 Thank you Carolyn and this is promising to be such a wonderful event so many interesting sessions and we're really going to be thrilled to open this conference with a talk from Professor Claire Hemmings. She's the current director of the London School of Economics Gender Institute and we're really delighted she's been able to come all the way around the world utilized to join us for this event. She really is one of the most important, contemporary thinkers of feminism as a movement, as a set of narratives, as a set of strategies, as a way of thinking. Her book from 2011, Why Stories Matter, is a really brilliant engagement with the narratives that shape our understanding of feminism as a political project. And it very rightly I won the Feminist Women's Studies Association of UK and Ireland's book award in 2012. She's recently completed another monograph considering Emma Goldman, Feminist Politics of Ambivalence, which will be coming out with Duke University very shortly. It's this project that we're going to hear from today. Please join me in welcoming Claire. Emma Goldman was an anarchist, activist and thinker. She was a lifelong believer in anarchist revolution and the importance of prefigurative engagement with utopian ways of living that such revolution would surely inaugurate. As an anarchist, activist and theorist born in 1869 and who died in 1940 she spanned a very key period of both the rise and demise of particular social movements. Goldman was certain that sexual freedom was central to revolution and the unchosen authority of any kind was counter-revolutionary. She was clear that utopia is prefigurative and by that she means living the future you want then in the present now and takes place in a never-ending struggle in preference to revolution. So I'm partly reminded of the opening remarks about the importance of ongoing everyday struggle. Yet for all her fervent certainties Goldman's articulation of the means to bring about anarchist utopia was shot through with political ambivalence about gender, race and sexuality in particular. She was ambivalent about those very things that she cared about most, as most of us are. Women's oppression, anti-nationalism, sex itself. And that ambivalence has been seen as meaning very often that she fell short of her ideals while still remaining a heroic character. But my own view is that this is precisely the site of struggle and that it is her conflicting views on gender, race and sexuality that what we need to bring forward contemporary in order to make sense of current dilemmas and power relations. Or indeed to have a glimpse of utopia ourselves. I suggest that they offer a useful way of bringing forward past uncertainties as a way of illuminating present difficulties about precisely the same objects in queer feminist studies. I've bought too much technology because I kept changing the introduction. That's why I've got this. Now I'll move to paper. It may initially come as a surprise for any of you that know Emma Goldman. When I start from this proposition that the Goldman archive is overflowing with ambivalence this doesn't look like an ambivalent character. After all this is Emma Goldman who is unequivocal about the central role that sexual politics and gender division of labour and value play in the perpetuation of capitalist and militarist interests. Goldman spent her life foregrounding the inequalities attending and reinforcing women's subordinate role and insisted that women's position in the family was a fundamental feature of how capitalism worked rather than just its lamentable side effect. Emphasising the importance of the exploitation of women's reproductive labour as well as the impact of this tyranny on all women as individuals. It was in fact precisely because Goldman wanted to centre women's freedom as essential for revolution that she was so critical of suffrage and of the limits of efforts to gain the vote. For Goldman only women's fullest liberty would do what she describes as real emancipation and she understood state-oriented recognition politics such as the claiming of that vote as a waste of revolutionary energy. In this she was hardly alone of course women's sexual and political freedom was consistently contrasted with the red herring of feminism or equality in a range of international anarchist movements and most particularly those in Argentina and Chile. Goldman's rather frequent unpleasantness to women is harder to integrate into a celebration of her sexual politic however. While most feminist thinking does include a critique of femininity and of some women in its representation and reproduction in their representation and reproduction of the status quo Goldman is understood to take her judgments too far. She can indeed be vitriolic towards women representing them as not only co-opted or oppressed but specifically as stupid, vicious, petty and corrupt. And probably more important she takes great pleasure in her characterisation of bourgeois women as arch-consumers and of women in general as responsible for many of men's failings in particular mothers, no surprise I think there. It is Goldman's enthusiastic antipathy towards femininity that signals her ambivalence about women's capacity to change since it sutures these ills to women all the while she also rages about the importance of persuading them to change but the conundrum here then is that if women are so unoriented towards revolution and so supportive blindly of men and consuming of capitalism and so on how it is that they will be able to generate the character necessary in order to effect that change. Feminist critics tend to want to write off or ignore this ambivalence in order to claim Goldman as a feminist and in fact almost all feminist critics do eventually claim her as such but in the process they tend to see this simply as a mistake, vitriol where in fact I would argue it's central