Object Lessons

Robyn Wiegman

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780822351603, 9780822351467
• eBook ISBN: 9780822394945
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

No concept has been more central to the emergence and evolution of identity studies than social justice. In historical and theoretical accounts, it crystallizes the progressive politics that have shaped the academic study of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet few scholars have deliberated directly on the political agency that notions of justice confer on critical practice. In Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman contemplates this lack of attention, offering the first sustained inquiry into the political desire that galvanizes identity fields. In each chapter, she examines a key debate by considering the political aspirations that shape it. Addressing Women's Studies, she traces the ways that "gender" promises to overcome the exclusions of "women." Turning to Ethnic Studies, she examines the deconstruction of "whiteness" as an antiracist methodology. As she explores American Studies, she links internationalization to the broader quest for noncomplicity in contemporary criticism. Her analysis of Queer Studies demonstrates how the commitment to antinormativity normalizes the field. In the penultimate chapter, Wiegman addresses intersectionality as the most coveted theoretical approach to political resolution in all of these fields.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. How to Read This Book
• One. Doing Justice with Objects {Or, the “Progress” of Gender}
• Two. Telling Time {When Feminism and Queer Theory Diverge}
• Three. The Political Conscious {Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity}
• Four. Refusing Identification {Americanist Pursuits of Global Noncomplicity}
• Five. Critical Kinship {Universal Aspirations and Intersectional Judgments}
• Six. The Vertigo of Critique {Rethinking Heteronormativity}
• Bibliography
• Index