research
current projects
Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Reading, Writing, and Citation
Feminist Revolution: Political Imagination and Early Radical Feminism 1967-71
Playing Politics: What Games Can Teach Us About How to Do Democracy
forthcoming
“Justice and the Politics of Identity: Becoming and Structure in Iris Young,” Democratic Theory, forthcoming in 2023.
In this article I recuperate a structure-oriented account of a politics of becoming from the work of Iris Young, one that rejects identity politics to focus instead on redressing structural injustice. Young offers a theorization of democracy that at once acknowledges our inner multiplicity and our individual capacity to shape our identity, and views equality and inclusion as important political goals that require eliminating structural injustice. For Young, fully embracing the multiplicity and fluidity of groups entails a shift away from conceptualizing groups in terms of identity, toward viewing groups as structural positions. Emancipation thus cannot be achieved through including marginalized identities (e.g., through group-based representation) but only through attention to how particular social positions become the site of structural advantage or disadvantage.
recent articles
“Dead Dogma and the Limits of Feminist Political Imagination: Thinking #Metoo as Consciousness-Raising,” Theory & Event, Vol. 25, no. 2, 2022: 275-303. DOI: 10.1353/tae.2022.0013.
Commentators frequently describe the #metoo movement as a kind of "consciousness-raising." This language works to position #metoo within a radical, political tradition of feminist activism, yet obscures anti-political, dogmatic undercurrents in contemporary feminism. I analyze contemporary and second wave feminist writings to reveal three, anti-political uses of "consciousness-raising" common to both eras. I recover a fourth usage—revolutionary consciousness-raising—deriving from early radical feminists' experiences with various forms of leftist activism. Revolutionary consciousness-raising can inspire a revitalized political imaginary: one that is radically democratic, and that aims to unsettle all dogma—including feminist dogma.
“Correspondence in re: Brotherhood Is Powerful,” co-authored with Alisa Kessel (under the pen-names A. Fergus Kastle-Michaelson III and Eunice Westlund), Political Theory, Vol. 51, no. 1, 2023: 237-240. DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128978.
Written for the 50th anniversary issue of Political Theory, this set of letters to the editors of the journal from fictional political theorists A. Fergus Kastle-Michaelson III and Eunice Westlund imagines a not-too-distant future in which political theorists discover the (feminist) concept of patriarchy via a book entitled Brotherhood is Powerful.