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In this essay, Robert W. Williams discusses Du Bois’s ideals of democracy and the impact they had on traditional US democratic theory. He juxtaposes Du Bois’s conceptions of difference with those of Iris Marion Young in order to highlight Du Bois’s distinctiveness. Young believes that difference is knowable, whereas Du Bois asserts that it is not, especially in regard to the possibility of scientific objectivity. Using Du Bois’s critiques of science’s limitations and strengths, Williams argues that Du Bois recognized the inadequacies of governance strictly based on science and therefore advocated a democratic form of governance that, although supported by science, would also rely on the participation of diverse groups of citizens.

This chapter argues that Iris Marion Young’s approach to unjust social systems and her acknowledgment that each of us is placed differently in those systems provides an important resource for engaging with questions of sexist oppression globally, while being attentive to intersectionality and power relations. After an explication of Young’s theory of political responsibility, criticisms of her theory are addressed. Because Young’s theory of political responsibility draws on feminist concepts such as social location, power, and privilege, it provides a more nuanced way to understand global justice than abstract universal frameworks such as human rights or cosmopolitanism. Extending Young’s theory, the chapter argues that global cross-border alliances can positively promote not only changes in unjust institutions and structures at the transnational level but also foster new local institutions, organizations, and practices that are fairer and more just, such as Fair Trade.

This chapter demonstrates that mainstream political philosophy is a philosophy of political passivity. It specifically argues that it is a philosophy of passive equality. It provides a preliminary definition of passive equality as the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions. Equality concerns what institutions are obliged to give people, rather than what those people themselves do politically. Iris Marion Young's own view and her positive proposals about passive equality are described. It also discusses the liberalism of John Rawls and the libertarianism of Robert Nozick. The method Rawls employs is the famous veil of ignorance. The greatest competitor to Rawls' view of justice is Nozick's, and especially his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The equality to which Nozick refers is equality of end-states, not equality generally. Rights can be the result of a struggle for equality, or a struggle from the presupposition of equality.

The principle of nationality defended in this book is contrasted with conservative nationalism on one side and radical multiculturalism on the other. Conservative nationalists treat national identities as rigid and authoritative, and therefore resist the changes in identity that immigration, for example, requires. Radical multiculturalists support the political expression of group identity, but fail to see how a secure sense of national identity can benefit minority groups. It is a defensible aim of public policy to integrate groups into such an identity, in particular, through the education system. Cultural minorities can legitimately demand equal treatment, but special rights for such groups are in general unjustified.

This chapter follows the parallel courses of various feminists'—Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Iris Marion Young—revaluations of pregnant embodiment and Hollywood's changing depictions of pregnancy. It presents developments in feminist thought, science, medicine, and popular film and relates them to the changing attitudes toward pregnant bodies and desires. The concept of pregnant glam not only causes the sexual objectification of the female body, but it has also been putting more pressure on women to “have it all”—careers, babies, a good man, and sexy bodies. The central question here is: can attractive representations of pregnancy also be empowering to women even as they promote traditional family values?

In this chapter it is argued that deliberative democracy’s promise is more likely to be realized if the dialogic conditions for inclusivity and free deliberation are taken into account. These conditions take two forms, both of which relate to listening. First, the process of deliberation will be at its best when the rules of good, apophatic, listening are followed. This is the discipline of listening. Second, inclusiveness is a function of effective listening out. This leads to an increase in legitimacy in pluralist societies as it promises to draw on as wide a range of viewpoints as possible. Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the ‘ideal speech situation’ is criticized for its lack of attention to listening, and the idea of dialogic democracy is discussed by developing the work of Antony Giddens, particularly in relation to the roles of ‘trust’ and of ‘difference’. The constructive power of dialogic democracy is illustrated by showing how it enhances the inclusionary intentions of Iris Marion Young’s idea of ‘communicative democracy’.

The cases of global injustice any of us has in mind when thinking about the requirements of justice condition our take on justice and responsibility. Chapter 1 provides two cases of injustice itself: garment worker labor rights struggles and the global food crisis. Throughout the book, the author refers back to specifics in these discussions. The empirical and conceptual complexity of these problems illustrates the kind of problem she thinks is most challenging for global justice and responsibility. She introduces other approaches to responsibility with which just responsibility has an affinity: Larry May’s shared moral responsibility, Hannah Arendt’s political and collective responsibility, and Iris Marion Young’s connected responsibility. A comprehensive discussion of how the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity takes responsibility for injustice illustrates the kinds of practices that are part of a political approach to taking responsibility for injustice itself.

Chapter 1 defines discrimination in the generic sense and then distinguishes between three different and more specific senses of discrimination, which are all prima facie or even necessarily, morally wrong kinds of differential treatment. One of these senses—group discrimination, i.e. treating people differently on the basis of their membership in different socially salient groups—is then explained in greater detail as this is the sense of discrimination that is employed in the rest of the book.

This chapter deals with territory-based modes of adjudication and argues that the existence of multiple normative communities in an era of globalization requires law that constantly negotiates the “permeable and ever-shifting divide” between the familiar and the strange. It analyzes the works of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt and advocates what it calls a “cosmopolitan pluralist vision” of conflict of laws that not only recognizes the multiple affiliations held by people but also gives rise to hybrid rules that combine laws across normative boundaries. It also shows that territory-based modes of adjudication make little sense between sovereign states and that negotiating with strangers in a globalized world requires the use of some concepts from conflict of laws jurisprudence (for example, choice of law, jurisdiction, and judgment recognition). Finally, the chapter considers a state called “unassimilable otherness,” which allows communication across, rather than annihilation of, difference.

This chapter turns to sports fan practices that decenter masculinity to argue that sports fandom need not always reinforce existing social hierarchies. Women’s fan practices—both as fans of mainstream men’s sports, and as fans of women’s sports—show that sports culture is not exclusively the domain of men and complicate our understanding of the gendering and racializing effects of sports fandom in the contemporary United States. Some forms of women’s sports fandom work to destabilize rigid gender, racial, and sexual norms by undercutting the “homosociality” of sport and valorizing the very forms of subjectivity that are typically excluded from or denigrated by mainstream sports culture. Drawing on the work of Iris Young, this chapter examines two primary cases of women’s sports fandom, the LeBron James Grandmothers Fan Club, and lesbian fans of the WNBA, and argues that sports fandom may in some circumstances be instrumental in the production of subjects and communities that reject gender, racial, and sexual oppression. Women’s sports fandom may not be ‘typical,’ but this is precisely the point. Women fans and fans of women’s sports do fandom in ways that give us reason to hope that for sports fans, all may not yet be lost.

This chapter discusses the potential of the corporate university, which stands as the subjugation of reason to the dictates of neoliberal ideology and global markets. It exposes the “corporateness” that resides within the university as an institution and within intellectual inquiry, and provides a genealogical approach to corporate university as a modest response to contemporary problems. The chapter concludes with a review of the structural transformations referred to as the corporatization of the university, and the difference between legal liability and political responsibility through the works of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt.

This chapter explores some of the ambivalent potential of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology for thinking about human beings as objects and about being with human beings as objects. In particular, it employs feminist phenomenological theories of objectification, such as those of Beauvoir, Young, and Bartky, as both already object-oriented and as already contesting the idealist tendencies opposed by Harman. Objectification often produces ‘double-consciousness’, and objectified human beings inhabit a site of ontological duality, often knowing themselves as objects for others. The chapter suggests that the absence of these analyses in object-oriented ontology constitutes an important oversight since such work not only draws attention to object relations among human beings but also points to ways of understanding human relations with non-human objects.