Iris Young

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a half-millennium of European empires.

This essay contends that one of the privileges of femininity in rationalized instrumental culture is an aesthetic freedom — the freedom to play with shape and color on the body, don various styles and looks — and through them exhibit and imagine unreal possibilities. Such female imagination has liberating possibilities because it subverts and unsettles the order of respectable, functional rationality in a world where that rationality supports domination. In the context of patriarchal consumer capitalism, however, such liberating aspects of clothing fantasy are intertwined with oppressing moments. This essay asks how women’s pleasure in clothes can be described. It adopts a method derived from Luce Irigaray in an attempt to extricate the liberating and valuable in women’s experience of clothes from the exploitative and oppressive.

Many old people who need nursing care live in residences that routinely deprive them of privacy in the sense of a secure personal space where one dwells according to one’s own habits with things of one’s own. It is argued that old people should not have to do without a home in this sense just because they have become unable to live independently, or because their relatives are unable or unwilling to make a home for them in their own dwellings. Services and institutions offering shelter and care to needy persons often fail to appreciate what is required for individuals not simply to stay alive, physically well, and nourished, but to have the life of a person. A room of one’s own or its equivalent should be understood not as a luxury that social services can ill afford, but rather as a basic element of the value of privacy.

This essay describes experience and oppressions of feminine styles of comportment, tracing in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space. It highlights the certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do. The account developed here combines the insights of the theory of the lived body as expressed by Merleau-Ponty and the theory of the situation of women as developed by Beauvoir. It limits itself to the experience of women in contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society, offering specific observations, phenomenlogical interpretation, and implications for an understanding of the oppression of women.

This essay explores the ambivalence of the values of house and home. It agrees with feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir that the comforts and supports of house and home historically come at women’s expense. Women serve, nurture, and maintain so that the bodies and souls of men and children gain confidence and expansive subjectivity to make their mark on the world. However, this homey role also deprives women of support for their own identity and projects. The essay challenges a group of feminist texts whose writers all reject the idea of the home as inappropriately totalizing and imperialist, questioning the wholesale rejection of an ideal of the home for feminism.

This essay evaluates Toril Moi’s arguments for abandoning the concept of gender for feminist theory and replacing it with the concept of lived body derived from existential phenomenology. It agrees with Moi that lived body is a better concept than gender as a category theorizing subjectivity. However, it argues that we need to retain and reposition a concept of gender for theorizing social structure. This essay serves as a theoretical introduction to some of the concepts applied in the succeeding essays.

This essay considers some of the experiences of pregnancy from the pregnant woman’s viewpoint. Drawing on diaries and literature as well as phenomenological reflection on the pregnant experience, it seeks to let women speak in their own voices. Section I describes some aspects of bodily existence unique to pregnancy. The pregnant subject is shown as decentered, split, or doubled in several ways. Section II reflects on the encounter of the pregnant subject with the institutions and practices of medicine. It argues that within the present organization of these institutions and practices, women usually find such an encounter alienating in several respects.

This essay examines the social oppression of women as menstruators in two major forms: the shame associated with menstruation that compels girls and women to conceal their menstrual events, and the misfit between women and public places such as schools and workplaces, which often refuse to accommodate women’s social and physical needs. Imagining away these injustices reveals not a glorious experience but a personal bodily process that causes many women some discomfort or annoyance some of the time. The process nevertheless carries emotional meaning for many women. The unfairness associated with the social response to menstruation is analyzed based on the accounts of women’s experience of menstruation derived from Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary feminist research. Mood and memory as menstrual events that mark a woman’s self-narrative are explored.

This essay explores some aspects of the cultural construction of breasts in a male-dominated society, seeking a positive women’s voice for breasted experience. It begins with a discussion of the dominant culture’s objectification of breasts. Relying on Irigaray’s suggestive ideas about women’s sexuality and an alternative metaphysics not constructed around the concept of object, an experience of breast movement and sensitivity from the point of view of the female subject is presented. It asks how women’s breasts might be experienced in the absence of an objectifying male gaze, and discusses how breasts are a scandal for patriarchy because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality. Finally, the question of objectification is revisited through reflections on a woman’s encounter with the surgeon’s knife at her breast.

For nearly four decades, the writings of Carole Pateman have been regarded as major contributions to debates within political philosophy and feminist theory. She is the recipient of the 2012 Johan Skytte Prize in political science for “in a thought-provoking way challenging established ideas about participation, sex and equality”. By critiquing conventional notions of consent at the heart of much modern political thought—hence the title for this volume—Pateman has been a central voice in discussions of such important topics as political participation and democracy, contract theory and sexual equality, liberalism and the problem of political obligation, and most recently social citizenship, welfare, and basic income. These essays, all prepared especially for this volume, deal with issues that have been central to Pateman’s work. The authors critically engage with her work while making their own original contributions and advancing ongoing debates.

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice. It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. The starting point for her critique is the experience and concerns of the new social movements about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor--that were created by marginal and excluded groups, including women, African Americans, and American Indians, as well as gays and lesbians. Iris Young defines concepts of domination and oppression to cover issues eluding the distributive model. Democratic theorists, according to Young do not adequately address the problem of an inclusive participatory framework. By assuming a homogeneous public, they fail to consider institutional arrangements for including people not culturally identified with white European male norms of reason and respectability. Young urges that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group difference. Basing her vision of the good society on the differentiated, culturally plural network of contemporary urban life, she argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies.Danielle Allen's new foreword contextualizes Young's work and explains how debates surrounding social justice have changed since--and been transformed by--the original publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference.

Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of everyday politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference.