Object Lessons

by Robyn Wiegman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822351603
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2012
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	412
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

OBJECT LESSONS

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By Robyn Wiegman

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5146-7

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Chapter One

Doing Justice with Objects

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, subjective complexity, social reparation, and theoretical sophistication. Such transferential practices promise to move the field toward critical coherence and political completion, now in the turn from women to gender and soon, no doubt, from gender to what ever will come to signify the ways in which it will have failed. Intersectionality perhaps? Or women of color or transnational feminism? (I'll take up the inevitability of the afterlife of gender at this chapter's end.) Above all, it is this practice of transference that interests me, as it makes legible the ways in which the disciplinary apparatus of Women's Studies stages its political desire as a representational practice, using its object and analytic relations as the institutionalized means for performing the commitment to justice that incites it.

Gender is not alone, of course, in being the occasion for object transference, nor is it the only category that collates optimism in identity-oriented fields today. Think here of queer in relation to Gay and Lesbian Studies, or trans in relation to queer, or diaspora in relation to both Ethnic and Queer Studies. Or consider how other terms—interdisciplinarity say—are routinely heralded as figures of political no less than critical progress. But while gender is not exceptional, its wide-reaching agency in field transformation in Women's Studies makes it an important case study for examining the imperative to do justice that has structured U.S. academic identity domains from their institutional beginnings. Indeed, no other term has so extensively revised the self-identity of an identity-based field, remapping what is taken to be its critical mission and the meaning of the concepts that attend it. At numerous institutions, gender now stands as the singular figure evoking the field domain, as in Gender Studies (Indiana University) or Critical Gender Studies (University of California–San Diego). At other institutions, it figures cohabitation, as in Gender and Women's Studies (Berkeley), Women and Gender Studies (UC-Davis), and Women's and Gender Studies (Rutgers University). At still others, it instigates a trilogy, as in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Trinity College) or Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Colby College). All of these configurations mark a decisive difference between terms that were once decisively converged, making the progress of gender the means to reflect not simply on the analytic divergences that have animated gender's development as both a category of analysis and an object of study in the past three de cades but on the political investments that have propelled the resignifying project altogether—investments that enable the field's name to serve as the privileged arena for staging and resolving anxieties over its political coherence.

The path my conversation traces is this one: I begin by looking closely at gender as a progress narrative in order to discern the practices of transference that underwrite its portability across a range of differently situated critical projects. By foregrounding the work of transference, I explore the field imaginary in which gender has emerged as the privileged supplement, if not the collectivizing sign, for political attachment in the afterlife of women. My project is not to hold onto women or to revel in its loss, but to meditate on the implications of believing the story that the progress of gender imparts: not simply that women is an analytically singular, insular category of analysis, but that its exclusivity can be corrected by addition or substitution, such that gender will be capable of giving us everything that women does not. To what understanding of the category of women does this idealization of gender commit us? And why is U.S. academic feminism so deeply in need of believing that an object or analytic, configured properly, will be adequate to all the wishes that are invested in it? To put these questions on the critical terrain that governs Object Lessons as a whole: What disciplinary apparatus generates this pursuit of a representative sign to organize the many intellectual projects and critical genealogies about bodies, identities, sexuality, gender, race, and ethnic, national, and economic difference that have come to exist within the institutional domain first named Women's Studies? What critical practices and object itineraries underwrite the demand for representation, inclusion, accuracy, or identity congruence in the figure of the field's primary name? And what will we do when gender can no longer sustain our investment in its ability to resolve the problems that it both collates and names? These questions and the conversations they generate in the following pages are animated by my contention that objects and analytic categories are always incommensurate with the political desire invested in them, which is not an argument against objects, analytics, or the practices of identity knowledges that seek to do justice with and through them. It is rather an engagement with the disciplinary shape and force of the field imaginary that conditions and compels the disciplinary subjects we have become. In the end, then, this chapter is less about gender and its critical capacities per se than an engagement with the fascinating conundrum of political desire that generates our disciplinary commitment to doing justice with, to, and through our objects of study and the analytics we develop to discern them. This conundrum, it seems to me, is as pleasing as it is vexed, which is why a deliberation on the promises that sustain it is well overdue.

