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.