Examining debates in interdisciplinary identity studies, Robyn Wiegman finds the repeated assumption that a better critical theory will produce a better political outcome. She studies debates in Women's Studies, American Studies, Queer Theory and Whiteness studies, especially at points when the key terms changed, as happened when Women's Studies was superseded by Gender Studies. While scholars each time imagined that a new configuration of the field would be more politically effective, instead the field reshapes itself around the new terms in ways that are not as different as hoped. Her metacritical analysis is sympathetic to the political desires she traces, but also clear about the limitations of this means of producing change.

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.

"“The lesson that emerges from [Wiegman’s] argument resounds forcefully throughout Object Lessons as a whole. It teaches that whether in creating fields of scholarly practice or in the theorization of objects of knowledge, the institutional formation of identity knowledges is inescapably attached to what these knowledges critique and thereby attempt to leave behind. Identity knowledges, in other words, appear in Object Lessons as moored to and made in the very gestures of disavowal,”" - Signs

"“Object Lessons by Robyn Wiegman is a profoundly pedagogic book. By which I mean: it is a book that teaches us how we are taught. . . . The book prompted me to reflect on my own relation to Women’s Studies even if I did not always recognise the version of Women’s Studies being presented (and we do not need to recognise each other’s versions to know they bear some relation).”" - Feminist Theory

"“[Wiegman’s] book left me reeling in the best possible way, precisely because it focuses in on the affective life of our critical impulses. Wiegman peels back the veneer on our investments in a variety of politics — feminist, anti-racist, imperialist, queer— leaving us to confront why we show up to struggle with our work. This book gave me the gift of recognizing conflict and incommensurability as powerful sites from which to continue to passionately invest in politics.”" - Feminist Studies

"“Object Lessons is an excellent contribution to the field of critical scholarship... Recommended for scholars and graduate students working in the areas of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, particularly, as well as other identity-based disciplines. Wiegman is a brilliant thinker and her text provides a site for considering the stakes of the projects with which we’re engaged and how the “stakes” are defined in the first place.While Wiegman offers no easy answers, for scholars who have ever asked questions of themselves, like: “Does my work do anything?” and “Does this work really matter?” what Wiegman does offer is a thoughtful meditation on the narratives that work to sustain the aspirational hopes of disciplines emerging out of left critique; specifically, the hope that critical practices will deliver the futures of which we dream.”" - Reviews in Cultural Theory

"“In addition to engaging identity studies’ practitioners, Object Lessons effectively addresses students being disciplined in interdisciplines and schooled in the tradition of oppositional positions: all those, in other words, for whom the limits, possibilities, and pleasures of academic labor are inextricably bound to the questions of the legibility and precarity of their institutional homes.”" - Women & Performance

"“In Object Lessons, 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.”" - Feminist Theory

"An extraordinary work of critical theory within academic identity knowledges, and deserves to be numbered among the best works of contemporary feminist and queer theory."   - Colloquy

"Masterfully cover[s] a wide range of theoretical material, from the complex intercalation of women’s studies with gender studies, through the fraught relation of queer studies to conceptions of 'normativity' (306), and the equally fractious question of how the discourse ofinternationalization has played out within the 'field imaginary' (14) of American studies.  . . . Object Lessons is an important book, shrewd both in its critique and its awareness of the limitations of critique." - American Literature