Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Reading, Writing, and Citation

Feminist scholarship seems to have achieved legitimacy in academia in the West: there are feminist scholars in top positions at major research universities, well-established feminist journals and book series, and institutionalized women’s and gender studies departments. Why then is feminist work still peripheral to fields like political theory? While feminist scholars have worked within and against the discipline of political theory for generations, their contributions remain marginalized: they are rarely taught, cited, or read, unless by feminist scholars themselves. Feminists engage with political theory, yet political theorists seldom return their attentions. Why has this one-sided dynamic emerged? How might contemporary scholars resist the marginalization of feminist political theory to disrupt this pattern?

In Bandita, I turn to Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) at different moments as my case study, my muse, and my subject in order to diagnose and redress the structural conditions inhibiting the uptake of feminist scholarship within political theory. Young once described herself as a ‘bandita’: a feminist outlaw who selectively steals resources from male philosophers to serve her own political purposes, while leaving behind whatever of their work is sexist or unhelpful. This figure of the bandita illustrates the structural position of the feminist political theorist, working within a field in which often misogynist and masculinist canonical texts exercise a gravitational pull (feminists need to know them, be trained in them, and are often attracted to them), while simultaneously exerting a centrifugal force (feminists are repulsed by their sexism, and by how the field centers the ideas and the figures of men). For intellectual and professional reasons, feminists desire to engage with living political theorists as well, and feminists want their engagement to be reciprocated. Disappointingly, however, feminists find that in order to be taken seriously they often have to address nonfeminists on their terms, and downplay, hide, or set aside their feminist commitments. And so banditas structurally are suspended between the feminism that makes them disciplinary outlaws, and their attraction to and need for engagement with nonfeminist academics, with whom they often have dissatisfying, one-sided intellectual interactions.

I examine Young’s work and its reception as a case study of the impediments to the uptake of feminist scholarship. I show that readers tend to take up her work in one of two tracks: feminists read her explicitly feminist work [e.g., Throwing Like a Girl (1990), Intersecting Voices (1997), On Female Body Experience (2005)], and nonfeminists read her less explicitly feminist work [e.g., Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Global Challenges (2006), Responsibility for Justice (2011)]. Few scholars read across these tracks, which means that many of her political theory readers miss the centrality of feminist theory and activism to her thinking, leading to impoverished and even erroneous interpretations of her ideas. While these tracked reading practices are in part a product of unquestioned disciplinary norms, they are also a consequence of how Young writes. I trace how over time, she came to write differently for nonfeminist readers, moving feminist examples and references first into her footnotes, and then eliminating them altogether in favor of citing canonical male authors. This writing practice enabled her perhaps to reach more nonfeminist readers, but in a way that left no citation trail for them to follow to lead them back to her feminist scholarship, or to see the influence of feminist theory and practice on her thought. I argue that this combination of reading, writing, and citation practices impeding engagement with feminist work is not unique to Young’s work and its reception, but rather is characteristic of broader patterns within political theory.

I also take up Young as my muse. Reading her as a bandita myself, I take from her writing concepts that help me think through the political problems that concern me: namely, the structural barriers that have limited the uptake of feminist scholarship. I find in her work the concept of the bandita, which I also trace back to where she discovered it, in the fragmentary work of feminist philosopher Linda Singer. Additionally, I repurpose other concepts from Young’s writing: such as internal exclusion, dual systems thinking, structure, exploitation of reproductive labor, and housekeeping understood as commemoration. And I take inspiration from her love of jazz and study of jazz piano to reconceive of feminist theory as a living tradition along the model of improvisatory jazz.

Finally, throughout the book I engage with Young as my subject: that is, I engage in close reading of her work and offer my unique interpretation of her thinking. In particular, I argue that her encounter in the late 1970s with socialist feminist theory and practice deeply influenced her understanding of oppression as occurring along multiple dimensions simultaneously: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and so forth. This shaped her approach to oppression in her most famous book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, whose influence by socialist feminism has gone unremarked by other scholars. Moreover, I show how socialist feminist thinking continued to influence her approach to the theory of structure that she continued to develop over the 1990s, and which found expression in the essays written in her last years and published in her two posthumous books. I also highlight how being a bandita influenced her method and approach to doing political theory. Young regularly drew from a variety of intellectual traditions and thinkers that do not sit comfortably with one another: feminist theory and practice, phenomenology, existentialism, analytic philosophy, and authors like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. Yet she never bothered with the task of making the ideas she stole from various sources philosophically compatible. Her eclectic approach to theorizing makes sense when we understand her as a bandita: picking and choosing the elements of theoretical frameworks that serve her political purposes and help her to think through the problems that occupy her.

Bandita diagnoses how reading, writing, and citation practices in political theory produce structural barriers to the broader uptake of feminist scholarship, but it also proposes practical ways that academics can resist and shift these practices, which I illustrate along the way through my own writing. First, we can shift how we read by deliberately reading off of the usual tracks. I show one way to do this – by interweaving the reading of books from different tracks, alternating a chapter or two at a time, in order to highlight relationships between them and to make connections that may be difficult to see when we read books separately and sequentially. Second, we can change how we write to make feminism central to political theory. For feminist scholars, this means resisting the pressure to downplay feminism in our writing, and instead to write in way so as to expect our nonfeminist readers to engage it. For nonfeminist scholars, this means resisting the temptation to treat authors like Young as FINOs – Feminists In Name Only – as when authors reference “feminist theorist Iris Young” without also engaging with the ways that her feminism manifests in her work. Third, we can intentionally cite in a way that helps to keep alive the tradition of feminist theory. I propose a Feminist Citation Bechdel Test – a play on Alison Bechdel’s test for whether a film is worth watching – as a guide for citation practice in scholarship that cites (or should cite) feminist theory. (1) Citations should include references to at least two feminist authors and texts. (2) These citations should clarify how these feminists disagree with and relate to one another’s ideas (even if they have not ever explicitly engaged one another’s work). (3) These citations should include at least one feminist who is not a star, and at least one text published within the past ten years. Even though this would be a modest shift in citation practice, it would go a long way toward making feminist theory visible as a living tradition in the field, and toward giving readers pathways into reading and engaging feminist scholarship.