How do we make sense of the contradictory claims embedded in these two views articulated by the same scholar over a 15-year interval? Is the mature feminist philosopher writing in the leading journal of feminist scholarship in 1994 repudiating the neophyte socialist feminist who published in Socialist Review? Are we glimpsing a familiar feminist trajectory from Marxism to socialist feminism to poststructuralism? Do these two claims represent a discursive shift in how one writes feminist theory or a change in philosophical views?

While it might be easy to assume that the quotations mark a significant shift in the views of this prodigious scholar, I want to caution against too hasty a move toward that conclusion. Indeed, by tracing certain themes that did not change over the course of Iris Marion Young's intellectual journey, I want to suggest a different story—a story about how changing times and changing frames have affected the parameters of feminist argumentation. I will argue that Young remained a convinced socialist feminist throughout her life and that her theoretical motives remained constant over her rich and productive career. To use her own words: “My primary motive in raising these critical questions is political: I wish to see the political principles of socialist feminism furthered” (Reference Hawkesworth1980, 95). Precisely because her pragmatic objectives were unwavering, Young explored various approaches in her effort to answer the question: “What theoretical strategies are most useful to politics” (1997, 147). What may at first appear to be a contradiction, then, might better be understood as a sign of pragmatic feminist theorizing in a world moving toward the right politically and toward the poststructural philosophically. Shifts in Young's theoretical language, I will argue, mark a complex shift from a powerful critique of dual systems theory to a sophisticated critique of dualism, linked in a continuing struggle to develop an objective and persuasive account of feminist historical materialism.

Young was never a doctrinaire thinker. While completing her dissertation on the works of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, she was already publishing in socialist journals, making a case that all socialists must take feminist questions seriously if they are to understand how capitalism works (Reference Hawkesworth1980, 104). While some Marxist feminists were devoting arduous efforts to the “domestic labor debates,” trying to determine whether women's labor in the home should be subsumed under the Marxian category of productive labor or reproductive labor, as the production of use value or surplus value, or better yet as a mode of consumption, Young issued a fundamental challenge to Marxist theory: “If traditional Marxism has no theoretical place for analysis of gender relations and the oppression of women, then that theory is an inadequate theory of production relations” (Reference Young, Hennessy and Ingraham1981, 50). She criticized dual systems theory in part because it “had not succeeded in revising Marxist theory enough. … [I]t allows Marxism to retain in basically unchanged form its theory of economic and social relations, onto which it merely grafts a theory of gender relations” (1980, 98).Footnote ¹ In Young's view, dual systems theory enabled traditional Marxism to maintain its pretense of gender blindness, which had the effect of insulating its account of production relations, historical change, and the operations of capitalism from critiques devised by feminists and critical race theorists. One unhappy consequence of dual systems approaches, then, was that women's oppression, racial oppression, and gay and lesbian oppression remained “additive to central questions of Marxism” (Reference Young, Hennessy and Ingraham1981, 49).

To avoid this unhappy situation, Young advocated the development of a feminist historical materialism, which could demonstrate that phenomena such as “class, domination, relations of production and distribution on the one hand, and women's oppression on the other hand are aspects of the same socio-economic system” (Reference Young, Hennessy and Ingraham1981, 56). To demonstrate these connections, she deployed the gender division of labor as a central analytical tool. Refusing the myth of the woman of leisure, she argued that the “labor of women occupies a central place in any system of production; gender division is a basic axis of social structuration in all hitherto existing social formations; and gender hierarchy serves as a pivotal element in most systems of social domination” (1980, 101). Attention to the gendered division of labor could make it clear that women's oppression is related to work, waged and unwaged; it is not confined to domestic matters. Thus, Young suggested that empirical investigation of the unique modes of sexist domination at work and at home would afford “materialist analysis of social relations of labor in gender specific terms without assuming that all women in general or all women in a particular society have a common or unified situation” (Reference Young, Hennessy and Ingraham1981, 55).

Advocating a method of analysis attuned to historical specificity and capable of engaging complex differences among women and men within and across boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and nation, Young conceived feminist historical materialism as “a total theory, not merely a theory of the situation or oppression of women” (Reference Hawkesworth1980, 104). By incorporating processes of gender differentiation in her analytical framework, she developed a mechanism to illuminate how gender status, gender hierarchy, and gender domination were produced, challenged, and changed under specific historical circumstances (1980, 105). By attending to hierarchies rooted in race and sexuality, she also sought to create a version of feminist historical materialism that would “not reduce all social phenomena to economic phenomena, narrowly understood as processes of the production and distribution of material goods” (1980, 105).

