ANU Feminist Utopias 2017 - Emma Goldman's Struggles for Utopia: Feminism and Ambivalence
Channel: ANU TV
Date: 2018-01-16

Professor Clare Hemmings, Director of the Gender Institute, London School of Economics, says Emma Goldman was a life-long believer in anarchist revolution and the importance of prefigurative engagement with utopian ways of living that such revolution would surely inaugurate. 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. Rather than dismissing or seeking to resolve these ambivalences, Hemmings suggests that they offer a useful way of bringing forward past uncertainties as a way of illuminating present difficulties about precisely the same 'objects'. Lastly, she suggests 'panache' as a useful way of holding these ambivalences in tension for a queer feminist politics that resists identification in favour of wonder.