Beschreibung:
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.
A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, Robyn Wiegman turns her attention in Object Lessons to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. In a series of case studies drawn from womens studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, she examines the unspoken belief that better theory will produce progressive social change in order to consider the political desire that fuels current scholarly debate. Her metacritical analysis is neither a defense nor a dismissal of such political commitment but a sustained inquiry into the hope it generates, the thinking it inspires, and the conformity it inadvertently demands.
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: How to Read This Book 11. Doing Justice with Objects: Or, the "Progress" of Gender 362. Telling Time: When Feminism and Queer Theory Diverge 913. The Political Conscious: Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity 1374. Refusing Identification: Americanist Pursuits of Global Noncomplicity 1975. Critical Kinship: Universal Aspirations and Intersectional Judgments 2396. The Vertigo of Critique: Rethinking Heteronormativity 301Bibliography 345Index 391