I. Transferential Idealism

In "Women's Studies on the Edge," a special issue of differences published in 1999, Leora Auslander opens the volume by thinking about the composite intellectual projects that coalesce under the framework of gender. Her essay "Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" offers an affirmative answer to the central question its title poses, finding in the move from Women's to Gender Studies an intellectual expansion, such that "the study of masculinity, feminist gender studies, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies each have an equal voice" (25). Positioned as the volume's optimistic answer to the dystopic diagnosis in one of the concluding essays, Wendy Brown's controversial "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," Auslander's keynote offers assurance that the edge can become an intellectually cutting and politically capacious one when gender reconfigures the priority of women. To a certain extent, the question that Auslander's essay posed was not in 1999 a contentious one, at least not in the sense that scholars would have debated whether the terms it collated represented the terrain claimed by Gender Studies or not. Indeed, while new analytic terrains were rapidly emerging at the time the essay appeared—trans and intersex being the most obvious ones—the proposition that gender was the functional category for designating a wide array of object and analytic investments was increasingly routine. The more pressing issue had to do with what this meant for the future of the field, in terms of both its political identity and the intellectual priorities that would be cultivated to sustain it. For some scholars, such as Shirley Yee and Mary Evans, the nomination of Gender Studies was an incorporation of women that could likely engender their displacement; certainly, in Yee's terms, it could function to marginalize feminist methods and interpretative practices and to erase the hard-won visibility of both scholars of color and scholarship on women of color. As Yee writes in her own contribution to "Women's Studies on the Edge," "Scholarship that has interrogated 'women' has enabled scholars to see the category as a window for examining interlocking systems of power and in e quality as well as giving voice to historically marginalized groups." While gender for Yee is analytically important, the turn to it as the means to rename the field threatens to undermine the ways in which "The 'Women' in Women's Studies," to quote her essay's title, collates a history of struggle over differences among women.

The story Auslander tells is not bound, however, to the dilemma of the 1990s over the name change, in part because the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago never supplanted a Women's Studies program. Indeed, in 1995 when the center was founded there were no identity studies programs at the university at all, though faculty had been teaching courses and organizing workshops on identity objects and analytics for a decade. Auslander's essay is thus a rather odd contribution, as even she notes, to a special issue on the future of Women's Studies. And yet her essay's project of narrativizing the center's institutional history and intellectual rationale displays important aspects of the transferential idealism that proliferated throughout the 1990s, such that a term once used synonymously with women could emerge not simply as distinct from it, but as capable of signifying for many scholars a collaborative destination for the future of the field. How did gender accumulate this kind of capital, and what effect did its accumulation have on the various objects and analytics that it came to collectively represent? The grammar of Auslander's title is instructive. By situating women at the farthest distance from gender, the title secures gender's power by allocating it the space of being after: after the "fact" of women's categorical failure, after differences among women riveted the field, after the public political crisis of feminism, after the field's contentious battle over men, after the identity attachments of Gay and Lesbian Studies, after the deconstructive invocations of queer. In being both destination and summation, gender could simultaneously (miraculously) signify and exceed each of its constituent parts. Its utility was thus borne in what we might call its critical transitivity, which is indicated by Auslander in the mathematical formula she adopts, such that gender travels through and accumulates multiple analytic and object domains—women, feminist, men, lesbian and gay, and queer. In large part, her essay is organized to detail the converging and diverging routes by which gender emerged to claim oversight and priority, the hope it carried with it, and the worry its progress raised along the way.

First the hope.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from OBJECT LESSONS by Robyn Wiegman Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction. How to Read This Book 1

1 Doing Justice with Objects 36

{Or, the "Progress" of Gender}

2 Telling Time 91

{When Feminism and Queer Theory Diverge}

3 The Political Conscious 137

{Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity}

4 Refusing Identification 197

{Americanist Pursuits of Global Noncomplicity}

5 Critical Kinship 139

{Universal Aspirations and Intersectional Judgments}

6 The Vertigo of Critique 301

{Rethinking Heteronormativity}

Bibliography 345

Index 391

Editorial Reviews

Object Lessons by Robyn Wiegman is a profoundly pedagogic book. By which I mean: it is a book that teaches us how we are taught. . . . The book prompted me to reflect on my own relation to Women’s Studies even if I did not always recognise the version of Women’s Studies being presented (and we do not need to recognise each other’s versions to know they bear some relation).

