Object Lessons by Robyn Wiegman (review)

Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons is an expansive study of the way identity knowledges are shaped by the academy. The book engages by asking us to dwell in not only what we do as researchers and scholars but why and how we do what we do. Early in her introduction, Wiegman writes, “‘identity knowledges’ are so mired in ongoing social and institutional relations that their analytic capacities are inseparable from the projections, attachments, and affects that propel them” (8). Taking on major identity knowledge categories, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Ethnic Studies, Whiteness Studies, and American Studies, Wiegman sets out on a journey that explores corresponding objects within those categories, such as gender, antinormativity, antiracist whiteness, internationalization, and intersectionality. She poses an inspiring challenge: “Let’s not pretend then that objects of study matter only because of what we want from them, or that what we want from them is adequate to the ways in which they inhabit and transform how we grasp the world. The issue at stake is more simple, if confounding: What am I without them?” (8). It is this query that makes Wiegman’s work stand out. The project is honest, albeit occasionally uneven, in its attempts to show and embrace the complexities around what she calls the field imaginary, how we invest our own identities into our objects of study, and the ways in which we can rethink our critical practices. While not in the least polemical in its tone, in fact, utterly the opposite, the book persists in challenging our assumptions about the identity categories within which we work and live. It is Wiegman’s self-reflexive writing style that pushes us into the ebbs and flows of her own critical process and methodology. At times, we feel we are in too deep; we crave a clear-cut statement, a carefully fixed argument, but that is exactly what Wiegman asks us to resist--just as the objects under her scrutiny continually evade, resist, and slip out from under her grasp.

Wiegman’s work offers an important contribution to feminist scholarship as it grapples with the terms that have come to be associated with it, such as failure and affect. Chapter one, and one of the strongest and most lucid chapters, “Doing Justice with Objects: Or, the ‘Progress’ of Gender” traces the development of the category of women, which Wiegman asserts fails to remain “conceptually coherent and universally referential to all women” (38), into that of gender. By focusing on the “object transference” of the category “women” to that of “gender,” Wiegman establishes clearly the problematics of her project--that the commitments and investments we want to make through our political desires to doing justice for objects such as women or gender often conflict with and fall prey to the very nature of our critical practice. In a footnote, Wiegman catalogues a selection of college and university departments who have in the recent past changed division names from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Feminist Studies, Comparative Women’s Studies, and so on. As a microcosm, the list exposes the disgruntled state in which the academy finds itself within its own institutionalizing practices. Throughout the book, Wiegman follows feminist theory’s recent investments in the affect of failure, and this first chapter elucidates it beautifully.

An exploration of the correlative to the problems with feminism as an institution, chapter two “Telling Time” makes a rather compelling, if heated, exploration of queer divergence from feminist narratives. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to response to Janet/Ian Halley’s “Queer Theory by Men,” which Wiegman reads as a gendered performance and uses as a case study for identifying the (terrifying and severe) problems with “taking a break” from feminism, removing its political strengths, ultimately, rejecting it in favor of queer theory that, she asserts, exists in a wholly different temporality. Divergence, Wiegman concludes in this chapter, does not mean undoing or opposing the other but as part of the greater community formation of...