Professor Clare Hemmings

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

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