Hypatia

Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher is always socially situated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she either reinforces or struggles against them.

—Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) was Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she was also on the faculty boards of the Center for Gender Studies, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. During her too-brief career, she held appointments at various universities in the United States, held visiting fellowships at several institutes and universities throughout the world, including the G. W. Goethe University (Frankfurt, Germany); Australian National University; University of Waikato (New Zealand); Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna); Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa; and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and Institute for Advanced Study. She was truly an international scholar and teacher.

Young’s major publications include Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (1990); Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990); Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (1997); Inclusion and Democracy (2000); On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (2005); and Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination, and Responsibility for Justice (2006). She either edited or coedited several volumes, and wrote countless articles ranging over issues as diverse as the sense of home, reciprocity, pregnancy and menstruation, educational theory [End Page vii] and practice, oppression and domination, military intervention, aging, and, well, throwing like a girl.¹ Across and through these disparate topics, Young was able to maintain a focus and to develop a coherent and consistent body of work, each piece of which builds upon and further develops that which preceded it. This is an increasingly rare accomplishment among contemporary scholars. Even in her relatively short career, Iris Young was able to accomplish much: to refashion political theory and to inspire the application of feminist analysis to nonstandard problems of national sovereignty, global rule of law, and constitutional analysis.

Iris Young was perhaps one of the most influential political philosophers of our time. Her work demonstrated the practicality of, and theoretical flexibility for, bridging jealously guarded divisions in philosophical methodology, borrowing from phenomenology, postmodernism, and various streams of analytic philosophy, as necessary. She resisted overly abstract ideal theory at a time when it was de rigueur, choosing instead to critique those who held the view that political life is best understood through the formulation of universal ideals, divorced from lived realities and practical differences.

At every chance, Young took the opportunity to reach out, to understand, to share, to work, to build bridges between academia and social activism. By this, I mean she took to heart the feminist dictum that the personal is political. Reading her essays and books gives even the casual reader a sense of her as a person, and that sense is of someone striving to change the world, not just to theorize it. For those among us fortunate enough to have known and worked with her, yet obvious even to those among us who only knew her through her writing, Young was a force of intellect and character, meshing the too often sterile world of academia with devotion to the often raucous and risky day to day work of social justice. Whether on the domestic front of efforts to achieve justice for women in their personal lives or on the global or the local scene, supporting the struggles for justice among geographically and culturally disparate communities, she worked tirelessly.

Also remarkable is the scope and span of Young’s work, in which she analyzed and theorized about the everyday. Very little of what bears on women’s lives, in both personal and public complexities, went without her thoughtful refection. Her writing, which spans two decades, also shows a progression of concern from the intimately local to the global. She began with an adaptation of phenomenology to allow a rigorous theorization of the body in movement and form, function and location, in her highly influential and groundbreaking essay, “Throwing Like a Girl.” The result was a theoretically...