Object lessons
Record details
- ISBN: 9780822351467 (cloth : alk. paper)
- ISBN: 0822351463 (cloth : alk. paper)
- ISBN: 9780822351603 (pbk. : alk. paper)
- ISBN: 0822351609 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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Physical Description:
print
x, 398 p. ; 24 cm. - Publisher: Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2012.
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (p. [345]-389) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Acknowledgements -- Introduction: How to Read This Book -- Doing justice with objects (or, the "progress" of gender) -- Telling time (when feminism and queer theory diverge) -- The political conscious (Whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity) -- Refusing identification (Americanist pursuits of global non-complicity) -- Critical kinship (universal aspirations and intersectional judgments) -- The vertigo of critique (rethinking heteronormativity). |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Critical theory Feminist theory Queer theory Race Whites -- Race identity |
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Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
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Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Circulation Modifier | Holdable? | Status | Due Date | Courses |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Emily Carr University of Art + Design | HM480 .W54 2012 (Text) | 30234354 | Book | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Duke Univ PrNo 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.
- Duke Univ PrA 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.