Author interview: considering Emma Goldman with Professor Clare Hemmings

We speak to Professor Clare Hemmings about her new book, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Duke UP, 2018), which examines Goldman’s significance as an anarchist activist and thinker to the past and present of feminist theories and activism. Hemmings shows that the contradictions and tensions within Goldman’s approach to race, gender and sexuality speak to unresolved questions that continue to shape feminist practices and politics today

Ready for Bologna? The Impact of the Declaration on Women’s and Gender Studies in the UK

This article explores the likely impact that the Bologna Declaration (1999) will have on the field of women’s and gender studies in the UK. While the UK higher education sector as a whole has been slow to take up the opportunities and challenges presented by Bologna, this article argues that women’s and gender studies may gain particularly from a European reorientation. Women’s and gender studies currently has to struggle for both national resources and recognition, and so has little to lose and much to gain from actively engaging in the process of Europeanization of degrees. The author advocates for UK women’s and gender studies practitioners to take a leading role in this process, in order to facilitate the potential benefits for the field

We thought she was a witch: gender, class and whiteness in the familial ‘memory archive’

‘We thought she was a witch’ uses my own ‘memory archive’ to give texture to the complex inheritance of gender, class and race that characterises the present. Drawing on interviews, archival data and fictionalisation, the article explores the role of gendered labour in securing dominant understandings of class progress. Starting from stories, my mother and I weave together of the history of 64 Chepstow Road, Newport (where her maternal family lived), I highlight the cost of historiography that does not pay attention to what is written out of family memory. The article draws on existing feminist memory work to flesh out an intersectional approach to the ‘memory archive’ we inherit and introduces the importance of an imaginative approach to the past

Is gender studies singular? Stories of queer/feminist difference and displacement

As a way of trying to ensure that feminism remains accountable and inclusive, there is an institutional tendency to multiply the subjects and objects of inquiry within women’s and gender studies. While sympathetic to this impulse, this essay also recognizes that such pluralization tends to reinforce the separation between subjects and objects that women’s and gender studies hopes to pluralize, often positioning “gender” as a more singular object than “sexuality.” In accepting such a teleology and taxonomy, is there a risk of ceding the terrain of gender to conservative forces that already harness it effectively to nation, to whiteness, to heterosexuality? This essay explores institutional stories of gender and sexuality in the U.S., the UK., and France, with a particular emphasis on the ways they align us more conservatively than we might want to imagine

Resisting popular feminisms: gender, sexuality and the lure of the modern

This article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the Modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as “universally desirable” in light of this history. I suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. A related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. I will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men or heterosexuals against women or homosexuals then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. In conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories

‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: an interview with Clare Hemmings

What follows is an interview with Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. A leading figure in UK feminist theory, her research insists that we acknowledge matters of ambivalence and uncertainty in our history-making, storytelling and theorising. As such, it contributes to and has productively intervened in many fields, including feminist epistemology, affect theory, historiography and sexuality studies. Beginning with her first book, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), continuing in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), and most overtly in Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (2018), Hemmings interrogates and challenges dominant modes and expressions of gender and sexuality from a feminist positionality that is itself under-theorised and rarely articulated: that of a feminine bisexual woman. As Hemmings notes, bisexual positionality encompasses the affective capacity for a ‘combination of heterosexual and homosexual desire’ (Hemmings, 2002a; 2002b: 17) and thus generates ‘radical reconfigurations’ (Hemmings, 2002b: 197) of our understanding of the relations between gender, sex and desire. Yet bisexuality has been repeatedly reproduced, within both feminist and queer theory, ‘as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle. As a lesbian and feminist who has occupied that supposedly ‘lifeless middle ground’, albeit differently (I have had two long-term relationships, one with a man, one with a woman), I was interested in speaking with Clare about these issues, and was compelled to do so after I attended an event that she co-organised at the London School of Economics, a screening of Sylvie Tissot’s film about the French feminist Christine Delphy that included Delphy herself. As soon as Delphy entered the theatre and began walking down the stairs to the podium, the audience burst spontaneously into a standing ovation and long applause: '[T]his moment involved both a shared jouissance and the returning of haunting conflicts within feminism – conflicts that we wish had been resolved long ago –because it entailed both exhilarating and dissonant affects, it became a sort of feminist moment par excellence, a moment where solidarity is never exempted from the (re)emergence of disagreements, and where the fantasy of a collective fusion becomes the condition for those conflicts to emerge' (Eloit in Delphy et al., 2016: 151). Delphy’s presence, and the film about her, reminded me that (1) feminist thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s were extraordinarily sophisticated in their understanding of how gender constitutes us as men and women; (2) this analysis is still mostly absent from public conversations; and (3) we still long for such conversations. My interview with Clare Hemmings is thus a continuation of this moment of shared jouissance and haunting. It was conducted informally, in 2017, in Clare’s office, in what was then the Gender Institute, in Columbia House at the LSE. For over 90 minutes during a grey afternoon in London, we spoke on a range of topics, from Clare’s intellectual history to her (then) forthcoming book on Emma Goldman. We discussed her background as a poststructuralist theorist who also carries out empirical research and the challenge of studying sexuality in the archive. In the portion of the interview that appears below, we talk in detail about Clare’s early work on bisexuality and how her thinking contributes to theorising gender in the present