Search

Who can forget Rachel Doležal—the Africana Studies instructor and head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who was outed in 2015 as "born white to white parents" after years of presenting herself as a light‐skinned Black woman. By taking up the controversies that have followed Doležal, this paper considers the multifaceted ways that she constitutes a quintessential bad feminist object, even as her "alibi" (which is more a defense) draws on academic feminism's own anti‐essentialist investment in social constructionist theories of race and racial identity. In doing so, I am not interested in condoning or rescuing Doležal from critical condemnation but in exploring the problem of thinking about Rachel Doležal for feminist analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the theme of this special issue's engagement with the work of Leo Bersani, "Un/reading" tracks the itinerary of a single quotation across the four appearances it makes in published work between 2011 and 2018. While it is easy to query whether Bersani was aware of the citational redundancy, this essay focuses on the pedagogy of reading it suggests, not only in terms of Bersani's own thought but for the critical humanities more generally. The quote in question posits the absolute necessity and impossibility of psychoanalysis in its attempt to "theorize an untheorizable psyche." By focusing on the role that repetition plays in Bersani's work, including his interest in nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Bersani's work in order to value the critical intuitions he repeated in order to hone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation returns to Robyn Wiegman's field-defining Object Lessons, reflecting on the book's travels, resonances, and continued importance a decade after its publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is " queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?" Leo Bersani laments in Homos , his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory's now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani's critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever "a queer thinker ," not a " queer theorist." Reading with Tuhkanen's distinction, this essay explores Bersani's investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]