No Guarantee: Feminism’s Academic Affect and Political Fantasy

Abstract Both an assessment of the political present and a deliberation on feminist desires for a transformed future, this essay draws on nearly three decades of the author’s engagement with Women’s Studies and its academic institutionalization in order to identify both new and ongoing challenges to the intellectual and political life of the field.RésuméConstituant à la fois une évaluation du présent politique et une réflexion sur les souhaits féministes pour un avenir transformé, cet essai s’appuie sur près de trois décennies d’engagement de l’auteure dans les Études sur le genre et les femmes et leur institutionnalisation universitaire afin de cerner les défis à la fois nouveaux et persistants de la vie intellectuelle et politique dans ce domaine

The Closet, Its Conventions, and Anti-Racist Criticism

Uncorrected proof. Supplementary material: http://culanth.org/supplementals/706-the-closet-its-conventions-and-anti-racistThere have been many things said in the popular press about Steven Spielberg’s sensationalist rendition of American history in his award winning film Lincoln (2012), but as far as I know no one has accused him—yet—of being just a bit too interested in Thaddeus Stevens’s bedroom

Negotiating the masculine: configurations of race and gender in American culture

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1988James Baldwin once described the intertwining lives of Anglo and African in American culture as "a wedding," a metaphor that is at once illuminating and hauntingly inappropriate as a characterization of the long and bloody history of racism and slavery in the New World. While capturing the inextricability of blacks and whites in America, Baldwin's imposition of a gendered, heterosexual paradigm reproduces a larger cultural tendency to read "race" as a replication of the binary structure of sexual difference--masculine/feminine, whole/lack, self/other, man/woman. Such a grafting of sexual difference onto race obfuscates the power relations both within the space of "otherness"--that is, the discrepancies in power between black men and black women--and between black and white men, falsely constructing black men as stand-ins for the feminine. Part of the strategy of American cultural production is just this sleight-of-hand where the masculine "raced" other is engendered in representation, the threat of masculine sameness averted through the replication of a gendered construction. Through this collusion of race and gender structures, black men are reined into the ideological orbit of cultural hegemony, their images intricately tied to the reproduction of the white patriarchal economy.Because the category of race is fragmented by gender--black men gaining access to power via the masculine--and gender is hierarchicalized along racial lines--white men holding racial hegemony over black men--this study investigates the intersection of race and gender in American cultural production by looking, specifically, at the various ways black men are inculcated into the patriarchal economy via the discourse of sexual difference. My intention throughout is to further feminist theory's understanding of the construction and maintenance of patriarchal structures by focusing purposely on areas of cultural power relations that often appear outside the scope of a feminist analysis. Such a study depicts the necessity of feminist investigation into the various structures complicit in the perpetuation of the white patriarchal economy, enabling us to begin to unravel the intricacy of race and gender in American culture

On sex and Discipline

This essay examines the current debate between proponents of "queer theory" and "gay and lesbian studies" in order to understand the way each sets forth a political agenda for disciplinary and institutional social change. The author surmises that the utopian hope invested in each critical perspective evinces an affinity that is often overlooked in the way the debate is presented. Further, she argues that neither queer theory nor gay and lesbian studies currently pays adequate attention to the "local" politics of the institution, and she raises the possibility of a political horizon for institutional change which we might call "queering the academy."Cet essai étudie les débats en cours entre les défenseurs de la théorie « queer » et les études gay et lesbiennes, afin de comprendre la façon dont chacune des positions articule l’agenda politique pour un changement social, institutionnel et disciplinaire. L’auteure considère que l’espoir utopique qui caractérise les deux perspectives critiques est un point commun très souvent ignoré dans la présentation des débats. Elle démontre d’ailleurs que ni la théorie « queer », ni les études gay et lesbiennes, ne font actuellement suffisamment attention à la politique « locale » de l’institution, et elle dresse la possibilité d’un horizon politique en vue d’un changement institutionnel qu’on pourrait appeler « queering the academy »

The materials of reparation

In Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman considers how the political imaginary of the feminist alternative functions. She explores our attachments to feminism’s objects, quite brilliantly showing how we – as feminists – invest in theory and critique’s ability to transform the world. I am not entirely sure how she manages it, but Wiegman combines uncomfortable insights about, for example, our desires for the concept and practice of ‘intersectionality’ to deliver us from the burden of ongoing racism and injustice, with a generosity that invites the reader in and keeps her reading..