism
democracy and inclusion as fairness. See Rawls
individualism as human development according to
methodological, 136 Young, 147
inequality classical liberal conception of, 188
social-structural, 12, 18, 81, 90, 98, 119, cosmopolitan conception of,
125, 214219, 221, 224225, 227, 186187, 197
290 critical conception of, 9798
economic, 134 capabilities paradigm of Young, 12
gender, 221. See injustice, structural democracy as aspect of, 12
racial/ethnic, 18, 214219 distributive paradigm
injustice, 5, 7, 11, 1415, 18, 21, 34, 37, 60, as critiqued by Young, 119, 189 (see
7980, 8691, 98, 100101, also Rawls)
117120, 133142, 148, 156158, equality and, 188 (see also equality)
165168, 186189, 197, 199209, freedom from domination as aspect
213219, 225, 231 of, 13
as base for theory of justice, 148 gendered, 100
economic. See inequality, economic goal of for Young. See self-development
gender. See inequality, gender global responsibility. See responsibility
global. See justice, global ideal vs. nonideal models. See
racial. See inequality, racial/ethnic methodology, nonideal
structural, 7, 11, 15, 18, 21, 35, 7980, international/global, 5, 7, 14, 18, 30
86, 8791, 100, 117, 130, 135, liability conception of, 7, 14, 18,
137140, 141142, 197, 199205, 186187, 205
215, 217219, 225 neo-liberal model of, 188
264 index
justice (continued ) unnatural, 148149

political responsibility conception of, Lugones, M., 6364, 193
186188, 197, 210 Lukacs, G., 139
racial, 99
and responsibility. See responsibility Makah Nation, 164
self-development as goal of, 189, 197 male bias, 41, 101
social, 35, 1314, 18, 117119, 122, 156, male domination, 19. See also patriarchy
185186, 188189, 192197, Mann, B., 11
214216, 225, 227, 231 marginalization, 16, 19, 2728, 99, 117,
denition of social justice, 18 119120, 138, 148, 154155,
social connection model. See 161164, 166, 189, 215, 221, 225,
responsibility 229, 230231, 234235, 240
solidarity paradigm, principle of, of animals, 161164, 166
1719, 186187, 190, 195197 Marcuse, H., 34
welfare state model of, 188 Martnez, M., 1819
Marx, K., 34, 97, 115, 139, 154, 162, 190,
Kant, I., 108, 110111, 115, 154, 197 195, 197, 201203.
King, M. L., 144 Marxist Activist Philosophers (MAP), 4
Kittay, E., 100 masculinist protection as theorized by
knowledge and experience. See narrative; Young, 13, 37, 103, 118, 120,
personal experience 130131.
Kristeva, J., 46 masculinist security regime, 5
Kymlicka, W., 21, 27, 224 Mauss, M., 71
Mead, L., 134135
Laban, R., 7374 Melton, D., 16
labor menstruation. See embodiment, feminine
gender/sexual division of. See gender merit, principle of, 186, 195
in childbirth. See embodiment Merleau-Ponty, M., 7, 9, 7071, 8385, 89
of animals, 162, 168 metaphysics of solids as theorized by
social division of, 190, 217, 219, 230 Young, 43
sweatshop, 138, 144, 200 methodology, nonideal, 1112, 14, 9697,
Lacan, J., 11, 83, 8889 100, 188189, 190, 197
language of resonance, 63, 6566 migration. See immigration policies
1esbian, lesbians Mills, C., 99100, 189
concept of, 152153 mirror stage, 8889
space, 44 Mitchell, J., 22
Levinas, E., 139, 173 Minow, M., 222
liability Mohanty, C., 186, 188, 196
conception of justice. See justice Moi, T., 11, 2224, 79, 81
rhetorics of blame. See blame moral respect, 17, 174, 178180, 182, 184
liberalism, political, 7, 189, 226 Morgan, R, 192193
lived body approach, 1011, 22, 24, 28, motherhood, 44, 62, 71, 229, 231,
49, 65, 79, 81, 89, 119 236237
logic of identity as theorized by Young, 41 and sexuality. See sexuality
lottery and Black women. See work and
natural. See Rawls motherhood
index 265
and working mothers, 231, 236237 Park, Y., 74

