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  • Critical Catholic Studies as Identity Studies?
  • Ludger Viefhues-Bailey32

As a philosopher who is not a practitioner of Catholic Studies but who engages the project of political theology from the perspective of issues of gender and sexuality, my contribution focuses on the construction of Catholic Studies as identity studies. Particularly I want to ask a methodological question: How does the critique of the critical apparatus of identity studies illuminate Catholic Studies?

To build the frame of my reflection, I will first turn to Robyn Wiegman’s book Object Lesson in which she examines the politics of identity studies, such as Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and Whiteness, or Critical American Studies. 33 Based on my understanding of Wiegman’s intervention, I will secondly formulate some questions pertaining to Catholic Studies as identity study.

Compulsion to Overcome the Irritant Object

In Object Lessons, Wiegman analyzes sets of formative debates that have shaped the very disciplines of identity studies in which she participates. She demonstrates how debates about what counts as the right object of a field enable a particular “field imaginary,” i.e., a discursive frame policing a discipline’s possibilities and hopes.

Debates about what we study constitute not just scholarly objects but also a normative vision about our place in the order of knowledge-power. What motivates these definitional battles is an epistemic-political promise: namely, the hope that the “critical practice [of scholarship is] … an agency of social change.”34 Her analysis of the move from “Women Studies” to “Gender Studies” exemplifies how this promise operates.35 [End Page 24]

The shift to the category of “gender” as the defining identity object in the academy was motivated by the insight that the project of women’s studies can exert epistemic violence by attaching itself to a white, bioessentializing, and middle class object. Yet, Wiegman identifies a particular attachment to a scene of epistemic hope that operates in this story of failure of the category “woman” in woman’s studies. This is the hope that if we only theorized the object of identity knowledge correctly, then we could overcome the failures allegedly inherent in the old object. Yet, by removing the irritant of the identity object “woman,” the object “gender,” which was first meant to incorporate the scholarly energy around women’s studies, ended up in fact denouncing the original identity object.

Thus Wiegman’s analysis shows that a particular affect is at work in the disciplining debates of identity studies: “the compulsion to overcome what has failed.”36 This compulsion of overcoming the “failed” object of identity knowledge reflects “the faith [. . .] that if we only find the right discourse, object of study, or analytic tool, our critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it.”37

The compulsion to overcome failed objects and its concomitant faith in critical practices reminds me of what Vincent Lloyd calls a “supersessionist” eschatology: Here political liberation is identified with the replacement of one failed political state with another perfected political order.38

Identity studies, as analyzed by Wiegman, replicate this eschatology in its quest to replace a failing epistemic object with one that is up for the task of political perfection. The new object brings with it an epistemic and political difference. By marking its difference incisively it can separate itself from the imperfections of its predecessor. Yet Wiegman also shows that our epistemic objects irritatingly fail to be up to the demands of a supersessionsit eschatology. For example, the problem with “queer” in Wiegman’s telling is that despite its heterogeneity it assumes an underlying concept of sexual identity. Resisting one kind of hegemony is thus purchased by falling under the sway of another. [End Page 25]

In sum: By uncovering identity studies’ compulsion to replace “failing” objects, Wiegman reveals to my mind first a desire for a supersessionist eschatology.

Second, this compulsion seeks to evade the ethically compromised nature of our academic enterprise and its lack of incisive political power. Perhaps, I may venture, what drives the desire for conceptual and political purification is a sense of conviction and powerlessness. I am attached to the ethical commands that convict me and powerless in the...

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