Robyn Wiegman. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012 [Book review]

What are the consequences for the practices of contemporary academic identity knowledges in the US (race, gender, sexuality and nationality critiques) when these fields come to equate their academic work with political labour? What does it mean to "do justice" with and to the objects of these fields? These are the central questions of Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons. Wiegman is a Professor of Women‘s Studies and Literature at Duke University, and one of the most prominent contemporary US feminist and queer theory scholars. Object Lessons brings together six journal articles originally published between 1999 and 2008, re-published and in some cases extensively revised in the current work. Each chapter takes as its object a text or case study within an academic identity knowledge field and uses that example to identify and explore the field‘s characteristic animating tensions—often its thorniest foundational paradoxes. The six chapters examine women‘s studies, feminism and queer theory, whiteness studies, American studies, and intersectionality.