Iris Marion Young

To grow up feminist, to learn social justice in a national and global context, to make of the mind a scalpel to excise confusion and spurious argument, is to have read the work of Iris Marion Young. May she return to us again: fierce, brilliant, loving, speaking truth without fear.

Her friends Alison Jaggar and Sandra Bartky, both maginificent forces in feminist thinking and action, posted this announcement of her death on the FEAST list:

We are devastated to announce the death of Iris Marion Young on July 31,2006. Iris was a pioneering feminist philosopher who made groundbreaking contributions to political philosophy and phenomenology. Her work bridged divides between analytic and European philosophy and between high-level theory and grassroots activism. In addition to her philosophical contributions, Iris was a committed political activist, an inspiring teacher and a loyal friend.

Sandra Lee Bartky and Alison M. Jaggar

The University of Chicago obituary is here. Let us carry on.

It is the work of these women, Iris espescially, and MacKinnon, whose minds bend themselves to the real, to the situtation as it is, in its ugliness and its possiblity, who keep feminism and patriarchal power honest. We needed agree with with every analysis to learn from and profit from the work of facing facts and staying faithful to them. Feminists like me, interested in theory, in how literature plays its role in collusion and resistance to Jack's hypnosis, in how the future might not be the past with new toys, we, and I owe Iris and her fellow travellers a great debt. I can turn to their work and ground my own imganiative hope with reference to the very great distance still to go for justice and mututality to become the bones of our cultures. We can see, again, again, again, that power/dominance/violence and cycles of destruction it creates in the personal and political worlds, that those bones require excision -- as we find we have evolved beyond their value.