“Subject Positions”: Perspectives on Gender and Identity in the Academy and Beyond

Abstract

����� ��� In Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, Orr, Braithwaite, and Lichtenstein have overseen the publication of a stylish, informative volume, characterized by a wonderfully simple structure. Eighteen essays define and illustrate key terms from the fields of women’s and gender studies (WGS). The result is a fresh and lively work that never feels overly didactic or pre scriptive. So much thought has gone into making this an accessible and readable text that even the table of contents is a delight, as each chapter effectively “advertises” itself there, in concise abstracts that read in some cases like mini manifestos. Astrid Henry’s excellent essay, “Waves,” for example, is presented as being about a metaphor which “is both descriptive and prescriptive, simultaneously offering a representation of femi nism’s history and constraining our imagination of that history” (viii), while Jennifer Purvis’s contribution is more succinctly summarized: “Women’s and Gender Studies is always already queer” (ix). Rethinking is a descriptive title, then: in it, terms are rethought and revivified. But it’s not a carelessly iconoclastic volume. Instead, it acknowledges its forebears (Robyn Wiegman, especially) and maps the existing critical terrain. In one essay, for example, Susanne Luhmann vividly reminds her readers of, and then builds on, Carolyn M. Shrewsbury’s formative 1987 article “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” to argue that “in the face of the categorical instability of the term ‘woman’ . . . it becomes increasingly politically and intellectually unintelligible to assume that WGS is about women, or that we know what ‘women’ are” (81). Each one of the eighteen contributors uses first-person narrative to some extent. This is good: it’s the way that “theory” ought to be explicated