On collective endurance: thinking gender studies in illiberal times – a conversation

In honor of Frontier’s 50th 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.