Centre for Women's Studies 40th Anniversary Lecture

York’s Centre for Women’s Studies Founded in 1984, the Centre for Women's Studies (CWS) at the University of York is among the most well-established bases for feminist and gender-oriented teaching and research, both in the UK and internationally.

On the occasion of York’s Centre for Women’s Studies’ (CWS) 40th Anniversary year, we’re delighted to invite you to our prestigious 40th Anniversary Annual Lecture by Professor of Feminist Theory and CWS alumna, Clare Hemmings, entitled: Feminist Knowledge Struggles: Telling Stories Differently

Feminist, queer and critical race work, as well as the people associated with those fields, are under consistent attack within universities and communities. Attacks on migrants, gender non-conformists and trans people, queers and feminists are on the rise transnationally, underpinned by securitised states and militaries, religious fundamentalists, and far-right ‘anti-gender’ idealogues. What resources do we have in queer feminist work that will help us counter these developments, resist the negative impact of these attacks, and strengthen community responses to aggression?

This lecture will introduce a new project that seeks to expand queer feminist methodologies as a way to intervene in this often horrifically hostile present.

From Prof. Hemmings: “I want to propose two tactics here - recitation, which is a methodology I initially offered in 2011 to challenge received histories of feminism and universalism, a much maligned epistemological position – as interventions to resist the certainties of ‘anti-gender’, homophobic, transphobic and racist aggression. With the first tactic, I want to ‘recite’ a feminist history of ‘sex’ to incorporate the fields’ materialist, radical and black or decolonial interrogations of it as a site of struggle. Here I will work with Christine Delphy, Katherine MacKinnon and Hortense Spillers to think about ‘sex’ as having a history very far from claims that essentialise it. With the second, I revisit Sedgwick’s understanding of the ‘epistemology of the closet’ as a universal condition for knowledge claims, suggesting ways in which that impulse might be expanded productively to think about affective dissonance as a universal condition for solidarity politics in our grim times. With this lecture, I want to honour the radical thought we have, and the histories of pedagogy that have laid the ground for present resistance.”

Clare Hemmings is a Professor of Feminist Theory and CWS alumna. 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 institutionalised at national and international levels. Clare has published 3 books – Bisexual Spaces (2002); Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018). In all her work she’s interested in form as well as content, and in interdisciplinary and creative methods.

Clare has recently been gathering family stories for a project Inheritance: a Memory Archive. Combining fiction and memoir, the project foregrounds the moments in family dynamics that challenge what we think we know about gender roles, sexuality, race and citizenship. She has also been actively engaged in writing against ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations, often as part of the network ‘Transnational “Anti-Gender” Movements and Resistance” with Sumi Madhok.

Clare 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. It’s this work that she will draw on for the talk.

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For any queries about this event, please contact boriana.alexandrova@york.ac.uk