Rigorous engagement with the configurations, felicities, and entanglements of cultural objects remains critically and theoretically imperative to the construction of an adequate account of contemporary fields of power relations and to the articulation of an aspirational politics of emancipation.

To advance the assertion above might seem no more than to reiterate a methodological postulate already recognized as fundamental, if not self-evident, to much of the work currently pursued in the critical humanities. It would therefore be unsurprising to learn of the above statement's capacity to engender feelings of relational familiarity and interpretative certainty, to conjure the comforts of an all too intuitive, intimate intelligibility. Analytically arrested and meticulously interrogated, culture and its objects become the instrumental tableaux through which we might finally satisfy the Delphic injunction to know ourselves; in the cipher of the cultural, then, would be found a truth of our practices, constellated across axes of production, consumption, desire, meaning-making, the possible and the impossible. Such an achievement would mark, one might say, the final disciplining of culture.

It is in response and resistance to the presumption of culture's disciplinary potential that this conference has been organized. (Inter)Disciplining Culture is thus a refusal of the complacent fantasy of a "disciplined" culture, and yet it is also an insistent refutation of any account of culture that would categorically foreclose the possibility of what Stuart Hall has described as "cultural strategies that can make a difference" (1993, 107). For Hall, it is because cultural contest "is never about pure victory or domination" that the critical task of "shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture . . . [and] changing the dispositions and configurations of cultural power" remains possible and necessary (ibid.).

To intervene in the configurations of culture is premised not on a fantasy of analytically disciplining culture, a disavowal of what Hall elsewhere describes as the impossibility to achieve "anything like an adequate theoretical account of culture's relations and its effects" (1991, 284). The work of cultural analysis is rather, writes feminist cultural critic Angela McRobbie, the crystallization of a desire and a need "to understand the dynamics of social and cultural inequality and the ways in which these are lived in and through a variety of social categories and ideological identifications" (1994, 37). In its practice, cultural critique remains cognizant of the historicities of power relations that have shaped culture's objects in substance and form. Its application eschews the privileging of external object over internal logic, working to identify its constitutive inside and outside, what Hortense Spillers has provocatively called the grammar of culture and its vestibularity (1987). Indeed, Spillers's methodological commitment to interdisciplinarity, to interrogating how formations of knowledge and discourse can be read against and through one another to reveal their insufficiencies and their generativities, is an aspirational template for the commitments of (Inter)Disciplining Culture.

(Inter)Disciplining Culture asks how methods, frameworks, and critical dispositions of scholarship in gender, sexuality, and women's studies can invigorate current conversations about culture, its objects, and its configurations. Its themes range from analyses of television programs, music, and art to questions of international feminist politics and culture. It is a demonstration of the categorical power of the frameworks developed and debated within the scholarship of gender, sexuality, and women's studies pose necessary questions about contemporary cultural objects and forms and the consequential imbrication of the cultural and the political.