Iris Marion Young Research Articles

Being (not) at home: Exiled women artists in postwar New York

In postwar art, the question of exile is the question of home. House defines a space as a locative concept. Home represents a place with a symbolic value of belonging and refers to objects, people, and ideas. Home does not designate a fixed state but rather a relational and transformative site in which individual and collective acts of remembering are embedded. In this article, the author explores the aesthetics of exile in the artistic production of exiled women artists in postwar New York, most notably Ruth Vollmer, Louise Nevelson, and Eva Hesse, who have often been excluded from the discourse around 1960s sculptural practice. The author casts the mode of construction and the viewing experience of their artworks through the notions of home and body. This contribution focuses on the intricate interrelations between women, domesticity, and artmaking associated with the aesthetics of exile and displacement, which significantly challenges any stable and absolute conception of home and place. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars and theorists, such as Sarah Ahmed, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Iris Marion Young - in their argument that the idea of home and the practices of homemaking support relational identities-the author sheds light on how women artists in exile investigate notions of home, borders (both physical and psychological), diasporic longing, habitation, and uprootedness in a constant state of exchange.

Gendered experiences during COVID-19 in Turkey and the meaning of home

This work aims to uncover the changing meaning of home by focusing on gender-based experiences of staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey. The findings show that the meaning of home is not straightforward and, depending on one’s gender-based experiences and diverse experiences of staying at home arise. In this work, Doreen Massey’s (1994) joint conceptualisations of spatiality and identity for understanding space and place in general and home in particular not as an absolute but as a relational place, together with Iris Marion Young’s (2005) conceptualisation of homemaking provide the theoretical context for linking the stay-at-home experiences of the participants with the meaning of home during the COVID-19 pandemic from a gender perspective. Furthermore, gender-based experiences of staying at home during the COVID-19 in Turkey are meaningful in the context of the discourses and social policy interventions of the existing government producing the social organization of space from an anti-gender and a conservative neo-liberal perspective. This work is based on online qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with 32 self-identified female participants. Interview data were interpreted using the three thematic categories of ‘home as a dwelling,’ ‘home as a burden,’ ‘home as a place for preservation. The findings support the existing research on the gender-specific organisation of care work and time usage and further contribute to the field by demonstrating that home was a gendered space sustained through mutual relations between gender practices and spatial practices before and during the pandemic.

The unnerved and unhoused: a rhetorical analysis of save Austin now’s campaign to disband unhoused individuals from Austin, Texas

Over half a million people in the United States enter homelessness every night. These rates rise in large metropolitan cities with intolerable outdoor living weather conditions. We blame the impoverished for their position and punish them as a society. For example, some states would instead treat homelessness as a criminal offense to wipe it clean from the city. In Spring 2021, Austin, TX, passed Proposition B, legislation treating homelessness as a criminal offense (Austin City Manager, 2021). This paper will analyze Save Austin Now’s (SAN) website through a rhetorical critique utilizing Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm and The Five Faces of Oppression by Iris Marion Young. These theories provide a lens to analyze the languages of hate and oppression SAN uses on its website to sway Austin voters to pass Proposition B and further displace Austin’s ever-growing homeless population. It was discovered SAN’s campaign was successful because of narratives around violence, crime, and personal deficits toward those experiencing homelessness. We can shift this narrative with public information and awareness campaigns, humanizing unhoused people. This research provides new insight into changing public opinion, altering policy, and creating common values. We promote a more humanizing engagement when we have a more informed citizenry.

Hegemonic listening and doing memory on right-wing violence: Negotiating German political culture in public spheres

The first section of this chapter illustrates that the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 has not been categorized sufficiently as a substantial milestone of right-wing violence in postwar Germany. This pogrom led to historically significant limitations in the right to asylum, ultimately resulting in a change to the German constitution. We propose to look at Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an example to explain that practices of remembering right-wing violence, a process that we describe with the term ‘Doing Memory on right-wing violence’, is a central part of creating a society’s basic story. This basic story, in turn, contributes to how a society understands itself. In this chapter’s second section, we argue first that analyzing practices of memory of right-wing violence, be they acknowledging, forgetting or suppressing those practices, actually make it possible to even expose the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture. Second, we want to uncover how potential and publicly effective interventions of and changes to the basic story might look like. Here, we build on Habermas’ model of democracy, utilize Susan Bickford’s work on listening as an important element in her political philosophy and refer to Benjamin Barber, who articulates that a participatory democracy requires political listening. As a result, our chapter’s third section demonstrates how listening can be conceptualized from a supra-individual perspective and how questions that are critical of existing hegemonic structures can prioritize a focus on hegemonic (non)listening. Lastly, we will sketch out strategies to intervene in hegemonic (non)listening. These strategies connect theoretically with concepts of ‘counter publics’ and ‘opinion forming publics’ and reference, among others, the work of Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, thus enabling the creation and execution of resistance practices of Doing Memory on right-wing violence.

