On Collective Endurance: Thinking Gender Studies in Illiberal Times—A Conversation
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2025
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<jats:p xml:lang="en"> Abstract: In honor of Frontier 's fiftieth anniversary, Clare Hemmings and Robyn Wiegman offer a wide-ranging conversation about the institutional and intellectual history of the field now called gender studies. Working in different national contexts—Hemmings in the United Kingdom and Wiegman in the United States—both scholars have devoted their research to deciphering how stories of the field have been told, how these narratives have become part of the field's reproduction of its own common sense, and how (or when) these narratives have been resisted, rejected, or revised. At the same time, they both have been embedded in the practices they identify and study as insiders, as each served multiple terms as chair/head of their respective departments and programs. Using a discussion format, the scholars reflect on these histories and their successes while also attending to the geopolitical rise of state authoritarianism and nationalism that threatens feminist world making in general and higher education in particular.</jats:p>
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Hemmings, Clare, and Robyn Wiegman (2025). On Collective Endurance: Thinking Gender Studies in Illiberal Times—A Conversation. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 46(1). pp. 1–44. 10.1353/fro.2025.a962956 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34800.
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Robyn Wiegman
Robyn Wiegman is Professor of the Programs in Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and former Margaret Taylor Smith director of Women's Studies at Duke University (2001-2007). She earned her Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of Washington in 1988 and has taught at Syracuse University, Indiana University, and the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include two monographs---Object Lessons (2012) and American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995)---and five edited collections---Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). Wiegman's research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies. She was co-director of the Dartmouth Summer Institute on American Studies from 1998-2004 and director of Women's Studies at UC-Irvine from 1997-2000. She has two monographs in progress: Racial Sensations, on affect and anti-racist aesthetics, and Arguments Worth Having, on key debates in feminist and queer theory, and has recently curated a special issue on "autotheory" for Arizona Quarterly. She has forthcoming essays and interviews in Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, SAQ, and differences. In 2013 she received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Graduate School at Duke University. In 2015, she was a Fulbright visiting lecturer in Naples, Italy where she taught "Love and Sex in American Literature" at L'Orientale University.
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