City Lights and Haymarket Books present
Sophie Lewis in conversation with Eric A. Stanley
discussing the new book
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
By Sophie Lewis
published by Haymarket Books
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.
Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish 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 like Feminist Theory, TSQ, and Signs, she is making her living writing free-lance for magazines like n+1, Harper’s, and the LRB, newspapers like the New York Times, and art websites like e-flux.
Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable and the co-editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. They live and organize in San Francisco, CA.
This event has been made possible with the support of the City Lights Foundation