Social processes of oppression in the stratified economy and Veblenian feminist post Keynesian connections

Conceptions of social stratification and oppression should be central to post Keynesian inquiry. The article takes a Veblenian feminist view to discuss aspects of oppression in economies of stratification and outlines connections to areas of post Keynesian economics. The article is structured around “five faces of oppression” delineated by political theorist Iris Young: exploitation, violence, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and marginalization. The paper reframes those based on a conception of evolving social processes and diverse economic relations, and employs Veblen’s theory of surplus and stratification, which has a broad understanding of domination that goes beyond capital accumulation. The article provides illustrations of these interconnected aspects of oppression, and discusses how each is co-opted today. The article presents specific connections to post Keynesian economic analysis and concludes by highlighting the potential of post Keynesian economics for social justice.

Who Do Our Methods Serve and Protect? Pedagogical and Meta-Ethical Challenges in Teaching Breonna Taylor

Abstract: Introductory courses in Christian ethics ordinarily survey deontological, teleological, and virtue ethics, testing each against case studies. In spring 2021, this author followed the customary approach, but our case was a claim made by Sgt. John Mattingly of Louisville Metro Police Department, who was involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor. In an e-mail to over 1,000 LMPD colleagues, Mattingly claimed, "I know we did the legal, moral and ethical thing that night." Mattingly's striking assertion raises epistemological and meta-ethical questions. In what sense was killing Ms. Taylor the right thing to do? Was this action virtuous? Did it proceed from a worthy intention toward a valid goal? Was it done in accordance with duty/ies? Did it produce good consequences? Was it conducive toward liberation? While the methods are necessary, none is fully adequate; the article argues that they should be supplemented by responsibilist ethical lenses adapted from Darryl Trimiew and Iris Marion Young.

Global injustice and animals: towards a multispecies social connection model

In this article I argue for and sketch the outlines of a multispecies social connection model, based on the work of Iris Marion Young. This multispecies social connection model responds to shortcomings in existing approaches to multispecies global justice in animal philosophy and IR. Because the model focuses on concrete structures of injustice, it allows for taking into account relations without categorizing other animals beforehand and for being attentive to nonhuman animal agency, and it recognizes the entanglement of political and economic forces in perpetuating injustice towards animals. The multispecies model also brings to light problems with anthropocentrism in theorizing structural injustice and responsibility. Analyzing multispecies structures of injustice shows how different forms of oppression are connected globally, which offers a better view of animal and human oppression than anthropocentric theorizing. This is important for determining the responsibilities of different kinds of social, political, and economic actors in working toward social change, and for knowing what to work toward. This model can either complement existing political models, or function as the starting point for new multispecies politics.

Equity and Inclusion as Workplace Practices: A Four-Step Process for Moving to Action

Purpose: In this article, we offer a praxis-driven framework that practitioners, scholars, and administrators can use to differentiate between equity and inclusion challenges and move toward catalyzing individual and/or coalitional action. We argue that distinguishing between equity and inclusion as two different potential problem types provides an opportunity for imagining a range of more just and equitable solutions. Acknowledging our margins of maneuverability and tacking in and out of potential realms for action allow practitioners to enact those solutions in practical and context-driven ways. Method: Following the definitional work of Iris Marion Young (1990) and Rebecca Walton, Kristen Moore, and Natasha Jones (2019) surrounding justice, we delineate relationships between justice, equity, and inclusion before offering a four-step process that practitioners, scholars, and administrators can deploy in order to envision and enact contextually specific tactical actions to redress inequity and exclusion in TPC workplaces and programs. Results: Through the application of the four-step process to contextualized examples of equity and inclusion challenges, we illustrate the utility of this approach as an actionable strategy for revealing and addressing inequity and exclusion within TPC workplaces and programs. Conclusion: The work of doing equity and inclusion is an ongoing endeavor that requires vigilance and imagination. Identifying whether we frame a problem as inclusion or equity makes visible the arguments available within specific contexts, acknowledges our margin of maneuverability, and enables us to consider the realm where initial change is possible. Our proposed process provides but one point of entry into the field's long-standing pursuit of justice.

A Digital Space of One’s Own: Rethinking Children’s Online Privacy

AbstractThis paper rereads the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, as it was adopted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Jones v Tsige, to include a fuller account of online privacy. It proposes that the Court’s stress on informational privacy forfeits a more dynamic and “spatialized” conception of privacy harm. This paper develops a relational account of spatial privacy using the work of Iris Marion Young, Virginia Woolf, and Jennifer Nedelsky based on three features—embodied habits, narrative, and experimentation—to supplement the informational reading of privacy in Jones. While Jones is not a case about young people, this paper nonetheless takes the Court’s emphasis on digital technology as an invitation to reflect on young people’s privacy. Using different accounts of young people’s online experience, it proposes that while privacy is certainly transformed by the online world, its basic spatial features have not changed as dramatically as the Court in Jones suggests.