Feminist Theory - Sara Ahmed

"Masterfully cover[s] a wide range of theoretical material, from the complex intercalation of women’s studies with gender studies, through the fraught relation of queer studies to conceptions of 'normativity' (306), and the equally fractious question of how the discourse of
internationalization has played out within the 'field imaginary' (14) of American studies.  . . . Object Lessons is an important book, shrewd both in its critique and its awareness of the limitations of critique."

American Literature - Paul Giles

In addition to engaging identity studies’ practitioners, Object Lessons effectively addresses students being disciplined in interdisciplines and schooled in the tradition of oppositional positions: all those, in other words, for whom the limits, possibilities, and pleasures of academic labor are inextricably bound to the questions of the legibility and precarity of their institutional homes.

Women & Performance - Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

[Wiegman’s] book left me reeling in the best possible way, precisely because it focuses in on the affective life of our critical impulses. Wiegman peels back the veneer on our investments in a variety of politics — feminist, anti-racist, imperialist, queer— leaving us to confront why we show up to struggle with our work. This book gave me the gift of recognizing conflict and incommensurability as powerful sites from which to continue to passionately invest in politics.

Feminist Studies - Naomi Greyser

“Object Lessons is an excellent contribution to the field of critical scholarship... Recommended for scholars and graduate students working in the areas of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, particularly, as well as other identity-based disciplines. Wiegman is a brilliant thinker and her text provides a site for considering the stakes of the projects with which we’re engaged and how the “stakes” are defined in the first place.While Wiegman offers no easy answers, for scholars who have ever asked questions of themselves, like: “Does my work do anything?” and “Does this work really matter?” what Wiegman does offer is a thoughtful meditation on the narratives that work to sustain the aspirational hopes of disciplines emerging out of left critique; specifically, the hope that critical practices will deliver the futures of which we dream.

Reviews in Cultural Theory - Elizabeth Groeneveld

"An extraordinary work of critical theory within academic identity knowledges, and deserves to be numbered among the best works of contemporary feminist and queer theory." 
 

Colloquy - Jessica Durham

In Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman considers how the political imaginary of the feminist alternative functions. She explores our attachments to feminism’s objects, quite brilliantly showing how we – as feminists – invest in theory and critique’s ability to transform the world. I am not entirely sure how she manages it, but Wiegman combines uncomfortable insights about, for example, our desires for the concept and practice of ‘intersectionality’ to deliver us from the burden of ongoing racism and injustice, with a generosity that invites the reader in and keeps her reading.

Feminist Theory - Clare Hemmings

Scholar Robyn Wiegman explores the aspirations and limitations of identity studies as instruments of political change in this cross-cutting analysis of disciplines.... Offering separate analysis of several disciplinary frames, her exploration bridges women’s and gender studies, gay and lesbian and queer studies, ethnic studies and whiteness studies, and global American studies (among others) to examine what happens and what doesn’t when fields continually redefine themselves.

On Campus with Women

The lesson that emerges from [Wiegman’s] argument resounds forcefully throughout Object Lessons as a whole. It teaches that whether in creating fields of scholarly practice or in the theorization of objects of knowledge, the institutional formation of identity knowledges is inescapably attached to what these knowledges critique and thereby attempt to leave behind. Identity knowledges, in other words, appear in Object Lessons as moored to and made in the very gestures of disavowal,

Signs - Nick Mitchell

This book is as incisive in its articulation of the stakes involved in post–Civil Rights academic field formations as it is responsive to the affective investments shaping specific fields' modes of self-governance and self-reinvention. What do we want from identity knowledges—and what do they offer us? In the incongruent spaces opened up by these questions, and against the nonsynchronized discourses marked by political obligations, institutional structures, and methodological ambitions, Robyn Wiegman narrates what she calls object lessons with inimitable intensity, agility, and imagination. If visionary thinking about identity studies is an art, she has given us a brilliant master-class performance.”—Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture


“This brilliant, commodious book gives us a name for that fast-moving conceptual traffic arrayed across the academic galaxy from the 1970s to the present; as a strategy for naming, Object Lessons brings about ‘identity knowledges’ as a rethought object of desire and destination, its political commitments pursued to the bone, in the immediacy of its institutional arrangements. The reader will not want to miss Robyn Wiegman in this quite stunning and masterful outcome.”—Hortense Spillers


“This is a contentious book, but without contention, knowledges become rigid and fortified. Robyn Wiegman induces us to think more carefully about the ways in which politically committed knowledges make themselves as they make knowledge of their objects of investigation.”—Elizabeth Grosz, author of Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art

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