WMNS 1103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Tyrant, Iris Marion Young, Cultural Imperialism

• School: Northeastern University
• Department: Women's/Gender/Sexualty Stdies
• Course: WMNS 1103
• Professor: Moya Bailey

Document Summary

Justice should refer not only to distribution, but also to the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation. Injustice refers primarily to two forms of disabling constraints, oppression and domination. In the most general sense, all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings. Oppression as a structural concept: in dominant political discourse it is not legitimate to use the term oppression to describe our society, because oppression is the evil perpetrated by the others. Oppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. Oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few people"s choices or policies. The systemic character of oppression implies that an oppressed group need not have a correlate oppressing group.