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DSA sought to heal the rift between the Old Left and conflicting factions of the New Left amid the rise of an ascending cultural left that privileged race, gender, and sexuality, building on the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The Gramscian focus on hegemony—the cultural process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural—provided the socialist left with a basis for appropriating the cultural leftism of identity politics, difference feminism, and other forms of cultural recognition. The book shifts gears in chapter 7 because cultural left academics took over the left and changed the subject.

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.

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.

The final chapter calls a refiguring of justice that moves toward communicative and deliberative theories of democracy and democratic practice that begin by theorizing injustice, difference, and subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, Michel Foucault, and Simon de Beauvoir, the normative evaluation of felon disenfranchisement must begin by recognizing what it as a productive failure that manages paradoxes of liberal punishment and membership. This calls for a provisional acceptance of the relationship between punishment and the boundaries of political membership and a deeper rethinking and refiguring of practical and institutional practices of exclusion, inclusion, and punishment. Recognizing the relation between persons who have and have not been subjected to the criminal punishment system in the US as one of seriality, this chapter calls for a critical, self-reflective, and radical democratic practice. To end the legacy of racialized social and political hierarchization requires removing disenfranchisement provisions, but also demands moving beyond the logic of inclusion, divesting the vote as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.

Many feminist theorists have used the metaphor of home to identify the problematic and illusory nature of an ideal of individual identity as bounded, unified, safe and secure, and an ideal of a feminist politics emerging out of a cohesive community of women-identified women. In response to these critiques, Iris Marion Young argues that the ideal of home nevertheless ought to be affirmed as a locus of normative values that support personal and collective identity: 1) safety, 2) individuation, 3) privacy, and 4) preservation. Responding to critiques of each of these values, I argue for alternative values: 1) the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; 2) relational identities, constituted through both relations of power, and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; 3) relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; 4) connection to past and future, through reinterpretive preservation and transformative identification.

This chapter examines the role of the imagination both in the production and in the prevention of social harms. Different ways of imagining can sensitize or desensitize people, creating or severing social bonds, affective ties, and relations of empathy and solidarity. Stigmatizing ways of imagining play a crucial role in facilitating injustices by distorting and excusing the suffering of some. But resistant ways of imagining can contest stigmatizations, and they can help us become sensitive to the suffering of stigmatized subjects. I argue that in order to develop pluralistic democratic sensibilities, we need to cultivate a resistant imagination that is polyphonic and experimentalist. I conclude by developing a conception of network solidarity grounded in a kaleidoscopic social imagination. The women’s movement is used as a model for the increasing pluralization of a public that has learned to develop a kaleidoscopic social sensibility.

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.

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?

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.

In this chapter the anthology's editors provide an overview of some of the extant philosophical considerations of pregnancy, childbirth and mothers, attending in the process to the historical neglect and misappropriation of each. Reflecting on the relationship between philosophy and feminist theory, they call for a reexamination of some deep philosophical prejudices that so often bar conventional philosophers from taking feminist philosophy, or women's experiences, seriously. First, they consider the view that the personal is opposed to the philosophical. Next they address the perennial problem of essentialism in the light of Iris Young's notion of gender as seriality. Young's approach is offered as a way to navigate the personal and the theoretical while avoiding the sweeping claims that characterize essentialist philosophical theory. The authors further note that “feminine” experiences such as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering have the power to radically challenge and in many cases undermine conventional, often fundamental beliefs about the nature of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity, humanity's relationship to the natural world, and the nature and purpose of ethics, to name just a few.

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.

Critics of the deliberative approach argue that deliberative theory works with an overly restrictive understanding of argumentation that leads to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. Successive generations of deliberativists have developed two approaches in response. The first, supplementing approach, supplements rational argumentation with ‘other’ forms of communication to better accommodate difference. Drawing on the work of Iris Young, this strategy is shown to fail. The second, systemic approach, replaces the categorical criteria of the supplementing approach with systemic criteria. While this response significantly opens up deliberation, it sacrifices core deliberative ideals for perceived net benefits to the deliberative system. This can result in the violation citizens’ deliberative freedom and the political impoverishment of vulnerable actors. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of rhetoric, a third, constitutive approach, is suggested, an approach that opens up deliberation in a way that overcomes the problems with the supplementing approach, whilst avoiding some of the unwelcome consequences of the systemic approach. The chapter ends with an unexpected crossing of paths between Bohman and Derrida that points the way to a deconstructive entry into the debate.

This chapter looks into the struggle of finding a feminist space in social media. It uses the studies of Susan Gal and Iris Marion Young as references for the matter of building perspective on gender and space. Social media as a space operates similarly to the home as it can be a crucial zone for connection, self-expression, and resistance but can also incite violence. On the other hand, overemphasis on construction was linked to gender dynamics wherein women's work is always undervalued in patriarchal spaces. Research has found that the majority of social media labor is conducted by women while being underpaid work.

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.

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.

Chapter 4 examines the fraught relationship between integration and racial solidarity. Because racial mixing is often taken to be the core element of integration, many have worried that integration would threaten cherished black spaces and institutions that nurture a valuable form of solidarity. Against this concern, the chapter argues that we need not understand integration and racial solidarity as fundamentally antagonistic to each other. Rather, distinct racial identities, spaces, and institutions can persist in an integrated nation, provided they are not openly exclusionary or hostile to others. Iris Young’s ideal of differentiated solidarity provides a model of this form of integration, despite her own presentation of it as an alternative to integration. This reading emerges through an extended engagement of Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of Young.