Robyn Wiegman

No More Separate Spheres

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literatur e of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. Jose F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’

This article examines the reparative turn in current queer feminist scholarship by tracking its twin interest in the study of affect and time. By foregrounding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential critique of what she called paranoid reading, I am interested in the ways that various critics – Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman in particular – take up the call for reparative reading by using the temporal frameworks of the everyday, backward feeling, and queer time to reparative ends. In the process, I consider the reparative work being done to reclaim Sedgwick as a major thinker for queer feminist concerns, and speculate on the attraction, in a time of declining economic and cultural support for the interpretative humanities, of a critical practice that seeks to love and nurture its objects of study.

Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood

On 24 April 1998, Donna Fasano, a white woman, and Deborah Perry-Rogers, a black woman, underwent in vitro fertilization at a fertility clinic in midtown Manhattan. Six weeks later they both learned of the mistake made that day: while each woman received her own fertilized eggs, Donna was given Deborah’s eggs as well. Only Donna became pregnant, and in December 1998, she gave birth to two boys, one of whom, DNA tests showed, was not genetically hers. As the media declared, Donna Fasano had delivered ‘‘twins,’’ ‘‘one white, one black,’’ but the status of her motherhood was challenged as Deborah and her husband Robert filed for custody of their genetic child. In March 1999, the couples reached an agreement: The Fasanos would give ‘‘Joseph’’ to the Rogerses if the twins would be raised as brothers. ‘‘We’re giving him up because we love him,’’ Donna Fasano explained to reporters. In May 1999, one day after Mother’s Day, as the Washington Post duly noted, the Fasanos relinquished the child to the Rogerses, who renamed him Akiel. The pact between the couples was short-lived, however, and in June 1999 they went to court. The Fasanos claimed that the Rogerses had broken the custody agreement by refusing to allow Akiel to spend a weekend at their home; the Rogerses cited a failure of trust between the couples, based in part on an incident that occurred during a scheduled visit. According to Deborah Perry-Rogers, Donna Fasano had referred to herself as Akiel’s mother, encouraging him to ‘‘Come to Mommy’’ and comforting him that his ‘‘mommy is here.’’ David Cohen, the Fasano attorney, explained the white couple’s perspective: ‘‘The Fasanos don’t see [Joseph] as someone else’s black baby; they

UN-REMEMBERING MONIQUE WITTIG

If the demeanor of a public voice is set in large part by the genre in which one is called to speech, then I can only begin by confessing that I do not fulfill here what memorialization might most seem to offer. This is odd, no doubt, because I did indeed accept an invitation to remember the contributions of Monique Wittig, and I did promise to consider the implications for the critical present of what her absence might come, now, to speak. But as you will soon see, I have faltered on some of the less noble implications of memorialization, and I have grown increasingly disoriented by the disjuncture between the ongoing force of our own outliving and the necessary break — the insistent interruption — that the proper acknowledgment of loss necessitates. To be sure, I did go looking for Monique Wittig, and there are clear signs that many of the issues that have stopped me in my tracks are ones absolutely germane to her political theory and fictional worlds. She was, after all, consistently enthralled by the dissonance between the struggle to diagnose the incipient violences of her own political present and the impulse to leap, wholesale, into an imaginative elsewhere that ruptured the toxicity of what we can only call, inadequately, the status quo: that is, the seemingly frozen is of a contemporary field of speech and action. What else, quite honestly, can we take her statement “lesbians are not women” to be, except an absolute refusal to concede to the conditions of the known?1 Wittig, of course, would spend a great deal of time writing about what “women” were, how they had become trapped in conceptual practices, social relationships, and economic forms, and what it meant to wrench them from their annihilating particularity into other possibilities. The “paradise of the social contract,” she wrote, “exists only in literature, where the tropisms, by their violence,

Bureaucratic Modernity, the Indian Civil Service, and Grammars of Nationalism

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