Iris Young was a wide-ranging political and social theorist whose works transformed the study of democratic theory, theories of justice, multiculturalism, nationalism, and group rights, among others—all of this in addition to her enormous contribution to feminist theory. Young left not only specific substantive legacies but also her method as a critical social theorist: She sought to undertake projects that helped make sense of the claims and analyses made by progressive social movements, including feminist movements, by providing a philosophical grounding for those claims and analyses. She trained her critical eye on political and social institutions, aiming to expose relations of domination and other injustices.
Using this method in her work, Young often contributed simultaneously to academic political theory, feminist theory, theories of race and ethnicity, and theories of human rights, as well as to the study of public policy, social movements, and other fields oriented to practice. Her work on difference and social structure, the topic of this essay, is thus broader than feminist theory, while also being central to that field.
One of Young's most important contributions to feminist theory has been to develop an understanding of the concept of gender that enables a critique of social-structural injustice at a macro level, while simultaneously and equally acknowledging the political importance of group difference among women (especially as that difference relates to relations of domination). Indeed, a dual commitment to social-structural analysis and to taking account of the political importance of group difference is a theme that runs through all of her major works, both those focusing on feminist theory as well as those theorizing justice and democracy more broadly (i.e., Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980), Intersecting Voices (1997), Inclusion and Democracy (2000), and On Female Body Experience (2005). In what follows, I very briefly outline the problem that combining structural analysis of gender with an emphasis on group difference presents for feminist theory and then aim to spend most of the essay explaining Young's contribution to clarifying and resolving the problem. I will identify areas where further clarification or conceptual development is needed in order to continue to further this important theoretical project.
Iris Young's Critical Social Theory of Gender
The idea that “gender” names a single social structure that divides people into sex groups has come under thoroughgoing critique from queer theorists, postmodern feminists, and women of color, among others. These theoretical critiques radically undermined the conceptual basis of the work of most early feminist theorists and social scientists, not to mention feminist activists and policymakers.
Young proposed a theory of gender in order to resolve this problem. While acknowledging the importance of theorizing identity and subjectivity in feminist theory, she argued that there is a still a need for the concept of gender. Feminist theory, she argued, is not only about theorizing subjectivity, identity, or experience. It is also aimed at social critique, at exposing relations of power and domination (2005, 19). Moreover, we need different conceptual tools for social critique than for theorizing subjectivity (Young Reference Young1994, Reference Young2005).
Young's work on social structures, and specifically on thinking of gender as a social structure, takes up this challenge of theorizing power relations (1994, 2005). For the purpose of social critique, she argues, we need to think about social structures. Social structures are
1 constellations of social practices, norms, and institutional rules, both formal and informal;
2 comprised of practices and meanings that are embedded, reflected, and/or expressed in material surroundings; and
3 experienced as “given” by individuals, although they are formed through the cumulation of individual actions.
In Young's words (2005, 20), such structures
denote the confluence of institutional rules and interactive routines, mobilization of resources, and physical structures, which constitute the historical givens in relation to which individuals act, and which are relatively stable over time. Structures also connote the wider social outcomes that result from the confluence of many individual actions within given institutional relations, whose collective consequences often do not bear the mark of any person or group's intention.
Social structures position individuals “in relations of labor and productivity, power and subordination, desire and sexuality, prestige and status” (2005, 20).
The concept of gender can be thought of as naming one such structure. Similarly, race, class, sexuality, and other such social categories name axes of social relations rather than specific identity groups. Thinking of gender, race, and class as social structures is important because it helps to explain societal inequality: Specific constellations of norms and institutions coincide to advantage certain people or characteristics and disadvantage others in certain ways. This interaction occurs at a macro level and is not necessarily visible in the experience of specific individuals. The idea of social structures, and a concept of gender as one such social structure, helps to understand the operation and reproduction of social inequality.
Some scholars have suggested that thinking of gender as a social structure implies a homogeneity of experience that is difficult to square with the heterogeneity of female experience (Misra and Akins Reference Misra and Akins1998). Young (Reference Young1994) specifically aims to develop an understanding of social structure that can accommodate such a variety of experiences. “Gender” names an axis of social relations, one particular way in which social inequality is produced and reproduced. Social structures name the constraints within which people fashion identities more than they refer to those identities themselves. Saying that “gender” refers to a social structure does not imply that all women share a single interest, identity, or experience.
Fleshing out this idea of gender as social structure, Young identifies three basic axes of gender structures, while acknowledging that there could be others: 1) a sexual division of labor, 2) normative heterosexuality, and 3) gendered hierarchies of power. The sexual division of labor refers to the ways that different kinds of work are assigned to different social groups of women and men—the way that some work (for example, care work) is feminized, associated with women and the feminine, while other kinds of work are masculinized. Normative heterosexuality refers to a set of social structures that advantage heterosexual coupling. Gendered hierarchies of power include “positions and practices of institutionalized and organized violence” (Young Reference Young2005, 24). As Young concludes:
When describing social structures as gendered, it is not necessary to make generalizations about men and women nor is it necessary to reduce varying gender structures to a common principle. … The most important thing about the analysis is to understand how the rules, relations, and their material consequences produce privileges for some people that underlie an interest in their maintenance at the same time that they limit the options of others, cause relative deprivation in their lives, or render them vulnerable to domination and exploitation (2005, 24).