to her argument about contemporary ills that need to be overcome as part of a revolutionary utopia and I'll come back to that point in a bit. Goldman's ambivalence about femininity resonates in the feminist archive albeit with the occasional false note but her ambivalence about race and racism is harder for critics to negotiate. In relationship to racism and race feminists have noted with some dismay that Goldman quote Mrs Race, that's a quote from Kathy Ferguson claiming her instead as an intersectional heroine before her time and very often within feminist criticism on Goldman you'll have those two things in one sentence what a shame she doesn't talk about race but isn't she very intersectionally indeed. Goldman certainly was a practical and intuitive internationalist she herself migrated and was exiled numerous times during her lifetime and she had a trenchant critique of the relationship between nationalism, militarism and capitalism particularly insofar as these limited the possibilities for women to live full lives. She was thus a supporter of the Indian anti-colonial movement and the Mexican Revolution and worked towards solidarity with anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Philippines. Goldman was of course one of those anarchist migrants who became politicised after her move from Russia to the United States and who was first educated in and then exiled to Europe. She wrote to comrades and intimates all over the world over her lifetime no matter where she was living and she participated in that vast network of transnational anarchist publication and translation that typified its vibrancy in the early 20th century. Goldman's border crossings and lack of belonging underwrite her challenges to patriotism and capitalism as well as the gendered and sexual norms that secure them and those skins of her life resonate well with the feminist critical and theoretical archive that foregrounds a transnational feminist politics attentive to contemporary geopolitical complexity. It's no surprise in other words that people like her. Yet Goldman like many other European, Latin American and American anarchists was less clear on how to negotiate race politics. For Cathy Ferguson one of her most brilliant interlocutors Goldman's political commitments meant that she was quote confident that class would always trump race in the production of social inequality unquote and for Candice Falk her biographer and archivist while Goldman had a clear analysis of lynching as quote the most graphic and egregious expression of racist terrorism in the country. She did not theorise that horror as the focus of her general critique of state aggression. In other words she recognised horrors but she didn't theorise it independently as having a history that needed to be told. And she wasn't alone in that. Further she draws on racist stereotypes in her depiction of life in prison in particular in ways that are profoundly unpleasant and historically ignorant of colonialism positioning black inmates as gaining special favours over the Anglo inmates as she terms it. She was not alone of course. Anarchist social movements more generally too supported decolonial movements but only in the move to general revolution and western movements were white if migrant. So of course anarchists supported colonial anti-colonial movements but only as a move towards more general universal revolution not in their own right. The critical response sees these issues this displacement or non centering of race politics and racism as self evidently problematic focusing as I said on how she misses race and negotiating a kind of embarrassment a critical embarrassment at this missing in similar vein to anxiety about her anti femininity. Yet this anxiety is itself productive of its own displacements as anxiety usually is in turning away from her partial theorisations of race because it's not deemed sufficient a range of ways in which Goldman does explore how racism functions as a form of oppression are easily missed in turn. As indeed is her explicit framing of black movements as reformist as a critique which they often were and often are. In wanting Goldman's attention to race to be familiar and appropriate as well as privileged the attention that she pays in fact to overlapping forms of violence and her analysis of the concept of slavery she has a particularly strong analysis of slavery as both or chosen or forced and her analysis are glossed over in other words they receive almost no critical attention. For example it is the differential response to similar forms of violence scarcely being mentioned in the press or by social movements for example that she emphasised. In other words the violence itself she might have thought of similar but she was very clear about the different reception to particular forms of violence depending on the body. And that's quite interesting given then that she's highlighting and emphasising an important aspect of racist history that of representation as well as questions of freedom from acts of actual violence and again this receives no mention because of a kind of critical embarrassment and in terms of her critiques of nationalism or the mobilisation of Jewish identity as or is thought of as an alternative in framing her as an intersectional heroine before her time despite this inattention to race and racism the very ways in which those approaches combine in Goldman to provide a somewhat unexpected account of race and sexual freedom or analysis of the relationship between anti-semitism and anti-black violence are also easily overlooked. In other words in wanting intersectionality to displace or substitute for questions of anti-black violence the critical material tends to miss the ways in which she tries to articulate them together. I've been particularly struck by her critique of race as embedded in the family for example such that