Responsibility for Future Climate Justice: The Direct Responsibility to Mitigate Structural Injustice for Future Generations

ABSTRACTIn this article we argue that duties towards future generations are situated on the collective level and that they should be understood in terms of collective responsibility for structural injustice. In the context of climate change, it seems self‐evident that our moral duties pertain not only to the current generation but to future generations as well. However, conceptualizing this leads to the non‐identity problem: future persons cannot be harmed by present‐day choices because they would not have existed if other choices had been made. Recently, Charlotte Franziska Unruh has proposed a solution that places the duties not on the individual level but on the collective level. The current generation has a responsibility for future generations as a whole. This solution is promising, but we argue that it problematically overlooks the existence of unjust relations within the contemporary collective, as we all contribute differently to bringing future generations into existence. Therefore, we propose to graft Iris Marion Young's Social Connection Model, which is concerned with structural injustice, on to the discussion of responsibility for future generations. Our proposal incorporates the strengths of Unruh's arguments, while also allowing for a differentiated responsibility based on different implications in unjust structures.

Structural Change Through ‘Collective Action as Democratic Practice’: Linking Grassroots Democracy With Social Justice

Iris Marion Young argued that tackling structural injustices that arise from complex interactions requires collective, political action. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what kind of collective action leads to social justice and how. This article aims to fill this gap by developing the idea of ‘collective action as democratic practice’ that emphasises crafting democratic institutions from the bottom-up to re-orient structural processes in ways that resist oppression and domination. This departs from Young’s own account of collective action as engaging in communicative action to pressure powerful agents. It also departs from previous attempts to conceptualise structural change through the cumulative, rather than collective, actions of individuals changing their behaviours independently of one another. I argue that my approach is a more promising way to theorise collective action from a structural perspective. This approach has wider implications for understanding the outward-looking political potential of self-organised projects by citizens.

The Curious Case of Carson McCullers: Appropriation, Allyship, and the Problem of Speaking for Others

In this article, I situate the life and work of Carson McCullers within the larger disability studies debate over the problem of speaking for others. The essay makes two arguments that build on one another. The first is for including McCullers more fully in the disabled community and in studies of literary disability, despite her having expressed a small number of ableist comments. The article suggests that McCullers’s experience as a queer disabled woman became a key lens that animated much of her writing. The essay then turns to its second and larger goal, which is to consider how the complicated case of McCullers can help the field distinguish allyship from appropriation and unethical identification. Turning to feminist theorists of communicative ethics Iris Marion Young and Linda Alcoff, as well as Deaf and disability scholars like Rebecca Sanchez, the article ultimately argues that McCullers’s “use” of deafness in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, though undeniably flawed, is not an act of appropriation but an early historical attempt at allyship from a differently disabled perspective. Her commitment to deafness is driven by a sustained critique informed by the shared afflictions of injustice, but one that also overall refuses to dissolve human difference or speak for deafness.

Discourse, Deliberation and Difference in an Authoritarian Public Sphere

This article explores how discourse, deliberation and difference – classically advanced by Jurgen Habermas and Iris Marion Young within a Western democratic context – functions in an authoritarian environment, with special reference to China. The article suggests why authoritarian discourse and deliberation is more limited than its Western democratic counterparts. It further suggests that the incorporation of difference into authoritarian discourse and deliberation is difficult due to the inherent tensions between the ‘Other’ and the ruling elite in authoritarian polities. Nevertheless, these constraints do not invalidate the notion that discourse and deliberation is theoretically possible and has a practical function in authoritarian regimes.

Narrative Identity and Recognition Deficiency

AbstractPaul Ricœur says that our narrative identity depends on how others understand us. This claim, however, does not explicitly address the fact that not everyone receives the same recognition: it underexplains how certain groups are systemically not acknowledged, respected, or taken seriously. More recent work on narrative co-authoring starts to address this fact by examining how people’s vulnerability to co-authoring depends on the context in which they live. But I argue that this work should be extended to attend to the kinds of vulnerabilities that result from what José Medina calls recognition deficiencies, which become more normalized due to structural oppression, specifically what Iris Marion Young calls cultural imperialism. I then illuminate the kinds of vulnerabilities that result from recognition deficiencies in cases of structural oppression by bringing in work in Black feminist thought and epistemic injustice, particularly that of Audre Lorde and Veronica Ivy, into conversation with narrative scholarship.

