Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation

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From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics well need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.
In recent years, white feminism and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in wont make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.
Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to todays anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.
is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

Reviews

Praise for Abolish the Family:

A bracing invitation to think beyond an institution that immiserates so many but that, for just as many, remains a fixed point of social possibility. Sophie Lewis is, as always, sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless.
Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

I am consistently dazzled by Sophie Lewis's work, which is both intellectually capacious and heart-expanding. Abolish the Family is a liberatory demand and a world-making project proposed here with revolutionary love and inimitable style. Without fail, Lewis clarifies, disrupts and inspires.
Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life

Sophie Lewis is our most eloquent, furious and funny critic of how the family is a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment.
New Statesman

Thrilling.
Refinery29

Praise for Full Surrogacy Now

Sophie Lewis and her expansive vision of feminism are desperately needed right now. She makes the work of undoing what "womanhood" has come to mean look possible and irresistible.
Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore
Dazzling.
London Review of Books

Author Bio

Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books,Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,andAbolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She studied English Literature at Oxford University before pursuing graduate and postgraduate study in environmental theory, political science, and human geography, respectively at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University. However, Lewis now counts herself an ex-academic. Although her writing still appears in journals likeFeminist Theory,TSQ,andSigns,she is making her living writing free-lance for magazines liken+1,Harpers, and theLRB, newspapers like theNew York Times, and art websites likee-flux.