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Professor Clare Hemmings

Professor Clare Hemmings

Professor of Feminist Theory

Department of Gender Studies

Telephone
+44 (0)20 7955 7572
Email
c.hemmings@lse.ac.uk
Room No
PAN.11.01M
Office Hours
Book via Student Hub
orcid
Languages
English, French
Key Expertise
Interdisciplinarity; feminist epistemology and methodology

About me

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory. She has been working at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics since 1999.

She has two main areas of research focus – feminist and queer studies – and is particularly interested in thinking through the relationship between these, as well as the ways in which both fields have been institutionalized at national and international levels. This interest has led her to think about how participants in these fields tell stories about their history as well as current form, and to explore how such stories resonate with (rather than against) more conservative agendas. Throughout her work she has been concerned with the relationship between nationalism, feminism and sexuality, and with form as well as theory. This latter interest means that all my work – from the book emerging out of my PhD Bisexual Spaces (2002) to my current work in progress – uses multiple methodologies and forms to explore how knowledge is produced and how we might make it work for us.

Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory was published by Duke University Press in 2011. It explores how feminists tell stories about feminist theory's recent past, why these stories matter and what we can do to transform them. Why Stories Matter won the FWSA (Feminist and Women's Studies Association UK and Ireland) Book Award in 2012. Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Politics of Ambivalence and the Historical Imagination, was also published by Duke University Press. The book considers the significance of the work and life of the anarchist activist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) for contemporary feminist theory and politics. An archive-based project, it returned Clare to her literary theory roots, including a creative letter-writing project that seeks to animate and intervene in the queer and feminist archive in invested ways.

Clare has recently been gathering family stories for a project: Inheritance: a Memory Archive, which engages questions of gender, sexuality, class-transition and nation. Combining fiction and memoir, the project foregrounds the moments in family dynamics that challenge what we think we know about gender roles, sexuality and citizenship. Several essays have come out of this project: for Memory Studies and for the book Scholars and Their Kin (ed Stéphane Gerson, 2025). She has also been active engaged in writing against ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations, often as part of the network ‘Transnational “Anti-Gender” Movements and Resistance” with Sumi Madhok. Articles from this work have appeared in Radical Philosophy and Feminist Studies. https://www2.lse.ac.uk/gender/research/research-highlights/closed-projects/AHRC/AHRC-home

 Clare’s is now beginning work on a new project entitled Feminist Knowledge Struggles: Telling Stories Differently, where she proposes translatable methodologies for a range of queer feminist projects to intervene in the categorical and political certainties of the hostile present. These methods include: ‘reciting’ a feminist history of ‘sex’ to incorporate the fields’ materialist, radical and black or decolonial interrogations of it as a site of struggle; exploring ‘affective dissonance’ as a universal condition to underpin solidarity politics; developing ‘empirical fictions’ to tell contested histories of sexuality, gender and class transitional whiteness as accountability; and reading with and through grief across the intractable differences that otherwise capture and hold us in thrall.

Expertise Details

Interdisciplinarity; feminist epistemology and methodology; fiction as method; sexuality studies; queer feminist theory; black feminist theory; queer of color critique; anarchism;

PhD supervision
Currently a member of the PhD supervisory teams of Senel Wanniarachchi and Rawda Elaskary.

Publications

by Clare Hemmings (2018)

In Considering Emma Goldman Clare Hemmings examines the significance of the anarchist activist and thinker for contemporary feminist politics. Rather than attempting to resolve the tensions and problems that Goldman's thinking about race, gender, and sexuality pose for feminist thought, Hemmings embraces them, finding them to be helpful in formulating a new queer feminist praxis. Mining three overlapping archives—Goldman's own writings, her historical and theoretical legacy, and an imaginative archive that responds creatively to gaps in those archives —Hemmings shows how serious engagement with Goldman's political ambivalences opens up larger questions surrounding feminist historiography, affect, fantasy, and knowledge production. Moreover, she explores her personal affinity for Goldman to illuminate the role that affective investment plays in shaping feminist storytelling. By considering Goldman in all her contradictions and complexity, Hemmings presents a queer feminist response to the ambivalences that also saturate contemporary queer feminist race theories.

 

by Clare Hemmings (2011)

A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory. Clare Hemmings examines the narratives that make up feminist accounts of recent feminist history, highlights the ethical and political dilemmas raised by these narratives, and offers innovative strategies for transforming them. Winner of the Feminist and Women's Studies Association (FWSA) Book Prize 2012.

Read a review of the book by Karen J Leader: Why Stories Matter.

 

by Clare Hemmings (2002)

Armed with theoretical agility, experiences personal and political, feminist and queer commitments, and an unflinching skepticism, Clare Hemmings wanders through the multiple spaces of bisexuality-geographical, theoretical, political, and cultural. Her report from these fronts is keen and challenging, a welcome addition to the development of critical bisexual theory, and to gender and sexuality studies more generally.

 

Books, Edited Collections and Special Issues:

  • Co-editor with Itana Eloit, 'Haunting Feminism: Encounters with Lesbian Ghosts', Feminist Theory 20. 4, December 2019
  • Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Historical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018)
  • , Feminist Review, Issue 106 (eds) Rutvica Andrijasevic, Carrie Hamilton and Clare Hemmings (2014)
  • Co-editor with Mary Evans, Marsha Henry, Hazel Johnstone, Sumi Madhok, Ania Plomien and Sadie Wearing, Handbook of Feminist Theory (London: Sage, 2014)
  • Co-editor with Rutvica Andrijasevic and Carrie Hamilton, ‘Revolutions’, Feminist Review, Issue 106, 2014.
  • Why Stories Matter: the Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke University Press, 2011)
  • Editor, 'Transforming Academies', Feminist Review, Issue 95, 2010
  • With Veronica Vasterling, Enikő Demény, Ulla Holm, Päivi Korvajärvi and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou, Practising Interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies (York: Raw Nerve Press, 2006)
  • Co-editor, Travelling Concepts in Feminist Pedagogy: European Perspectives (York: Raw Nerve Press, 2006). [series of 4 texts and website]
  • Co-editor, 'Sexual Moralities', Feminist Review, Issue 83, 2006.
  • Co-editor, 'Everyday Struggling', Feminist Review, Issue 82, 2006.
  • Bisexual Spaces: a Geography of Gender and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2002).
  • Guest editor, 'Stretching Queer Boundaries', Sexualities, Vol. 2, No. 4, November 1999.
  • Co-editor, Bi Academic Intervention, ed., The Bisexual Imaginary: Desire, Representation, Identity (London: Cassell, 1997)

 

Recent Journal Articles:

  • “We thought she was a witch”: Gender, class and whiteness in the familial “memory archive.” Memory Studies, 16(2), 2022: 
  • “But I thought we’d already won that argument!”: “Anti-gender” Mobilizations, Affect, and Temporality. Feminist Studies, 48(3), 2022: 594–615.
  • ‘Unnatural Feelings: the Affective Life of “Anti-Gender” Mobilisations’, Radical Philosophy, 2.09 (Winter 2021): 27-40. 
  • ‘When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiom