Clare
Hemmings

While one knows that part of right-wing populist appeal relies on its mobilization of affect – what Judith Butler describes as ‘fascist passions’ (2024) – people often struggle to delineate or harness affect for alternative, progressive projects. This talk asks how to generate solidarity and alternative affective investment for our times, drawing on Hemmings work on ‘affective dissonance’. She introduced this concept in 2012 as a way of thinking about affect and political attachments beyond identity and social movements. In this talk, she wants to return to ‘affective dissonance’ to propose it as a more universal methodology for underpinning ‘affective solidarity’ based in difference. Hemmings explores two mobilizations of ‘affective dissonance’, the first is as a methodology for universalizing affiliation through re-reading late 1980s and early 1990s queer theory (particular Eve Sedgwick and Gloria Anzaldúa) as consistently concerned with sexual violence, homophobia and space. The second proposes ‘affective dissonance’ as a methodology starting from grief and loss, through re-reading Amal Treacher Kabesh’s work on history and ambivalence. In both cases animating ‘affective dissonance’ towards ‘affective solidarity’ requires reading practices that sit with yearning and discomfort yet refuse to cede ‘affective belonging’ to the right.

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory 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.

The conference is organized by the Collaborative Research Center 1171 ‘Affective Societies’, FU Berlin, in cooperation with the TU Dresden research project ‘Image Protests on Social Media’ and ICI Berlin.

• At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 6 May 2025.
• Public livestream here (no registration required) with the possibility to ask questions via chat.

The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
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