An Unfinished Agenda
Young's work makes an important contribution to theorizing gender while taking account of both social group difference and the diversity of female body experience. But at least two challenges remain for this project. The first area of theorizing that requires further development is one that Young herself had identified: the relation of lived bodies to social structures (2005, 25). The second is an area that she had not herself identified: the challenge of theorizing the interaction between structures of social inequality.
The Relation of Lived Bodies to Social Structures
Young agrees with critics of the concept of gender that the concept is at best a clumsy tool for analyzing subject and identity formation. She argues, however, that rather than reject the concept, we ought to restrict its use to the analysis of social structures. But, as she herself acknowledges, such an analysis usually says little about the relationship between lived bodies and social structures. Young (Reference Young2005) offers a sketch of this relationship that may prove fruitful for further conceptual development and application: She suggests, although she does not herself complete this task, that an account of the interaction between social structures and lived bodies can be developed by combining or drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of sociality and habit, and Judith Butler's deconstructive gender theory. Such a conceptualization would flesh out the understanding of agents and structures as mutually constituted by detailing the processes by which they become mutually constituted (Giddens Reference Giddens1982; Wendt Reference Wendt1987).
Theorizing Relationships Between Different Social Structures
A second outstanding question is how to theorize the interaction of different social structures at the macro level (Weldon Reference Weldon2006; Wright Reference Wright1997). Theorists of intersectionality insist that we cannot understand the ways that women are disadvantaged as women or the ways that people of color are oppressed unless we examine the ways these structures interact. Certain aspects of social inequality will not be visible so long as we focus on gender, race, and class separately (Collins Reference Collins1990; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1993 Harris, Reference Harris and Adrien1997; Hurtado 1994; Roth Reference Roth2004). Structural analysis is required by the idea of intersectionality: The concept refers to the intersection of social structures, not identities. But it is not clear how exactly these structures interact or how we should study the interaction (Hancock Reference Hancock2007). Do race, class, gender, and sexuality always reinforce or magnify one another's effects? At least sometimes, it seems, these axes mitigate, modify, or counter one another to some degree. Sometimes gender or race enable subjects at the same time that class structures disempower them, or vice versa. The concept of intersectionality can admit such variation. The problem with the concept as a guide for researchers is that it is indeterminate: Any number of possibilities could be consistent with the idea of intersectionality, but we want to know more about the impact of these permutations (Weldon Reference Weldon2006; Wright Reference Wright1997).
Young's approach to theorizing gender may suggest a way to fill this theoretical gap, although there is not space here fully to develop and defend a version of intersectionality that draws on her work. Young lists three basic axes of gender, but does not claim that these are exhaustive. Consideration of the ways that gender intersects with other dimensions of social relations may suggest additional axes. For example, thinking about the ways that gender and race are simultaneously invoked in the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which people define nations is one way that social organization reinforces race-specific constructions of masculinity and femininity (F. Williams Reference Williams1995). We could call nation making a fourth axis of gender. If we think of gender, as Young does, as referring to a set of social axes, we can expand and reconceptualize the concept of gender as we identify additional dimensions of social structure that become visible when we consider the interaction of race, gender, class, and the like.
Conclusion
Many feminist theorists criticize the concept of gender for obscuring differences among women: differences stemming from class, race, and sexual orientation, as well as differences in the ways that individual subjects experience or relate to social categories. Taking account of these arguments, Young concedes that the concept of gender may be too limited to ground a theory of subject formation or identity. However, as she points out, this does not mean that we should reject the concept of gender altogether. The concept of gender is more useful for the analysis of social structures than it is for understanding identity or subject formation. Moreover, she argues, a critical social theory needs an account of social structures to give an account of the constitution and causes of social inequality. Feminist and queer theory need an understanding of how gender operates as a social structure in order to critically evaluate the justice of particular modes of social and political organization.
Young's work goes beyond these important observations, which clarify the theoretical and political issues at stake, to contribute to an understanding of gender as a social structure that does not rest on the assumption that all women share any experience, interest, or identity. Although some aspects of this theoretical approach remain unfinished (as she herself acknowledged), Young's work points the way out of a dilemma that forces critical social theorists to choose between acknowledging the political salience of group difference and mounting an effective critique of social relations of gender. She also suggests ways to incorporate a fuller theorization of the lived body into a social-structural account of gender, a move that could illuminate the processes by which agents and structures come to be mutually constituted. Theorists wishing to further Young's theoretical program and extend this important contribution can do so by further working out her structural account of the relationship between gender, other axes of social group inequality, and the lived body.
