Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) is the most sustained attack on the distributive paradigm in political philosophy, and the book that gave the politics of difference its theoretical form.
Her first argument is that justice cannot be reduced to distribution. Treating justice as the allocation of goods among individuals leaves the institutional context — decision-making procedures, the division of labor, culture — outside the frame, and those are precisely where domination and oppression operate. She replaced the single concept of oppression with five distinct faces: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Groups can suffer some without others, which is why a single measure of disadvantage misdescribes their situations.
Her second argument targets impartiality itself. The ideal of a universal citizenship in which people set aside their particular identities and deliberate as generic citizens is not neutral in practice: those whose perspective is already the unmarked default lose nothing by the demand, while everyone else is asked to argue in a register that has already excluded their experience. Her proposal is group representation — mechanisms giving oppressed groups a distinct voice in deliberation — which drew immediate objections from republicans and liberals that it would entrench the divisions it meant to remedy.
She also wrote "Throwing Like a Girl", an essay on how gendered comportment is learned in the body, which remains widely read outside political theory, and late work on responsibility for structural injustice: harms produced by many people acting acceptably within unjust structures, where no one is to blame in the ordinary sense and everyone shares a forward-looking responsibility to change it.