movement in space. See women patriarchy, dual systems theory of, 5, 8
multiculturalism, 148, 221, 224 performance theory, 8, 56, 66, 69, 78
multinational corporations. See personal experience, 89, 5366
transnational corporations epistemological importance of in
Murray, C., 134135 Young, 55, 6364
Muslims, 129, 214215, 217, 220, 226 depoliticizing subjectivism, 54
political importance of, 5366
Nagel, M., 34 personal is the political, 9
Narayan, U., 188 phallocentrism, 43
Negri, A. See Hardt, M., and Negri, A. phenomenology, 3, 7, 1112, 19; 4151,
narrative, 4, 5363, 76, 125, 176177 5354, 69, 7991
nationalism, 6, 29, 87, 125, 129, 130 and pregnancy. See embodiment
non-ideal approach, theory. See feminine. See embodiment
methodology, non-ideal feminist, 19, 50, 53
normative heterosexuality, 10, 24 Phillips, A., 27
normalization, 65fn, 128, 215, 217, Pogge, T., 199, 205208,
219220, 225227 political equality, 12, 174175
Nussbaum, M., 7, 1415; 221 political responsibility. See global
responsibility; justice, political
objectivism, 80 responsibility conception of;
ODonnell, C., 186 solidarity, practices as base for
Okin, S. M., 100, 188, 221 political discourse, 174175, 177, 225
one dimensional man, 4, 34 political pluralism, 181
ONeill, O., 139, 208 politics of difference, 56, 1012, 1415,
oppression, 34, 810, 1415, 17, 19, 22, 19; 34, 66, 118, 213227
27, 34, 60, 70, 90, 99100, 109, politics of recognition, 220
119, 147159, 161172, 186, 189, poor, the, 32, 134135, 196
192, 199200, 203, 205, 209, postcolonial critique. See feminism
216220, 223, 225226, 230, 240 post-structuralism, 8, 45, 5051, 8082
animal, 15, 19, 161172 poverty, 13435
and self-development. See self- power, 137138, 142145, 189
development and violence. See violence
as structural injustice. See injustice, gendered hierarchies of. See injustice,
structural structural; the gender/sexual
concept of, nature of, 153154 division of labor
ve faces of, 15, 19, 99, 148, 151155, 230 through collective ability, 142
multiple, multifaceted, 19, 230, 240 powerlessness, 16, 99, 109, 148, 154155,
racial and minority, 19, 217 161163, 166, 229230, 235,
womens, 4, 8, 9, 19, 22, 27, 60, 70, 237, 240
90, 119, 152154 practico-inert. See Sartre
Orford, A., 124 praxis philosophy, 7
original position. See Rawls pregnancy. See embodiment
Preston, V. and McLaferty, S., 231,
Pajnik, M., 6 233234, 236, 240
Parekh, B., 21, 221, 224 personal space. See space, personal
266 index
private space. See space, personal concept dened, 141