Five Faces of Oppression in Ayesha Baqir's Beyond the Fields

This research article analyses Ayesha Baqir’s Beyond the Fields (2019) using Iris Young’s model of ‘Five Faces of Oppression’. Baqir’s novel highlights the oppressive ideology that forces women to be subservient to male hegemonic values, traditions, and honour. The novel is evaluated to demonstrate the ways through which men exert their powers over women. Young's model shows how women become oppressed and marginalized groups of society and exploited at the hands of cultural norms. This research article will be an effort to create awareness among Pakistani women to believe in themselves and to fight hard to get what is rightfully theirs. Moreover, it will also be an attempt to open doors for future researchers to analyze literary texts through which they can raise such issues of exploitation.

“A Contingent ‘Yes’” Revisited

Reading these essays gave me a thrill of excitement like the one I felt on hearing that the #MeToo movement had extended even into China. The ideas in this Critical Perspectives collection go much deeper into the nature of and reasons for descriptive representation than I could two decades ago. Anne Phillips (1995) and Melissa Williams (1998), the two pioneers in this field who produced analyses far more thorough than mine, would, I think, agree with me on this. So would Iris Marion Young, whose early challenge in a talk over lunch inspired me to puzzle out my own take on the problem.

THE STRUGGLE OF BRIDE AND SWEETNESS AGAINST OPPRESSION IN TONI MORRISON’S GOD HELP THE CHILD

The aims of the study were to find out the types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness and know the Struggles of Bride and Sweetnees in the God Help the Child. The researcher used the oppression theory by Iris Marion Young to determine the types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness. The research applies African–American literary criticism to analyze woman oppression in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child. This study used a qualitative descriptive method by looking at Bride and Sweetness struggle againts oppression. This study only focuses on the novel God Help the Child as the object of analysis, and as the subject of analysis focus on the main characters, Bride and Sweetness. The result mentions that there are five types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness in different conditions. The types are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Another result is about Bride and Sweetness’s struggle to fight against their oppression. As they experience their own oppression, they have different effort. Bride finally overcomes her trauma and accepts her past, whereas, until the end, people don’t know Sweetness’s blackness since she never revealed it.

Досвід материнства під час війни: дескриптивно-феноменологічний аналіз

The article analyzes the individual experience of the first ten months of moth­erhood before and during the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine using the method of descriptive phenomenology of the body. Corporeality is considered as a basis for a possible description of the motherhood experience. In the analysis, I apply the ideas of Luce Irigaray (deconstruction of the complex image of mother­hood in art, science and philosophy) and Yulia Kristeva (analysis of the Western Christian tradition of depicting a mother with a baby and the narratives embed­ded in it) in the context of returning the discourse about motherhood to women. Based on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Young, I turn to a phenom­enological analysis of the body, namely, the female body, as the “first locus of in­tentionality.” In particular, it is about experiencing drastic bodily changes during childbirth and the first weeks of motherhood, the blurring of bodily boundaries between the nursing mother and the baby, the establishment of a common every­day life through the establishment of new repetitive rituals, its cancellation due to the need to flee and the attempt to restore it in a new place. In this regard, I provide the phenomenological interpretation of the home as a space of experiencing security, individuation, privacy and storage (Young) and its loss. I have singled out the processes of sleep and eating as the two main bodily manifestations of anxiety in everyday experience. A key element of the physical maternal experience is breast-feeding, which provides a suitable range of feelings: from pain and sacrifice to comfort and euphoria from union with the child. It was revealed that the specificity of the female body and its adaptation to new requirements within motherhood (in particular, additional weight, softness, endurance, inertness, etc.) made it possible to adapt to new critical circumstances associated with the beginning of a full-scale war, deprivation of a home, experiencing a threat and oppression.

On the Practice of Welcoming

The act of welcoming is often the first step in shaping the participatory contours of a collective’s social landscape. How and if individuals are invited into a space is often a product of the formal and informal social mechanisms used to facilitate newcomer or returner inclusion or exclusion. Notably, philosopher Iris Marion Young points out that greetings, as everyday communicative gestures, amount to acts of public acknowledgment. Moreover, during a successful greeting, Young argues that greeters announce themselves as “ready to listen” and “takes responsibility for her relationship to her interlocutors,” in addition to meeting the greeted’s basic need for recognition. In light of these observations, this paper argues that we have good reasons to think that welcomings, as a subcategory of greetings, require us to adapt our classroom communication norms, policies, assignments, and curricula in important ways. Specifically, they should change to publicly acknowledge our students’ dignity as potential knowers; to see them as contributors to the classroom space. Additionally, this paper offers a non-exhaustive list of three guidelines that can be useful when navigating these efforts and the challenges associated with the practice of welcoming.

Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice

Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency.