How should theories of justice account for conditions of difference? The political philosopher Iris Marion Young was among the most incisive critics of her discipline’s tendency to “reduce political subjects to a unity” when developing accounts of justice, advocating instead for a politics of difference in which equal treatment of individuals does not override ongoing harm resulting from group-based oppression. In a career that spanned three decades and traversed the analytic-continental philosophical divide, Young drew on myriad intellectual traditions—from feminist theory to critical theory, phenomenology, ethics, and public policy—to explore social justice, gendered embodiment, and deliberative democracy. What social ontology, she asks, do we require in order to make sense of structural injustice? How are we each to contend with responsibility for systems in which we participate, politically and socially, as members of a group?
In this course, we will explore the development of Iris Marion Young’s theoretical interventions, from her account of social groups as a salient and necessary category for political theorists, to her writings on structural and institutional sources of oppression and marginalization. Where does the distinction between individuation and group recognition conflict within democratic praxis? Does the law have an obligation to recognize, and therefore codify, resulting embodied experiences across difference? How can we theorize a social group without reifying collectivities? Readings will include foundational essays such as “Throwing Like a Girl” and “The Five Faces of Oppression,” excerpts from the critically acclaimed texts such as Justice and the Politics of Difference and Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy and Inclusion and Democracy, as well as the posthumously published Responsibility for Justice.