she sees the expansion of kinship through sexual freedom as a prefiguration of an anti or post-race cosmopolitanism central to anarchist utopia despite no attention to this particular way in in the critical archive so she centres sexual freedom not only as a challenge to militarism and capitalism but as a challenge to racist nationalisms. For Goldman sexual politics is a method both of women's liberation and anti-capitalist endeavour but it's also part of how narrow race-based nationalisms are potentially transformed and in thinking about it as method one of the things I do in the border book is think about how to re-imagine the relationship between sexual and race politics and what a sexual freedom indeed surely Goldman as the great sexual political icon of that period could not be thought of as ambivalent here Goldman was among those early 20th century anarchists and socialists who understood sexual expression to be a basic human right that's her term, it's one of the few terms she uses the term human right it's not a favourite basic human right a legitimate goal of the class struggle so here it's interesting an inversion instead of sexual freedom being a goal of the class instead of sexual freedom coming afterwards it's a legitimate goal the method of which might be class struggle Goldman theorises the sexual division of labour not simply as a prior condition for production and thus capitalist exploitation but as labour, alienated and exploited as is other labour in capitalism and thus an integral part of economic production that won't surprise any of you I'm sure there's plenty of Marxist feminists in the room through this analysis Goldman links birth control issues prostitution and wholesale destruction of the poor in wartime and develops her strong arguments for love as the site of reclaimed value privileged site of reclaimed value creativity and progressive possibility when returned into the hands of its workers women Goldman not only theorised sexual freedom but also practised it through her lifetime refusing to be domestically tied to men or children and struggling with the contradictions between feelings and politics that structure her bravery in this respect the feminist critical archive on Goldman's understanding of sexual freedom is of course seduced by that centring of sexual politics as both means and end of utopia and by Goldman's linking of nationalism, militarism and control of women's bodies support for and theorisation of prostitution as an effect of capitalism, migration and repressed sex drives have pleased queer theorist too less on the repressed sex drive front but more on the migration and capitalism front as has her contradictory support for homosexual liberty very contradictory but so too that archive finds limits to this privileging of sexual freedom representing it as too vague on the one hand excessively, too excessively focused on men on the other particularly following discovery of her self abasing letters to her tour manager and long term lover Ben Reitman but a range of different thinkers also celebrate Goldman's bold relationship to sexual freedom in her life and work also remaining dubious about her claiming of sexuality as the core of human nature whatever its object choice Bonnie Harland goes furthest in this line of thinking framing Goldman as a heterosexual essentialist because of her support for sexological and psychoanalytic understandings of sexuality as well as her excess of passion for Reitman combined with her uncertain relationship to homosexuality it's important I think to consider the ways in which Goldman is interrogating the question of sexuality's relationship to capitalism and freedom at a point in history when sexuality is an identity is in the process of being articulated Goldman is forging her own theory of sexual freedom as a difficult and contested rather than self-evident position of critique or transformation in addition Goldman's complex engagement with sexual politics in theory and practice poses an important challenge to assumptions about the nature of sexual identity and freedom in the present in relationship to prostitution for example Goldman's support for sex workers themselves stems from her support for all women to free themselves from social constraints her argument is that prostitution is no less egregious than other forms of sexual institutionalisation it along with marriage would disappear in a free society leaving women free to express currently constrained desire and in that sense I think it offers a slightly different intervention into contemporary debates about prostitution and sex work which either tend to be focused on abolition or on labour support for sex work for Goldman thinking about prostitution as one of a variety of kinds of oppression of women that real sexual liberation would cease to make necessary is a particular intervention that tends to also be ignored partly because it relies on assumptions about sexual interiority and drives that are perhaps a little bit less popular and in relationship to homosexuality about which she is indeed very ambivalent this ambivalence also means that questions about rights based sexual politics are displaced by her refusal of single issue politics and also by that own her own uncertainty about her and others desire and how to interpret it so that gives you I hope a little sense of the different debate she has around questions of gender race and sexuality and of course they overlap and I'm going to turn now in the second part to thinking about methodology hopefully a little bit more exciting ways than that sounds so if we think Goldman is ambivalent about categories that we hold dear and that we would like to perhaps be a little less ambivalent how do we think about those threads of ambivalence and bring them forward in ways that in live and present utopian aims in the book that I've just finished