privilege, 910, 1517, 23, 43, 50, 60, 101, forward-looking, 141
103, 119120, 139, 142, 153154, global, 185, 189, 191, 197, 199200,
161, 176, 178, 182, 191193, 203, 205, 210211
206, 215, 218, 219fn, 230, 235236 guilt and, 140143
lack of, 182 liability model of. See justice
psychoanalysis, 3, 8688 of international institutions, 139
Puar, J., 118, 127, 128, 129 personal, 134135, 138
public space. See space political. See justice, political
public intellectual, 5, 3132 responsibility conception of
public sphere, 67, 12, 27, 3032, 103, shared, collective, 14, 15, 18, 142, 200,
199, 226 203, 205
social connection model, 7, 200, 202,
queer theory, 23 207208
state, 139
race, 2526, 66, 81, 89, 99, 126127, 151, rhetoric of blame, 137. See also blame
181182, 185, 191194, 217, 231, game
233, 240 rights
risk of race. See Bahdi of animals, 161172
racial inequality. See inequality; of humans. See human rights
segregation Robinson, M., 127
racial justice. See justice Roemer, J., 135136
racism, 9, 18, 100101, 119, 123125, 169, Rubin, G., 4
189, 213, 215219, 225, 227 Ruddick, S., 8
Radical Philosophy Association (RPA),
34 Sartre, J.P., 10, 36, 44, 83, 139, 150151, 154
Rawls, J., 7, 1214, 136, 95101, 136, on the practico-inert, 10
147149, 156, 186 Schmitt, R., 180181
compared to Young, 95101, 136 Scott, J., 22
conception of justice, 9596 security state(s), 13, 103, 106108, 113,
distributive paradigm of justice, 12, 99, 117130. See also masculinist
118119, 147148, 189 security regime
justice as fairness, 147, 186 segregation, residential, 218219, 225,
lottery, natural, unnatural, 149 229232, 241242
original position, 96, 98 self
well-ordered society, 9697 decentered, 45
relational autonomy, ideal of, 13 split, 45
recognition, 9, 16, 34, 37, 58, 6567 self-determination, 7, 1314, 18, 148, 155,
right to, 166 214, 223
reparations, 133, 144 self-development, 14, 18, 56, 148, 155, 157,
resonance, 9, 63fn, 6567 189, 214
responsibility, 7, 1415, 1718, 21, 3335, self-interest. See interests
38, 100, 107fn, 116, 133145, 148, self-other relations, 8
153, 177180, 185187, 189, 191, self-transformation. See solidarity,
197, 199211, 231 transformational
and justice. See justice seriality, 1011, 28, 55fn, 64, 150
index 267
serial collectivity, group, 150, 154, 190 differentiated, ideal of, 12, 17, 194, 219
sex/gender economy, 194195
distinction, 8081 empathy and. See empathy
system, concept of, 4, 9, 11 feminist. See transformational
sexism, 18, 121, 169, 189, 192, 194fn solidarity
sexual difference, 58fn, 91. See also interests and, 191
feminism, sexual difference intersectional feminist view of, 192
school of networks, 195197, 210
sexual division of labor. See gender paradigm of justice. See justice
sexual objectication, 43, 46, 47 sisterhood solidarity of hooks. See
sexuality, 2326, 4344, 46, 71, 80 120, transformational solidarity
129, 150153, 185, 191192, 214 transformational, 17, 190, 192194
and homosexuality. See homosexuality transnational, 18, 190192, 207, 209
and motherhood, 44 political economy of, 17
double standard of, 44 space(s), 6, 8, 28, 31, 37, 42, 44, 45,
SEWA (Self-Employed Womens 4750, 61, 69, 7577, 8586, 115,
Association), 195 122, 125, 128, 137, 176, 180,
Singer, L., 8990, 150 195196, 205, 215, 218
Singer, P., 169, 171 access to, 220
social division of labor, 168, 217, 219, and pregnancy, 45
230. See also gender and the sexual as constituted in the imaginary. See
division of labor imaginary
social groups, 18, 117, 119, 148152, 154, ethnic, 218
156, 167, 200, 214218, 225227, feminine, 8, 37, 42, 47, 50, 69, 7577,
229 8586
essentialist vs. relational concept of, 6, lesbian, 44
910, 148152 personal, 61, 176
Youngs conception of, 148152 of political economy, 195196
social justice. See justice, social woman, 44
social movements, 7, 9, 12, 17, 19, 23, 26, spatial mismatch hypothesis, 232233,
30, 32, 66, 98, 149, 191192, 195, 235, 240241
201, 209, 221 spatiality, feminine. See feminine
anti-corporate globalization, 195, 205 spatiality
New Left, 98 speciesism, 169
social structures, 911, 15, 24, 64, 7980, Spelman, E., 9, 6364
85, 90, 120, 135138, 150154, stigmatization, 217223
157158, 182, 185, 189, 190, 196, style. see women
216, 218, 229 Stone, R. See Bowman, E., and R. Stone
racialist, 218 Structural Inequality model of Young, 18,
See also gender, social structures of 214227.
Socialist and Feminist Philosophers structural injustice. See injustice
Association (SOFPHIA), 4 structures, social. See social structures
solidarity, 5, 7, 12, 1719, 185197, Struhl, K., 5, 7
207219 style of comportment. See women
denitions and types of, 186, 190191, subjectivity, 80
193, 211 sweatshops, 187, 191, 203
268 index
Taylor, C., 83, 87, 88, 220, 224 woman, womanhood, category of, 2325,
theory 28, 4142, 4450, 5359, 69, 71,
critical theory and Young, 3, 12, 100 77, 81, 8590, 101, 150153 154,
dual systems. See dual systems 191, 194, 231. See also
feminist. See feminism embodiment, feminine; gender
of gender. See gender women
ideal vs. nonideal. See methodology, and movement in space. See feminine
nonideal spatiality
performance. See performance theory and style of body comportment, 47,
tolerance, 129, 213, 215, 219221, 224, 227 8385, 8990
logic of liberal, 215, 219220, 224 Black, 19, 33, 163fn, 231, 229242
transnational corporations, 18, 186187, ladylike vs. unladylike, 50
203, 205 of color, 910, 172, 191, 234235
transcendence. See immanence white, 10, 172, 194, 231, 235239
See also gender; voices of girls/women;
univeralism. See false universalism woman
utilitarian view, 169 womens
emancipation, 222
veil. See affair of the veil empowerment projects, 195
victimization, 4950 group interests. See interests
violence, 1213, 1516, 19, 21, 87, 99, rights. See human rights
103116, 119130, 145, 148, Womens Studies, 2223
154155, 161, 164165, 186, 188, work, workers, 9, 19, 44, 55, 5962, 66,
194, 215, 229, 231, 241 100, 135, 154, 170171, 186187,
against animals, 164165 191, 195196, 201, 203, 206, 214,
against women, 186, 188, 194, 215, 217, 229242
229, 231, 241 and motherhood, 231 (see also
and power as theorized by Arendt, motherhood and working mothers)
104107 caring, unpaid, 100, 196
as a face of oppression, 1213, 16, 19, 148, housework, 5962, 66
154155, 161, 164165, 229, 231, 241 low status done by people of color,
male. See violence against women 217, 239
ofcial, 13, 103, 107 structures of, 214
racial/ethnic, 188 sex-segregated, 135. See gender and the
Vissicaro, P., 74 sexual division of labor
voices, silenced, 37, 66, 101, 121, 221, trips, womens, 19, 229242
224, 227 Black vs. white, 229242
of girls/women, 37, 101, 176179, worker-owned cooperatives, 195
221, 224 World Bank. See gender
World Social Forum, 30, 195
war(s), 45, 28, 34, 3637, 106115, World Trade Organization, 32
121125, 130, 149 world-traveling, 193
just/unjust, 115, 186, 188 wrong-doing
on terror, 37, 103108, 121, 123, culpable, 148, 154, 15758
126127 inexcusable, 158
Wittig, M., 81, 152 See also blame

