American political theorist and feminist philosopher; professor at Pittsburgh and then at the University of Chicago, where she taught until her death from cancer at fifty-seven. Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) is a landmark of late-20th-century political philosophy and one of the most cited books in the field — a sustained immanent critique of the Rawlsian distributive paradigm from the standpoint of the social movements (women, racial minorities, the disabled, gays and lesbians, the poor) that had reshaped American politics in the two preceding decades.
Young's central argument was that distribution — the framing in which justice is the question of who gets how much of which goods — is necessary but not sufficient. Many of the most consequential injustices are not distributive at all; they are forms of oppression and domination that distributive theory cannot see clearly because they operate in the structures, norms, and practices that determine what people can do and become, not only what they have. She set out the famous "five faces of oppression" — exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence — as a framework for naming these structural injustices in their distinct forms. The argument prefigured and undergirds much of what later became intersectional analysis.
Her later work extended the analysis. Inclusion and Democracy (2000) argued for a more capacious model of democratic communication that takes seriously the situated knowledge of differently-positioned groups; Responsibility for Justice (published posthumously in 2011) developed her social-connection model of responsibility for structural injustice — the argument that ordinary participants in unjust systems (consumers in global supply chains, residents in segregated cities) bear a forward-looking political responsibility to organize against the injustices their participation reproduces, distinct from the backward-looking liability model of individual fault. The book closes with a careful, generous reading of Hannah Arendt on responsibility under conditions of structural wrong. Young's work is the major attempt of the past forty years to make liberal political philosophy answerable to the politics of difference without abandoning its commitment to justice.