Valuing radical feminist insights about the structuring power of false consciousness and the pressing need for consciousness raising, Young began theorizing a new conception of materiality that refused the economic determinism and the base/superstructure model associated with doctrinaire Marxism. To explicate a mode of materiality that recognized the formative power of ideologies, intellectual production, social attitudes, and beliefs, cultural myths, symbols, and images (Reference Hawkesworth1980, 105), she turned to existential phenomenology. In “Throwing Like a Girl,” she analyzed “femininity” in terms of the “structures and conditions which delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by women themselves” (1989, 55). In developing a lucid phenomenological account of how sexism in contemporary Western societies constrains the way that women occupy and move in space, inhabit their bodies, and manifest their intentions, she dramatically depicted how something as intangible as “the gaze” has productive material effects. Through powerful examples drawn from sports and everyday encounters on the street, she showed how “the modalities of feminine bodily existence are not merely privative,” but actively produce modes of “feminine body comportment and movement … that enact … inhibition” (1989, 66).

In keeping with her characteristic commitment to complexity, Young sought to demonstrate not only how being objects of the gaze affects women but also how women become self-objectifying, while still retaining their freedom. Although “objectifying regard” might function to keep women “in their place,” it did not dictate the choices of any particular woman. In this preliminary attempt to theorize materiality phenomenologically, she insisted that the situation of women understood in terms of sexist oppression was at once objective yet indeterminate. The situation of women constrained the choices available to them in a particular historical moment, but did not negate the possibility for agency and subjectivity.

In theorizing materiality, Young borrowed not only from Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre but also from poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. If she jettisoned the language of “total theory” under the influence of poststructuralism, she nonetheless continued the project of fleshing out feminist historical materialism. In her wonderful analysis of “Five Faces of Oppression” (Reference Young, Allen and Young1990), Young developed the “set of basic categories” she had called for in her earliest essays, a set of categories that could demonstrate the objective character of structural oppression, while remaining sensitive to differing social circumstances in such a way that “their specificity remains and yet comparison is possible” (Reference Hawkesworth1980, 105). She identified five objective criteria of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Using these criteria to investigate the situation of particular groups, she argued, would provide the material foundation for justifiable claims concerning oppression, while also providing grounds for repudiating unwarranted claims. These criteria would also “make it possible to compare oppressions without reducing them to common essence or claiming one is more fundamental than another” (1990, 64). To demonstrate the analytical potential of these categories, Young explicated dimensions of oppression rooted in everyday practices. Through careful examples drawn from the experiences of African Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, women, gays, and lesbians, she demonstrated how systems of disadvantage and injustice are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, symbols, and assumptions underlying institutional rules and procedures, which operate independently of individual intention.

Young suggested that individualist premises (both liberal and methodological) obscure the structural dimensions of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity, fostering the mistaken notion that oppression is a matter of subjective perception. To counter the mystifying power of individualism, she began developing an account of groups sufficiently capacious to capture the phenomenological and the constitutive character of group membership. Borrowing from Martin Heidegger, she noted the “thrownness” of group affinity—one seems to simply find oneself a member of a group, whether that group is a family, race, ethnicity, gender, or nation (Reference Young, Allen and Young1990, 46). Yet contrary to liberal individualist claims about “self-making,” she argued that groups constitute individuals: “A person's particular sense of history, affinity, sense of separateness, even the person's mode of reasoning, evaluating, expressing feeling are constituted partly by his or her group affinities” (1990, 45).

Drawing from Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Young used the series/group distinction to make sense of some of the puzzles of group membership. On the one hand, a structural account of oppression seems to suggest that members of a group have something in common whether they recognize it or not; while on the other hand, meaningful membership seems to imply identification with the history, status, and projects of the group. In “Gender as Seriality” (Reference Young1994), Young took up this issue in the context of the furious debates over “the category, woman.” According to Sartre, a series is a mode of collective unity structured by external social or material circumstances or what might be called the “logic of the situation,” Because the commonality that unites the series is imposed by external objects or the actions of others, seriality is passive, implying no conscious awareness on the part of those who make up the series. Sartre used the example of people waiting for a bus to illustrate his conception of the series: They have certain things in common by virtue of their situation, even though they may not be consciously aware of any common ties. In contrast, a group is a collection of persons who consciously acknowledge a bond uniting them, whether it be a collective identity, a common project, or shared values.

