Book review: considering Emma Goldman: feminist political ambivalence and the imaginative archive by Clare Hemmings

In Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive, Clare Hemmings offers a rich, complex and searching new engagement with Goldman’s life and politics, focusing on ambivalence as a key theme through which to understand her significance to contemporary feminist thought. While the book’s rigorous immersion in debates around race, gender and sexuality may be daunting for some readers, this impressive and challenging work uses Goldman to hold a mirror up to feminism today and in the process teaches us a great deal about both, writes Ruth Kinna.