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Talk by Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory, London School of Economics

As a way of trying to ensure that feminism remains accountable and inclusive, there is an institutional tendency to multiply the subjects and object of inquiry within ‘Women’s and Gender Studies.’ While I am sympathetic to this impulse, such pluralisation tends to reinforce the separation between subjects and objects it hopes to pluralise, often positioning ‘gender’ as a more singular object than ‘sexuality’. But in accepting such a teleology as well as 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? In this paper, I explore institutional stories of gender and sexuality in the US, the UK and France, with a particular emphasis on the ways they align us more conservatively than we might want to imagine.