Bandita: Feminism & The Politics of Reading, Writing, and Citation

About this event

Bandita is a powerful critique of the persistent marginalization of feminist scholarship. Taking up the work of Iris Marion Young, Michaele L. Ferguson argues that feminist political theorists have been "internally excluded": formally included in the discipline while their most disruptive insights are misread, dismissed, or ignored. Young―one of the most influential feminist political theorists of the past fifty years―is well known for her work on difference, democracy, and structural injustice, yet nonfeminist readers tend to treat feminism as merely incidental to her thought. Resituating her scholarship squarely within a feminist intellectual and activist tradition, Ferguson reconstructs her distinctly feminist account of structure and reveals what is lost when Young's readers―and even Young herself―fail to center her feminist commitments. Building from Young's own self-description as a "Bandita"―a feminist outlaw who selectively steals from male philosophers while leaving behind whatever of their work is sexist or unhelpful―Ferguson develops the figure of the bandita as a lens through which to understand the ambivalent, asymmetric, and often unreciprocated intellectual relationships between feminist and nonfeminist political theorists. The book exposes how reading practices, writing conventions, and citation norms pressure feminist scholars to veil their political commitments in order to secure recognition within the masculinist academy. Part intellectual biography, part disciplinary reckoning, part feminist manifesto, Bandita insists we move from structural critique to structural change. It breaks multiple desire paths for feminists and nonfeminists alike to follow, offering practical strategies for including feminist scholarship in political theory: reading off the beaten track, writing in resistance to compulsory heterosexuality in academia, and citing feminism as a living, ongoing tradition of scholarship. A love letter to the banditas who came before and a call to arms for those yet to come, Bandita insists that feminist political theory's internal inclusion is possible if we read promiscuously, write loyally, and cite intentionally. About the Speaker: Michaele L. Ferguson (https://www.colorado.edu/polisci/people/faculty/michaele-ferguson) is Associate Professor of Political Science and a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Sharing Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-editor of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Iris Marion Young: Gender, Justice, and the Politics of Difference (Routledge, 2022). She has written numerous articles on feminist and democratic theory, including most recently “Dead Dogma and the Limits of Feminist Political Imagination: Thinking #Metoo as Consciousness-Raising," in Theory & Event (2022), and with Alisa Kessel the satirical “Correspondence in re: Brotherhood is Powerful,” in Political Theory (2023). She is currently finishing a book on feminist political theory, Bandita: Iris Marion Young and the Politics of Writing, Reading, and Citation (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bandita-9780197862674?cc=ca&lang=en&) (Oxford University Press), and developing a role-playing game on the Paris Commune. She is the Co-President of the Association for Political Theory, a Consulting Editor for Contemporary Political Theory, and the Special Envoy for the Reacting Consortium. The Moderator: Isabelle Laurenzi (https://liberalstudies.nyu.edu/about/faculty-listing/isabelle-laurenzi.html?challenge=d06e90d7-4d8f-4b88-9d8c-10b73beb60f1) holds a Ph.D. in political theory from Yale University. Her dissertation draws on theories of political consciousness and action, as well as feminist critiques of domination and power. As of September 2026, she is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Liberal Studies at New York University. Currently she is at