Young analyzed gender as a serial collective that does not signify internalized identity: “The series woman is the name of a structural relation to material objects as they have been produced and organized by a prior history. … [G]ender, like class, is a vast, multifaceted, layered, complex, and overlapping set of structures and objects” (Reference Young1994, 728). The objects or “practico-inert realities” that construct gender include female bodies and enforced heterosexuality that defines bodily practices, as well as language, pronouns, verbal and visual representations, artifacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools, furniture, sexual divisions of labor, and gestures of exclusion and inclusion (1994, 730).Footnote ² Drawing together themes from earlier works, Young (1994, 733–34) notes that women are positioned

In contrast to the passive relations constitutive of the series, Young suggests that groups arise on the basis of and in response to a serialized condition. They mutually identify, that is, they recognize one another as belonging to a group with a common project that gives rise to collective action. Although women are not a group in this sense, feminist women are: “Feminist groups take something about women's condition as the explicit aim of their action. … [Their] purpose is to politicize gender and change power relations between women and men in some respect” (Reference Young1994, 737).

Reconsidered in context of the series/group distinction, one might argue that the complex structures constitutive of oppression that Young identified in “Five Faces of Oppression” might better be understood as series, reserving the term “group” for those who consciously mobilize to act together whether to perpetrate or to oppose oppression. But the materiality of these structural constraints is in no way mitigated by this change in terminology. What does change is the increasingly sophisticated account of materiality.

This change is made explicit when Young returned to a discussion of dual systems theory in 1997. Taking issue with Nancy Fraser's bifurcation of the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition, Young suggested that the opposition between these modes of political action might be an artifact of Fraser's analytical method. She faulted Fraser for failing to recognize that “political economy is through and through cultural without ceasing to be material and culture is economic, not as base to superstructure, but in its production, distribution and effects, including effects on reproducing class relations” (Reference Young1997, 152). The putative gulf between political economy and identity politics, on Young's view, could best be addressed by connecting “issues of symbols and discourse to their consequences in the material organization of labor, access to resources, and decision making power rather than solidify[ing] a dichotomy between economy and culture” (1997, 157). Echoing her argument about the importance of a set of categories that can illuminate the complex dimensions of oppression, she suggested that rather than becoming mired in polarizing strategies, those concerned with social justice would be better served by a theoretical approach that “pluralize[s] concepts of injustice and oppression so that culture becomes one of several sites of struggle interacting with others” (1997).

Young's approach to theorizing reflects the pluralizing she recommended for others. To comprehend the multiple modes of oppression characteristic of contemporary life, she read voraciously and borrowed extensively from analytic and continental philosophy, Marxist theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. Her later works may have eschewed explicit Marxian terminology and the language of “total” theory, but they theorize dynamic processes of materialization attuned to temporality, spatiality, and intangibility. She develops an account of the materiality of embodiment, which acknowledges the critical role of structural constraints while giving facticity, historicity, and agency their due. Refusing unhelpful binaries that pit intellectual production in opposition to economic production, recognition in opposition to production, distribution, and consumption, she offered an account of social relations in which social being and consciousness are mutually implicated. Neither is given; they shape and inform each other. In so doing, she also captured the complexity of a world emerging through globalization in which the service sector is the modal form of employment, and immaterial labor, producing immaterial products—information, knowledge, ideas, images, relationships, and affects—assumes hegemonic form (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2004, 65).Footnote ³

In embracing plurality and defending diversity, Young nonetheless produced a powerful and persuasive version of feminist historical materialism, which could demonstrate how particular forms become norms and particular practices become structures that delimit ways of being, situate groups in systems of advantage and disadvantage, and constrain individual choice and action over time. Her version of feminist historical materialism was pragmatic, driven by particular modes of injustice that became increasingly difficult to discuss in the aftermath of the Cold War. At a time when even as eminent a representative of the Left as Anthony Giddens insisted that “No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism” (1998, 43), Young preserved a more capacious vision of the possibility of social justice. She called for pragmatic solutions, but her project remained the same, devising sustainable solutions to the problem of oppression in all its complex and multiple forms.