From ‘Affective Dissonance’ to ‘Affective Solidarity’

While most people know that part of right-wing populist appeal relies on its mobilization of affect – what Judith Butler describes as ‘fascist passions’ (2024) – they often struggle to delineate or harness affect for alternative, progressive projects. In this talk, Hemmings asks how to generate solidarity and alternative affective investment for current times, drawing on her 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. Hemmings wants to return to ‘affective dissonance’ to propose it as a methodology for underpinning ‘affective solidarity’ based in struggle for current politics. And she returns to early queer theorists, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gloria Anzaldúa to think with them about both dissonance and solidarity. In both cases she takes up their refusal to seek recognition in dominant world-views and animate their radical energies to help imagine new futures.

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.