Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation

by Sophie Lewis

Overview

From the author of Abolish the Family, an unflinching tour of two hundred years of enemy feminisms, making the case instead for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we need.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888902493
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	02/18/2025
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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 Universitybefore 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,Harper’s, and theLRB, newspapers like theNew York Times, and art websites likee-flux.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Women Are Not Horrible
1. The “Enslaved” Englishwoman Goes Abroad
2. The Other Abolitionist
3. The Civilizer
4. The Prohibitionist
5. The KKK Feminist
6. The Blackshirt
7. The Policewoman
8. The Pornophobe
9. The Girlboss
10. The Femonationalist
11. The Pro-Life Feminist
12. The Adult Human Female
Conclusion: Feminism Against Cisness

Editorial Reviews

A field guide to reactionary archetypes from fascists to TERFs, Enemy Feminisms surfaces a hidden vein of feminist conservatism. A welcome alternative to political history as an accumulation of social media screenshots.”
—Malcolm Harris, author of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis

"Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant."
—Judith Butler

"Enemy Feminisms is a compelling, provocative, ferocious 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, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at New York magazine

"Sophie Lewis is sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless.”
—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

“Everything about the necessity of Sophie Lewis to contemporary discourse on the left has been said, and rightly so! Her work and voice are crucial, learned, and stylistically a joy to read.  But what needs to be said, more than this, is that Sophie Lewis is absolutely clear on the urgent material stakes of her writing. Enemy Feminisms expertly and painstakingly parses the historical and contemporary landscapes of reactionary fascist feminisms for our sake, and for the sake of a struggle we simply need to win.”
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

"This lively counter-history... is sure to entertain and provoke."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher