Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-02-19DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143032
Kadji Amin, Kinohi Nishikawa, Britt Rusert
{"title":"‘In retrospect’: Object Lessons forum","authors":"Kadji Amin, Kinohi Nishikawa, Britt Rusert","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143032","url":null,"abstract":"Our contribution takes shape as reflections on Object Lessons (Wiegman, 2012) from the perspective of three scholars of race, gender and sexuality who were also graduate students of Robyn Wiegman in the mid-2000s at Duke University. All three of us took Introduction to Feminist Theory with her and all three of us received graduate certificates in Feminist Studies. Our educational and career trajectories also share this similarity: we received PhDs in the disciplines (English, Comparative Literature and French), but went on to jobs that are either completely or partially housed in departments invested in studying what Wiegman calls ‘identity knowledges' (namely, African American Studies and Gender Studies). In these essays, we reflect on how Wiegman's course helped shaped our approaches to academic knowledge production and how her reflexive pedagogy animates not only Object Lessons but also our own critiques of identity’s institutionalized forms.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"301 - 308"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43506945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-02-05DOI: 10.1177/14647001221148639
Davina Cooper
{"title":"De-producing gender: the politics of sex, decertification and the figure of economy","authors":"Davina Cooper","doi":"10.1177/14647001221148639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221148639","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the contribution that the figure of economy can make to understanding gender in contemporary Britain, focusing on gender as a social quality and legal category that is produced, allocated and used. The article proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the politics of sex-based feminism and gender-as-diversity through an economic frame. The second part focuses, in detail, on one specific juncture where these diverging politics meet: decertification – a law reform proposal to dismantle the system for assigning, registering and regulating legal sex. Decertification is a controversial strategy. Advocates argue that self-expression and interpersonal communication, whether through gender or against it, is hindered by a state-based disciplinary certification system. Critics disagree. They argue that dismantling legal communication about a person's sex makes it harder to put categories of female and woman to remedial use. Drawing on other uses of certification, including commercial ones, this article suggests that certification not only communicates information about a process, quality or thing; it also contributes to their production. The impact of decertification on how gender is produced, what gets produced as gender and the uses to which gender is put are central to determining whether decertification is beneficial to a progressive transformative gender politics.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44313027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-02-05DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143035
Julien E. Fischer
{"title":"Object lessons and the desire of psychoanalysis","authors":"Julien E. Fischer","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143035","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, “Object Lessons and the Desire of Psychoanalysis,” I meditate on the significance of Robyn Wiegman‘s 2012 monograph Object Lessons by examining the psychoanalytic significance of the concept of “transferential idealism” that Wiegman first introduced there. In doing so, I read Wiegman‘s Object Lessons through the lens of the book‘s psychoanalytic ethics and argue that the desire of Object Lessons is the desire of psychoanalysis: an enigmatic desire, borne from lack, which aims toward the proliferation of difference. By foregrounding the psychoanalytic desire of Object Lessons, I also consider my own inheritances of the desire of Object Lessons as the desire of psychoanalysis, and argue for its urgent importance for the field of Trans Studies today.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"309 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43159278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143030
James Bliss
{"title":"Object Lessons in a time of tolerable suboptimisation","authors":"James Bliss","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143030","url":null,"abstract":"The present contribution reflects on the stakes of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons (2012) in the wake of a long era of austerity in American higher education. It reflects further on the history of discourses on the relationship between the practice of criticism and radical politics.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"277 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47141512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-01-05DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143034
V. Chaudhry
{"title":"Identity knowledges remixed: reflections on the itinerary of transgender","authors":"V. Chaudhry","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143034","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the uptake and circulation of ‘transgender’ in academic and philanthropic institutions, as a way of taking seriously Robyn Wiegman’s call for a divergentist approach. In so doing, the article aims to demonstrate the intimate entanglements between non-profit and academic spheres and identity knowledges therein. Taken together, both contexts reveal the messiness and complexities of institutionality, not only as a lived reality for individuals such as philanthropy professionals and academics, but also as an object of study itself.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"294 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43514196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143031
Matt Brim
