Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature at Duke University. She is the author of American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, editor of Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, and coeditor of The Futures of American Studies, all published by Duke University Press.

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OBJECT LESSONS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................................................................1INTRODUCTION. How to Read This Book.....................................................................36ONE. Doing Justice with Objects {Or, the "Progress" of Gender}..........................................91TWO. Telling Time {When Feminism and Queer Theory Diverge}..............................................137THREE. The Political Conscious {Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity}.....................197FOUR. Refusing Identifi cation {Americanist Pursuits of Global Noncomplicity}...........................239FIVE. Critical Kinship {Universal Aspirations and Intersectional Judgments}.............................301SIX. The Vertigo of Critique {Rethinking Heteronormativity}.............................................345BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................391

Chapter One

Or, the "Progress" of Gender

In the beginning, the most familiar version of the story goes, identity entered U.S. institutions of higher education as a palpable value for democratic life, inaugurating new practices of public access and accountability, and cultivating both new objects of study and the interdisciplinary fields that would be singularly devoted to them. In identity's most heroic scene, usually set in the late 1970s, the hierarchies of wealth, sex, and color were tacitly exposed as students and scholars sought to close the gap between the state and its citizens, institutions and the communities they were said to serve, and democracy and the incipient violences of capitalism. In time, identity's institutional and intellectual capacities were sorely blunted; diversity diverted its political attentions toward student ser vices and development; multiculturalism upended differences by making them all seem the same; and the transatlantic critique of the subject challenged its sovereign investments. To be sure, this quick glimpse of identity's position in the political economy of the always receding historical present underestimates the complexity of its historical sojourn and the very intense battles in the United States in the past century over its public, private, and academic utility alike—just as it fails to account for the fact that what is oft en referred to as "identity politics" was rarely recognized as such by those who have been given credit for inaugurating it. But the sweep of the story has a point, less about the actual substance of historical change or our ability to track it than about the affect that might symptomatically register it in the present. So much of what matters to me about identity knowledges emerges here, in the felt discordance between the political possibility that identity represents and the fear of what it has become, which is to say the discordance between what we have invested in it and how it might live in the world on terms not wholly—sometimes not even approximately—our own.

Elsewhere I will pay attention to the issue that hovers in the background, where political optimism is rocked by its encounter with the contingency of historical transformation, underscoring the extent to which the materials available for identity knowledges to think with and through—concepts, languages, disciplines, rhetorics, social practices, and cultural forms—have no fixed political essence, which means that they are not immune to becoming something other than what we want from them. For now, however, I want simply to set the stage for the various inquiries in this book by considering the shape, force, and consequences of the political commitment that underwrites identity's academic sojourn and serves as the distinguishing disciplinary characteristic of the various fields collated in its name. My primary example in this chapter is Women's Studies and the political commitment that institutionalizes its disciplinary formation, thereby determining its object and analytic dispositions, methodological priorities, rhetorical forms, and the field-forming narratives that accompany and frame them—all in a complex and at times anxiety-ridden calculus that confers (or withholds) critical authority and belonging in the field. To talk about identity knowledges as disciplinary formations is to find oneself immediately violating their first and most insistent rule, which takes their inaugurating commitment to justice as the means to overcome the distance, if not the distinction, between social movements and the institutionalized domains of study that seek to politically nurture them. Under this rule, the institutionalized object of study is the political referent it stands for, which is why identity knowledges so oft en seek to explicate their referent's historical and social itineraries in order to practice doing justice to and for them. My aim in Object Lessons is not to challenge this disciplinarity or to re orient the critical apparatus that sustains it, but to explore the ways in which its political promises are engaged and performed. Indeed, my point throughout is that such disciplinarity is absolutely alluring, as the political agency it confers on objects and analytics of study forwards the deeply satisfying belief that critical practice is the terrain of political resolution itself.

In this chapter, I consider these issues by following the discourse of justice that attends one identity object of study—women—whose well-rehearsed failure to remain conceptually coherent and universally referential for all women within the field domain of Women's Studies has inaugurated a turn toward a host of new investments organized increasingly under the sign of gender. While many academic feminists of my generation remember when gender was a synonym for women, the term has come to collate much of what the category of women is said to exclude: from men, masculinity, and queer sexualities to trans and intersex identities and analysis. Hence, one now encounters gender as a means both to describe the constraints of heteropatriarchal social formation and to figure subversion, disidentification, and dissidence in identity attachments and everyday life. It operates as a coordinate for approaching the complexities of social subordination (classic intersectionality) and as an analytic for unraveling a wide range of discursive, economic, and geopolitical pro cesses. It functions as well to denote emergent identities and is implicated in, if not central to, the practices and politics of contemporary social movements of various kinds. In serving as a referent for a range of objects of study and analytic practices, as well as the subjects that might be said to mirror them, gender performs the optimistic hope that a relation of compatibility, if not consistency, between critical practice and field domain can (finally) be won. My subtitle, "The 'Progress' of Gender," is meant to foreground the temporal and aspirational aspects of these far-reaching field transformations and to focus attention on the transferential idealism that underwrites gender's refashioning as politically progressive precisely where women is not—as a means for achieving representational inclusion, historical precision,...