sometimes it helps to re-state things you learn in the world. there was something terribly flattering in learning with clare hemmings here that how people plan to undo power's brutal confinement of bodily possibilities is fraught, if you didn't already know. I remember this book gifted to me by dean spade on the last day of the American studies association meeting in DC, as some generous consolation for trying to wait to the final discount day of the book sale to cop berlant and Edelman's just released *sex or the unbearable.* dean really really wanted to buy me a book and I couldn't find one that I really wanted, not needing to clutter my small living space. I settled on this because I thought it would be about storytelling something similar to what gayl jones means in *corregiadora* or donna haraway means by "material-semiotics." ah, but it's neither, boo-boo. in perhaps the most ethical display of academic practice hemmings returns the (perhaps) retentively sociological tending to gaze back upon the feminist project as a whole writ large. hemmings investigates how feminism itself is narrated, rather than narrative content. she formulates three modes: return, loss and progress: I got a little lost since she resists the more common chronological teleology of waves. i'm not sure how these styles of narration correlate to waves, per se, which was a little hard for me until the middle of the book; that is her point. these narratives can contain similar moments, elements and players.: one's loss as another's progress as another's return. I was particularly taken by what struck me as the descriptive implications for the return narrative for our current moment as pertains to the mainstream publicity of black trans womanhood. the return narrative seeks to resolve all the asymmetries instantiated in loss and progress, its a plea for some primordial innate sovereignty. what this narrative desire insists on is the foreclosure of meaningful discourse on differences: it's how we can all be in the same place talking about the prison industrial complex and never need to confront different experiences of class. can one really dismantle the PIC without acknowledging class differences? one thing did bother me and it was hemmings' insistence upon de-emphasizing the narrated contents near the end of the book was hard to think about beside *corregiadora.* i'm excited to meeting up with folks to re-read *corregiadora* this week, and looking forward to tell everyone about how hemmings tells stories about storytelling.

I really enjoyed and learned a great deal from Hemming’s arguments here, and am particularly impressed by the ways in which she asks big, difficult questions of herself and others, questions that most scholars probably entertain only in the backs of their minds but might feel compromised by actually attempting to address. I definitely see this as a text to which I will return and cite from.

That said, structurally, it was a bit off for me. At times, I felt that the 250+ page book could have just as easily been a journal article, or at least the first handful of chapters on narrative types. The arguments are at their most convincing when emphasizing the specific, such as the chapter on how Judith Butler has been historicised. Otherwise, it was hard to stay interested in, or to see the broad applicability of, some of the early chapters, which could frankly have each been dealt with in a matter of a few pages. The final chapter on affect is really insightful, but feels a bit like a separate project at times.

The last thing to know is that this text is very much about feminist theory, period…. I had thought that it would be more about the story of feminism(s), or of feminist criticism, and would name and evaluate more significant figures and moments, but as reflected above, it is essentially a critique of critiques of academic feminist theory, most of which come from short anonymized extracts from journals. It does not attempt to tell its own history of feminist theory nor provide any kind of macro-look at the narratives of others outside of brief quotations. I imagine that despite its usefulness to scholars, it would be a difficult text to teach, which is unfortunate.