Suchergebnisse

The essay asks what current thinking about gender has to do with the rather widespread claims that critique is finally dead. In posing that question, it asks what gender and a putatively exhausted critique have to do with the logic of capital as it appears to us in these times. If, as some claim, critique has nothing to reveal given that all is there to be seen in this age of electronic and televisual exposure, what is it we see when we see gender? What lure is entailed in the postcritical? What is the lure of gender? And what political and critical stakes do such questions carry?

"Reading for Pleasure" suggests a way of drawing the line between what is and what is not theory today. Following Roland Barthes, the author uses her own reading pleasure as a gauge, taking pleasure to be idiosyncratic rather than subjective. Assuming that all types of criticism are driven by a certain kind of pleasure, the essay looks at two genres—that of "exuberant critique" and that of "expansive system-building"—but finds theoretical pleasure only in a third genre: the form of criticism that embraces contradiction and incorporates it into its very practice.

A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott's influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," this volume explores the current uses of the term -- and the ongoing influence of Scott's agenda-setting work in history and other disciplines. How has the study of gender, independently or in conjunction with other axes of difference -- such as race, class, and sexuality -- inflected existing fields of study and created new ones? To what extent has this concept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as women's and queer studies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with what effects? In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transformations, can gender remain a useful category in the 21st century? Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has translated into their own disciplinary perspectives.

Speaking up, talking back : Joan Scott's critical feminism / Judith Butler -- Language, experience, and identity : Joan W. Scott's theoretical challenge to historical studies / Miguel A. Cabrera -- Out of their orbit : celebrities and eccentrics in nineteenth-century France / Mary Louise Roberts -- Historically speaking : gender and citizenship in colonial India / Mrinalini Sinha -- Gender and the figure of the "moderate Muslim" : feminism in the twenty-first century / Elora Shehabuddin -- A double-edged sword : sexual democracy, gender norms, and racialized rhetoric / (c)œric Fassin -- Seeing beyond the norm : interpreting gender in the visual arts / Mary D. Sheriff -- Unlikely couplings : the gendering of print technology in the French fin-de-si(c)·cle / Janis Bergman-Carton -- Screening the avant-garde face / Mary Ann Doane -- The sexual schema : transposition and transgenderism in Phenomenology of perception / Gayle Salamon -- Foucault and feminism's prodigal children / Lynne Huffer -- From the "useful" to the "impossible" in the work of Joan W. Scott / Elizabeth Weed -- Thinking in time : an epilogue on ethics and politics / Wendy Brown