the focus is on methodology and in particular I've singled out three issues to flag for you this morning affect, imagination and style all of these three centre the intersubjective aspects of the engagement with a figure such as Goldman and explore the question of temporality and relationality essential to utopian imagination I'm just going to indicate rather than fully explore these because of time but hope that you'll be able to ask me questions about them or come and talk to me about them at another point so first affective method in affective terms reading and thinking with Goldman has forced me to sit with the struggle over meanings of gender race and sexuality rather than resolve them and ride out to some extent the discomfort that requires because of course these questions of vitriol race stereotyping and sexual nature and not necessarily positions I share or feel comfortable with what slips out of my grasp or is easily framed as someone else's bad habit when I don't find what I want in the Goldman archive in methodological terms it's my own affective responses to reading Goldman that have opened up for me what I might know but tend to deny in relationship to Goldman for example I laughed uproariously at Goldman's viciousness to women when I first encountered it in her writing sharing nasty laughter at women's manipulability and culpability for their own oppression clearly distancing myself from that manipulability as I did so I've come to think of that pleasure my laughing as a way of letting my partner in crime Goldman carry the burden of our shared judgment of femininity and somehow displacing me from femininity even at the same time as I share in that laughter my laughing my pleasure lets me off the hook even as it binds me to Goldman in a kind of culpable relationship similarly my initial response to Goldman's understanding of race and racism in her work was highly effective I shared the critical disappointment and her lack of sustained theorising of race politics and found a firmer footing as I suspect we all do in reframing her initially as a prophetic intersectional thinker in other words it's not simply critics who do this as if critics were not me yet something niggled at me made me ashamed of my own displacement of race politics that seemed to mirror hers even as I sought to distance myself from her in this regard and finally I wrestled for some time with my what I can only describe as bodily glow at Goldman's sexual politics my pleasure in her fervency and in her declarative way of promoting this her insistence on human capacity as generous rather than mean spirited trying to control that common joy by filtering her through a more sophisticated contemporary post structuralist critical post anarchist sieve in doing so I missed for a long time the important temporality of Goldman's belief in human nature a future orientation I was only able to glimpse when I gave in to that glow that idea of nature is not fully encountered now but is prefigurative living it now in order that it should become much as one might apologise for a well-meaning but embarrassing relative in ways one later feels as a reciprocal humiliation my own attempts to clean up Goldman could not be sustained she kept jabbing at my ribs and stomach and in each case brought me back to her ambivalence as considerably more engaging than my own superficial certainties starting from affect shed some light on ambivalence through what it is that jars or can't be carried easily forward and what that says about my own and other feminist certainties rather than somehow what that tells us about a full account of Goldman who of course is always outside of my or anybody's interpretation in that sense then affect or these small moments of affect gave me a sense both of what it is that I might want from Goldman and also in that sense then what it is that a contemporary politics might be preoccupied with that makes some things harder to say than others and my sense then is that as a method that sense of affect as a kind of moment not of truth but of an interruption or a particular kind of light on different forms of epistemic value can be very helpful so secondly in terms of method my concern with ambivalence has also become a way of enlivening I hope the back and forth of queer feminist historiography my reading for ambivalence forces me into a relationship with Goldman that doesn't seek only to reproduce her in my own image or to imagine her simply dead because clearly in many ways she isn't it opens up the question of how we read the past as one of care as well as desire and assumes that the archive is only ever partial and that the gaps cannot be straightforwardly filled plus how do we represent anarchism as a lost cause that was once so vibrant without reproducing that erasure how do we talk about sexual politics as central to challenging racism as this is a hard to track and not so popular thread and how to think with and through non-identitarian sexual freedom in an era of rights claims as the dominant mode of redress contra heteronormativity so in the spirit of both ambivalent history and love for Goldman I have also turned to fiction and creative labour if we want evidence of solidarity in the face of annihilation without rewriting or fetishising the past then we will have to imagine what we will never be able to verify utopia is not archived in its struggling failing forms so I'll briefly introduce you to an experiment that I've undertaken with letters to and from Goldman as indicated Goldman was ambivalent over homosexuality she was cutting as well as supportive in particular about gay men she was coy about sex between women and between men in ways that seemed very unlike her and yet we also have more than 65 extremely long thank you, hilarious, provocative, over the top deeply disturbing and often sexually explicit letters to Goldman from Almodys