{"title":"Alongside desire: Object Lessons and Working-Class Studies","authors":"Matt Brim","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143031","url":null,"abstract":"This article reconsiders Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) as a book that helps to discern a necessary relation between Queer Studies and Working-Class Studies, two fields that do not often share a footprint in the US academy. That relation emerges for the author in the unexpected resonance between Object Lessons and Vivian Gornick’s recently republished The Romance of American Communism (2020), a classic text about the politics of passionate longing for a better world. Likewise, Wiegman understands political desire as the animating force behind the field of Queer Studies and other identity knowledges. Brim argues that, alongside this affective threshold of belonging that constitutes the field of US Queer Studies, there exists a material threshold of belonging that renders politically indispensable academic fields as, nonetheless, sites of class-based exclusion. In the increasingly class-stratified and race-sorted academy, disciplines such as Working-Class Studies that are attentive to the material exclusions of knowledge production can help scholars to proactively set material conditions alongside political desire in a future-oriented, sustainable vision of Queer Studies.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"285 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47281434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143037
M. John
{"title":"Reading Object Lessons in India today","authors":"M. John","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143037","url":null,"abstract":"This essay situates Object Lessons in the contemporary academic spaces of women’s studies in India. A decade ago, Object Lessons offered an extensive critique of identity knowledges in the US academy with a special focus on women’s studies. What might its relevance be in the contemporary Indian context? The institutionalisation of women’s studies in India has been shaped by the resources of the social sciences, with their empirical bent and especially their connection to state and development policy. This makes for specific differences with the US context while many concerns are shared. The essay also looks at how gender as a category has been deployed in specific contexts in contrast to that of “women”, in the light of Wiegman’s cautions over seeking resolutions to particular problems through a preferential treatment of categories. By way of concluding thoughts on the Indian situation, women’s studies in India is hypervisible compared to other identity knowledges. In spite of its marginal and precarious location in the academy, it carries a disproportionate political burden, one that a heterogeneous student body is shouldering in their struggles for a sustainable future.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"323 - 329"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44544005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2022-12-27DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143026
Robyn Wiegman, J. Nash
{"title":"Object Lessons at 10: a conversation","authors":"Robyn Wiegman, J. Nash","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143026","url":null,"abstract":"This conversation returns to Robyn Wiegman's field-defining Object Lessons, reflecting on the book's travels, resonances, and continued importance a decade after its publication.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"262 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44064428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143102
Pamela Carralero
{"title":"Geontopower as a feminist analytic: an interdisciplinary triangulation of women, water and feminist politics in India","authors":"Pamela Carralero","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143102","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I theorise the presence of a contemporary Indian and feminist subaltern consciousness that counters infrastructural striations of female subjecthood. Subaltern Studies scholar Partha Chatterjee notes that India's decentralised distribution of natural resources resulted in a politics of governmentality that slowly erased the twentieth-century Indian peasantry's insurgent consciousness. Chatterjee's observation suggests the need to unpack infrastructural-environmental-ontological constellations in rural India to assess their impact on subaltern agency and politics. I examine the biopolitical indices of this constellation using case studies of gender participatory water management initiatives to assess the impact of water privatisation on rural Hindu women's relationship to water infrastructure. During this discussion, the shortcomings of biopower as a parameterisation of subaltern oppression become highlighted and Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of geontopower is offered as a new materialist analytic through which to better clarify women's conditions under neoliberal water infrastructures and resist the latters' regimes.. Ultimately, I offer geontopower as a conceptual tool to argue that a form of contemporary subaltern insurgent consciousness is still present in India. The latter half of this article explores performative constructions of this insurgent consciousness through literary drama. I read Dalit playwright Vinodini's street play Daaham (2002) as a work that points to insurgent consciousness through the material confluences of water, the human body and the affective infrastructure of local wells.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65666064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feminist TheoryPub Date : 2022-12-18DOI: 10.1177/14647001221143036
Marquis Bey
{"title":"Asking the question of it: trans/gender object lessons","authors":"Marquis Bey","doi":"10.1177/14647001221143036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221143036","url":null,"abstract":"This article queries the very question of and that is ‘gender’, from the vantage of transgender studies. In other words, it moves through Wiegman's question of the desires that propel us and asks what desires propel a feeling of gender's necessity, positing the possibility of relinquishing gender as a vector with the same kind of footing it currently has. In short, the question that is asked is gender itself, and the question is asked from a trans studies that excavates the possibilities of radicality.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"317 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44861414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}