Ann Ferguson. Dancing With Iris

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Dancing with Iris

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

STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Oxford New York

Copyright 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

part i. homage to iris marion young

part ii. embodiment, phenomenology, and gender

part iii. theorizing the state: method, violence,

part iv. justice: ethics and responsibility

part v. justice: democracy and inclusion

Works of Iris Marion Young, 243

Bat-Ami Bar On is Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies at Bing-

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

HOMAGE TO IRIS MARION

Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel

In Homage to Iris Marion Young

Dialogues with Iris

Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Gender

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

inevitably experienced as immanence, or as hindering the human potential

Theorizing the State: Method, Violence, and Resistance

modalities of patriarchal power that characterize such current terror-fearing

Justice: Ethics and Responsibility

marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence feature in

Justice: Democracy and Inclusion

Youngs theoretical insights on the ideal of participatory democracy come from

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

gained more attention than relevant questions related to structural inequali-

When I Think about Myself as Politically

Vlasta Jalusic and Mojca Pajnik

While doing transcription and preparation of this interview for publishing,

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

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

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

I want to address what you say, about my response to Habermass

Letter to Iris Young

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

Iris Young and the Gendering

Sandra Lee Bartky

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

view. Contrary to the mutually exclusive categorization between transcen-

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

produced by human transcendence. But womens spatiality is inhibited. Fem-

Resonance and Dissonance: The Role

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

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

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

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

and PTA motherhood continue to oppress women, especially single mothers

Politics, Not Autobiography

When Young invokes personal experiencewhether in these deeply personal

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

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

Throwing Like a Girl, Dancing Like

Susan Leigh Foster

This chapter comments on the visionary insights articulated in Iris Marion

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

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

Reading a Feminist Choreographers Dance

In her essay from 1998 reecting back on Throwing, Young comments on

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