Sperry in 1912 and 1913 and which importantly to which we have no replies Sperry was a labour union and anarchist activist living in a small town in small town east coast America a woman who sometimes had sex for money was married to her sometimes pimp Fred with whom she had a violent relationship she was an alcoholic, chain smoking literary fantasist whose letters, fabulous letters may I say detail her beguiling attempts to seduce Goldman there's a whole series of them that tell Goldman how good sex will be if only she will come to New York so that they can have it brilliant seduction tactic right her delight in what was clearly the consummation of their desire her obsessive whining once it appears the mutual attraction had dimmed and the manic turn to barely contain violence that predictably marks the end of many a relationship it is tempting indeed to want to fill these gaps in traditional sources and to write a counter history that displays alternative evidence for the sceptic and believe me nothing would delight me more than discovering Goldman's replies to Sperry in all their smutty glory much like Candice Faulk found the letters to right men in all their self-abasement but what if instead of a search for lost sources we read these gaps creatively and productively is a central aspect of sexual history both then and now starting from there but not leaving them stranded as part of what constitutes a utopian methodology as post-colonial theorists and fiction writers have shown so powerfully stories can and must be retold from the position of these gaps and fishers not to provide an authentic alternative but to quote strain against the archive that's idea Hartman in order to be able to imagine what cannot be verified so although there's something very appealing about tracking my hopes for alternative sexual histories through the brilliant violent letters that form one side of the correspondence between this labour unionist, sex worker and married woman and this anarchist and free love advocate I'm not prepared to read Goldman only through the traces and echoes that ultimately take me back into that lack in a creative letter writing project of my own I write back to Sperry the letters I imagine Goldman writing when I read the ones we have and in doing so I foreground I collect both our collective failure to find them as well as the importance of still imagining them there starting from my yearning for Sperry's and Goldman's correspondence in all its complexity allows me to centre Goldman's struggles within sexual freedom as part of a history of revolutionary thinking and being in which love and lust are dynamic forces that cut through and across history politics, sorry across politics the aim is to bring life to an imagined sexual history in which Goldman's own sexual confidence and ambivalence opposite and same-sex passion and disgust, fear and bravery must have crafted the words she wrapped around Sperry's heart and lastly panash style and politics Candace Faulk responds to decades of typifying Goldman's life and work as dominated by passion by characterising them instead and in passing as filled with what she calls panash I found this thread of possibility very provocative and productive precisely because it issues a focus on intention was Goldman really a feminist should she have done more in this and that respect seems to be very particular critical questions it issues that focus on intention in favour of style what style the term panash derives from Edmund Rostorn Serrano de Bergerac the heroic big-nosed figure who does all for love he cannot have the original text itself the Rostorn's text suggests there are four primary aspects of panash not believing in worldly value and reward love as the basis of transcendence self-styling and insatiability in relationship to the world and the art of the losing battle Goldman has all these aspects too and I read her as a hero of similar mythic and flawed majesty one minute important too this is a way of framing Goldman not as a figure of feminist or queer identification requiring that we resolve ambivalence this is a figure we wonder at and use that wonder as a stepping stone or catalyst for our own abilities to imagine a different future panash in other words gives us an inkling into or as a mode of imagination rather than identification which is a flatter relationship it seems to me indeed it is precisely the carrying of flaws and contradictions and not their resolution that is the hallmark of panash as part of living utopia in the present in essence we might say that panash allows a range of incremental positions to be held in tension precisely because of the life force of its subject the power for Goldman of the minority or individual over what she sees as the self-reproductive majority while passion is a mode of politics offers the possibility of overcoming worldly obstacles panash describes the courageous way that certain unusual individuals can embrace a losing battle carry themselves with style and challenge limits to human endeavour and creativity wherever they find them Goldman takes on anarchism as a living force in the affairs of our life embracing the struggle to live as an anarchist although knowing this cannot succeed while there is not yet anarchy with a capital A and indeed this still is not her foolish brave actions cannot and do not change the circumstances under which she operates or we operate anarchism is after all the great failed social movement of the last 150 years and romantic heroes who sacrifice all for love and honour live on primarily in our memories and imaginations yet the embodied hope and possibility represented by Goldman pulses with life the panash with which she takes up their various causes always at a jaunty angle inspires a kind of awe perhaps an awe that is surely necessary to imagine ourselves other than we already are thank you