A 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.

No 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.

“This book is as incisive in its articulation of the stakes involved in post–Civil Rights academic field formations as it is responsive to the affective investments shaping specific fields' modes of self-governance and self-reinvention. What do we want from identity knowledges—and what do they offer us? In the incongruent spaces opened up by these questions, and against the nonsynchronized discourses marked by political obligations, institutional structures, and methodological ambitions, Robyn Wiegman narrates what she calls object lessons with inimitable intensity, agility, and imagination. If visionary thinking about identity studies is an art, she has given us a brilliant master-class performance.”—Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture