Miranda Joseph

Debt to society : accounting for life under capitalism

ed financial debts through technologies of accounting. While lauding Graeber’s debunking of the myth linking abstract financial debts to natural/moral responsibilities, and his unveiling of debt as an insidious instrument of social control under capitalism, Joseph also seeks to show up as myth Graeber’s assertion that via abstraction ‘communal relations based on interpersonal trust are displaced by depersonalized calculation . . . and the particular is disrupted or destroyed by being abstracted’ (p. 6, emphasis in original). Instead, Joseph shows how particularity – interpersonal obligations between individuals, communities, and social groups built on trust, social norms, and reciprocity – can and often do involve oppressive and predatory power relationships. Furthermore, she examines how these two seemingly opposing concepts – abstraction and particularity – enable one another, how the negative outcomes of abstraction rest on the maintenance of highly unequal particularities, and how abstraction not only destroys certain kinds of social relations but also constructs new forms of social relations. Joseph explores these larger questions through five extensive chapters, each of which then raises and examines subsequent questions. The first chapter (‘Accounting for Debt’) not only sets up the basic framing discussed above, using Graeber’s work as the foil, but interrogates the meaning – material, discursive, and performative – of abstraction through accounting rules and practices. In working through this, she nicely puts Marx into conversation with more recent postcolonial and anthropology literature, ending with a discussion of the performativity of double-entry bookkeeping. This is the most straightforward chapter and absolutely necessary if one is to decode the rest of the book. BO O K R EV EW

The Performance of Production and Consumption

The core of this essay offers a reading of several of Marxs central arguments, showing the continuity of production with signification and performativity. I bring the insights of poststructuralism with regard to the performativity, constructedness, and discursivity of identity together with a modified but nonetheless substantially Marxist view that social organization is implicit in the organization of production, broadly construed. The argument moves in two directions, showing the performativity of production and the productivity of performance. On the one hand, I expand the definition of production to include a range of activities not normally considered production; on the other hand, I am concerned with the central role of corporate production and of products that flow through the marketplace in producing identity and community. At the conclusion of the essay, I shift focus from Marxs texts to a set of texts that argue an opposing view, that try to distinguish performativity from production. These antiproductivist theories see production as only reproductive, not dialectical or dynamic, and locate freedom and liberation (from production) in an exterior space, a representational excess frequently named performance. Through a critique of these texts I mean to point to what I hope will be a more useful emancipatory strategy, a strategy of participation.

Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable was conducted by email from June 2009 to August 2010. We divided participants into three groups, with each group responding in staggered fashion to the prompts. In this way, group 2 was able to see group 1’s responses before they sent in their own. Group 3 was able to see the responses of groups 1 and 2. Through this process, we were able to not only include a remarkably large cluster of participants but also allow for the possibility of dialogue between groups. Group 1 consisted of Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, and Lisa Rofel. Group 2 included Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred Moten, and Tavia Nyong’o. Group 3 was Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Miranda Joseph, Gayle Salamon, and Dean Spade. — Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo.

Challenging Assumptions: Crossing Disciplinary Divides to Make Knowledge about Gender and Finance

What happens when a qualitative/theoretical scholar of gender/sexuality and cultural studies and a quantitative behavioral scientist step outside the boundaries of our respective disciplines, risking disruptions to our normal procedures and cherished political and theoretical commitments? Our unlikely collaboration allowed each of us to explore and challenge the possibilities, limitations, and consequences of our approaches to the study of gender and finance and, ultimately, to make new knowledge. The occasion for this collaboration is the Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) study, a longitudinal study of a group of young adults to understand how financial practices develop and the factors that shape those practices. We begin by presenting our respective research agendas and our concerns about “engaging the opposition.” We then narrate the sequence of our efforts: to talk and think together, generate analyses and interpretations, and then interrupt ourselves—only to begin again. Ultimately, despite (or perhaps because of) our divergent backgrounds, our final set of findings, which reveals the changeability of participation in gendered constellations of financial attitudes and behaviors over time, challenges dominant scientific and popular understandings of the relation of gender to financial behavior and attitudes, with implications across many domains of research, policy, and educational practice.

Reply to my critics

In this author’s response to the forum on Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph appreciates the responses for the ways they elaborate and expand on the potential resonances of the book. And, noting that Haiven and Hall both take this book to be a prompt to further work, Joseph invites readers to take up the counter-accounting project.

Risking Justice: Women's Studies Beyond Measure

A contribution to Inhabitations: A Feminist Formations Dossier on Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons.In finding my way and making my peace with a (so far) nearly twenty-year career as a full-time faculty member in women’s studies (with a substantial secondary affiliation with LGBT studies) while sustaining fundamentally anti-identitarian theoretical, political, and methodological orientations, Robyn Wiegman’s thinking has been importantly enabling. Her essays on women’s studies envision the possibility of commitment to these spaces as infrastructure for serious and unconstrained intellectual endeavor, shameless in its engagement with Theory. In a passing remark from the audience of a conference session, Wiegman urged that we in women’s studies, as we embrace and debate the inter- and transnational as rubrics for our work (from the repurposed domestic buildings on the fringes of campuses in which we are so often located), not ignore, but rather engage the larger and better-funded internationalizing projects of our universities in their fancy, new, centrally located buildings on our campuses. This imperative has stayed with me, inspiring my own recent effort to engage across substantial theoretical, methodological, and political differences with those doing a large and well-funded policy- and media-ready social science project in a fancy new building down the block. That is, I have taken Wiegman to be offering an expansive and empowered mode of inhabiting the field and the university.