Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe

by Sophie Lewis

Overview

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, a fierce critique of femmephobia within feminism, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

For two centuries, feminists have tried to be respectable and serious. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital political importance of “femmeness”: a femininity that is self-consciously artificial, a femininity whose erotic and political appetites are considered unacceptable and unnatural. Being femme is a kind of work that merits love and respect—but femmes instead face criticism from antagonists and feminist allies alike. 

Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on tradwives and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity and a poet who mothered against motherhood, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888905975
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	06/16/2026
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.79(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sophie Lewis is a writer, utopian, feminist, and independent scholar. She is the author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now, and a contributor to the collection Hope Against Hope. Lewis’s essays and articles routinely appear in academic journals like Feminist Theory as well as literary ones like n+1, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books. Lewis teaches short courses on feminist theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is based in Philadelphia, PA.

Table of Contents

Introduction
What does “femme” mean, and how is it different from femininity? What kind of anticapitalist potential do femmes offer us? 
SWERF
It’s impossible to take a meaningful stand against transphobia if, like Catharine MacKinnon, Julie Bindel, and others, you remain a sex work prohibitionist.
Mermaid
On the transness of the Little Mermaid.
Vampire
A portrait of cis-trans solidarity.
Daphne
Daphne was a woman who wanted to transition into a tree, and Apollo—you guessed it—was a chaser.
Mumputz
You can be femme and also femmephobic, a mother against motherhood, including the author’s own mother.
Marilyn
On the femme queerness of comrade Marilyn Monroe.
Shulamith
Shulamith Firestone on femme labor, against Shulamith Firestone on femme labor.
Andrea
On the femmephobia of Andrea Dworkin.
Cats
On the antiwork dialectics of cats.
Octopus
On the erotophilic promise of the octopus girlfriend.
Tradwife
The femmephobic alliance between tradwife and girlboss.
Maid
Maid memoirs and momfluencers: On the limits of domestic heterofatalism in maid memoirs and by momfluencers.
Diane
Diane di Prima’s “acid commune-ist” mothering against motherhood.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Enemy Feminisms:

“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