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Robyn Wiegman. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 288 pp. $45.95 cloth/$15.95 paper.
Reviewed by Michael Berube
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign merican Anatomies is an ambitious book; as its subtitle suggests, it promises to read race and gender as mutually complicating categories, and it's often quite successful in illuminating the many ways in which U.S. culture maps the one onto the other, either by feminizing blackness or by negotiating gender relations via the interracial male-bonding adventure. Then again, American Anatomies is not nearly so ambitious as it thinks it is, and that's probably a good thing: "It has been one of the major projects of this book," writes Wiegman at the outset of her final chapter, "to tease out the rhetorical and organizational dynamics of twentieth-century social struggle in the context of this formation of identity and modern discipline" (180). Personally, I hope I never come across a book that addresses twentieth-century social struggle, all of it, as only one of its major projects. American Anatomies does contain provocative and intelligent analyses of the work of Leslie Fiedler, the gender politics of Black Power, the psychodynamics of lynching, the interracial buddy film of the 1980s, and the nineteenth-century discipline of comparative anatomy; but it is not primarily or even convincingly a book about social struggle except in the most attenuated sense.
That's partly because the book's general ambitiousness is clear and its actual ambitions are not. For instance, Wiegman rightly resists the reduction of race and gender to the stock formula "blacks and women," and like many cultural critics, she notes that the formula ensures the misrecognition and undertheorization of black women. What, then, is to be done? At the end of her book's first section, "Economies of Visibility," Wiegman suggests that the disjunction between "race and gender" and "blacks and women" might be strengthened rather than superseded by "situating the black woman at the center of investigative study." As an example of this corrective or compensatory strategy Wiegman cites bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, but with the critical proviso that "there is no assurance, after all, that methodological centrality retrieves the black woman from her historical erasure, no matter how politically crucial the project of reclamation...