For over a decade, feminist studies have occupied an extraordinary position in the United States. On the one hand, they have contributed to the development of a strong 'identity' politics; on the other, they have been part of the post-structuralist critique of the unified subject - its experience, truth and presence - and of the massive challenge to Western metaphysics and humanism. Along with race and ethnic studies, feminist enquiry has moved beyond the fiction of a unitary feminism to address the differences within the study of difference. The essays in this volume all address feminism's relationships to theory and politics at the level of the criticism and production of knowledge. Readers and students of politics, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and the sciences - anyone with a stake in theory and politics - will benefit from this powerful book.

For over a decade, feminist studies have occupied an extraordinary position in the United States. On the one hand, they have contributed to the development of a strong identity politics; on the other, they have been part of the post-structuralist critique of the unified subject its experience, truth and presence and of the massive challenge to Western metaphysics and humanism. Along with race and ethnic studies, feminist enquiry has moved beyond the fiction of a unitary feminism to address the differences within the study of difference.

The essays in this volume all address feminism s relationships to theory and politics at the level of the criticism and production of knowledge. Readers and students of politics, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and the sciences anyone with a stake in theory and politics will benefit from this powerful book.

A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott's influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," this volume exploresthe current uses of the term -- and the ongoing influence of Scott's agenda-settingwork in history and other disciplines. How has the study of gender, independently orin conjunction with other axes of difference -- such as race, class, and sexuality-- inflected existing fields of study and created new ones? To what extent has thisconcept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as women's and queerstudies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with what effects?In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transformations, cangender remain a useful category in the 21st century? Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender hastranslated into their own disciplinary perspectives.

Before her death in 2001, Naomi Schor was a leading scholar in feminist and critical theory and a founding coeditor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. This issue takes as its starting point Schor's book Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995), in which she discussed her attraction to the "bad objects" the academy had overlooked or ignored: universalism, essentialism, and feminism. Underpinning these bad objects was her mourning of the literary, a sense that her work-and feminist theory more generally-had departed from the textual readings in which they were grounded. Schor's question at the time was "Will a new feminist literary criticism arise that will take literariness seriously while maintaining its vital ideological edge?" The contributors take literariness-the "bad object" of this issue-seriously. They do not necessarily engage in debates about reading, theorize new formalisms, or thematize language; rather, they invigorate and unsettle the reading experience, investigating the relationship between language and meaning. Contributors. Lee Edelman, Frances Ferguson, Peggy Kamuf, Ramsey McGlazer, Thangam Ravindranathan, Denise Riley, Ellen Rooney, Elizabeth Weed

Most readers of Louis Althusser first enter his work through his writings on ideology. In an important new essay Etienne Balibar, friend and colleague of Althusser, offers an original reading of Althusser's idea of ideology, drawing on both recently published posthumous writing and Althusser's work on the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Balibar's essay uncovers the intricate workings of interpellation through Althusser's essays on the theater. If debates on dialectical materialism belong to a distant history, Balibar suggests, the question of ideology remains crucial for thinking the present. The issue includes commentaries on Balibar's essay from five influential scholars who engage critically with Althusser's philosophy: Judith Butler, Banu Bargu, Adi Ophir, Warren Montag, and Bruce Robbins. This issue reanimates Althusser's concept of ideology as an analytic tool for contemporary cultural and political critique.

What is essentialism? What is anti-essentialism? The Essential Difference attempts to answer questions at the heart of current feminist theory and cultural study. The book deals with origins and contexts of the debate; relationships between essentialism, anti-essentialism, and the power of language; reasons for the demonization of essentialism within the academy; the relationship between essentialism and Third World studies.

The essays also speculate about whether there can be an anti-essentialist feminism, whether there can in fact be a feminist politics that dispenses with the notion of Woman. This long-awaited volume questions the bases of feminism itself.

The contributors are Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Leslie Wahl Rabine, Ellen Rooney, Robert Scholes, Naomi Schor, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

This special issue of differences continues to question the vestiges of humanism. Articles include a study on Kant's "Third Critique"; explorations of the rise of "computationalism" and "the digital" and their effects on humanism; an examination of the myth of equality in early American history; and an illustration of "mourning theory" through an analysis of The Great Gatsby.