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 we’ll 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 won’t 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 today’s 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.
At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.
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"Enemy Feminisms is a compelling, provocative, formidable book that shreds one received wisdom after another in a poised balance of incisive argument and elegant writing. Sophie Lewis has become an indispensable thinker for our era." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby
"Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms evidences the need for animosity between feminists and the histories of violence through which fascistic and reactionary accounts of feminism emerge. They warn us against the falsity of sisterhood, examining how and why we must be prepared to break with this myth in order to assert what feminism can and should do. With daring and inventive prose, they remind us that if ours is a liberatory vision, we must be able to identify our enemies." —Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism Interrupted
“Lewis treats feminism not as an inherent moral good but as a thick tangle of partial, contradictory practices that must be judged on their material effects—and shows us how we might cut our way through. Fearsome and deeply needed.” —Andrea Long Chu, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism
“Sophie Lewis is sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless.” —Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
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
Other books by Sophie Lewis
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Enemy Feminisms
by Sophie Lewis