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When literary critics approach highly experimental works, we are \ud confronted with a problem: it is not always clear to us what the \ud work means. Readers of such work may find themselves bereft. We \ud don’t know what to do when we open a book and fi nd texts like the \ud one reproduced on the front cover of Reading Experimental Writing, from Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Have a look. What do you see? I see very narrow lines in the shape of a stanza, and at first don’t realise I am looking at a drawing. Is this a drawing of unreadable lines of text? There are lots and lots of lines in this section that is called ‘LINES’ but doesn’t name itself as such until the penultimate page of the book. The question arises, what is a reader to do without language? Is there an alternative to feeling bereft of meaning? We are used to working hard, yes, but we expect that at some point the meaning of the work will become clear. If it does not, we imagine that the problem is outside of us. Despite decades-long debates about the death of the author, we feel her absence: the author has not offered us a clear path. But what has she offered? In this chapter, I argue that Caroline Bergvall’s ‘hyphenated practice’, experienced in the first pages of Drift as the juxtaposition of writing with drawing, calls for and models a new understanding of the relation between writer and reader, one that models what we can do when we find ourselves in the dark, when meaning is unclear, when we don’t know how to find our way.

What follows is an interview with Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. A leading figure in UK feminist theory, her research insists that we acknowledge matters of ambivalence and uncertainty in our history-making, storytelling and theorising. As such, it contributes to and has productively intervened in many fields, including feminist epistemology, affect theory, historiography and sexuality studies. Beginning with her first book, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), continuing in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), and most overtly in Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (2018), Hemmings interrogates and challenges dominant modes and expressions\ud of gender and sexuality from a feminist positionality that is itself under-theorised and rarely articulated: that of a feminine bisexual woman. As Hemmings notes, bisexual positionality encompasses the affective capacity for a ‘combination of heterosexual and homosexual desire’ (Hemmings, 2002a; 2002b: 17) and thus generates ‘radical reconfigurations’ (Hemmings, 2002b: 197) of our understanding of the relations between gender,\ud sex and desire. Yet bisexuality has been repeatedly reproduced, within both feminist and queer theory, ‘as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle. As a lesbian and feminist who has occupied that supposedly ‘lifeless middle ground’, albeit differently (I have had two long-term relationships, one with a man, one with a woman), I was interested in speaking with Clare about these issues, and was compelled to do so after I attended an event that she co-organised at the London School of\ud Economics, a screening of Sylvie Tissot’s film about the French feminist Christine Delphy that included Delphy herself. As soon as Delphy entered the theatre and began walking down the stairs to the podium, the audience burst spontaneously into a standing ovation and long applause:\ud '[T]his moment involved both a shared jouissance and the returning of haunting conflicts within feminism – conflicts that we wish had been resolved long ago –because it entailed both exhilarating and dissonant affects, it became a sort of feminist moment par excellence, a moment where solidarity is never exempted from the (re)emergence of disagreements, and where the fantasy of a collective fusion becomes the condition for those conflicts to emerge' (Eloit in Delphy et al., 2016: 151).\ud \ud Delphy’s presence, and the film about her, reminded me that (1) feminist thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s were extraordinarily sophisticated in their understanding of how gender constitutes us as men and women; (2) this analysis is still mostly absent from public conversations; and (3) we still long for such conversations. My interview with Clare Hemmings is thus a continuation of this moment of shared jouissance and haunting. It was conducted informally, in 2017, in Clare’s office, in what was then the Gender Institute, in Columbia House at the LSE. For over 90 minutes during\ud a grey afternoon in London, we spoke on a range of topics, from Clare’s intellectual history to her (then) forthcoming book on Emma Goldman. We discussed her background as a poststructuralist theorist who also carries out empirical research and the challenge of studying sexuality in the archive. In the portion of the interview that appears below, we talk in detail about Clare’s early work on bisexuality and how her thinking contributes to theorising gender in the present.