Sophie Lewis, "Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation" (Haymarket Books, 2025)
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Visit prma.org slash middleman to learn more. Paid for by Pharma. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. In today's episode, we'll be exploring one of the most provocative and intellectually stimulating works in contemporary feminist theory. Today, we're discussing Sophie Lewis's latest book, Enemy Feminisms, Turfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, published by Haymarket Books.

It is a rigorous examination of reactionary strands within feminist theory and a fierce call for a more liberatory feminist politics. Following her groundbreaking work, Abolish the Family, Lewis now offers what critics are calling an unflinching tour through two centuries of what they term enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists to contemporary anti-abortion activists and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs.

Central to Lewis's thesis is the challenging assertion that feminism is not an inherent political good, but rather a complex and contradictory set of practices and ideologies that must be critically evaluated based on their material effects.

The book has garnered significant praise already. Judith Butler has called it mandatory reading. And for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future, what makes Enemy Feminisms particularly relevant for our current political moment is its engagement with rising fascism, ongoing attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia.

Lewis argues that only by confronting feminism's complicated history can we develop the anti-fascist feminist strategies we urgently need.

In today's discussion, we'll explore Lewis's critique of various enemy feminisms, from white feminism and girlboss feminism to more explicitly reactionary forms, and examine their vision for a left trans feminist politics that is simultaneously decolonial project and a sex radical retort to femphobia and all its manifestations.

Enemy feminism forces feminists to take a long, hard look in the mirror, especially if and when we are tempted to think that women are not really the problem, when in fact so many of the forms of feminism that we engage in on a daily basis are state-sanctioned and commercially approved and often allied with white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy itself.

Dr. Sophie Lewis is an Anglo-German writer and feminist theorist living in Philadelphia and the author of Full Surrogacy, Now Feminist Against the Family, as well as Abolish the Family, a manifesto for care and liberation. Sophie's essays appear in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, The Drift, and several more. Sophie Lewis, thank you for joining us today.

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Before we dive into enemy feminisms, could you tell us a bit about your trajectory when writing this book? Previously, you've written about feminist politics of care, family and surrogacy and reproduction. What made you want to shift your focus and write this book?

Great question. Yes. My first book, Full Surrogacy Now, intervenes in the prevalent framing. This was in 2016, 17, 18 that I was writing it. It came out in 2019 around what I call, I'm not the first to call it this, gestational labor, right? The unwaged and in commercial surrogacy, waged labor.

labour of pregnancy. And I'm doing something sort of theoretically defamiliarising around the divide between surrogate and non-surrogate, sort of so-called, you know, unassisted, I suppose, and assisted baby making. I don't think any life making labour is unassisted. I'm trying in

in a sort of critically utopian, trans-feminist Marxist way to use this interesting kind of fraught and yes, very sort of unpretty kind of domain, economic domain of, of,

commercial contract pregnancy to squint towards the horizon of what I call gestational communism based on the materially imminent latent present reality that we are the makers of one another we're not organizing our world in a way that is adequate to that fact right so that that we are already in a sense um that sort of

the gestators of one another and the call in the sense that it is a manifesto, which it's not really, but in the sense that it is, it's calling for a kind of actualization, like an abolitionist sort of aufhebung of that.

of that material reality. So this is a sort of book that has a positive, in a sense, like, I mean, like grammatically speaking, you know, like an injunctive kind of title, you know, Full Surrogacy Now, and the follow up, which clarifies the

care communizational politics that was my jumping off point you know family abolitionist politics you know um abolish the family a manifesto for care and liberation which also has this injunctive right let's do this let's let's you know um prescriptive kind of title with a um a more obviously sort of uh yeah i'm going to use the word positive again sort of valence so i i

I think when you're asking me how I came to write Enemy Feminism, I think it's important for me to, you know, speak to this in some way. Like, is this...

turn to the negative, I suppose, you know, enemy feminisms, really the only thing that's happening. I think enemy feminisms remains very much a kind of love letter to the sort of feminism I'm practicing in Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family. In a sense, I would probably suggest that

negativity is part of the critical utopian process. You know, there's a sort of connection between these projects, after all, despite what it might look like, because of the way that understanding where lines must be drawn in antagonism or in enmity is part, a necessary part, sometimes neglected, sometimes avoided because of the kind of

I guess you could say toxically positive sort of or conflict diverse character of much much liberal democratic politics or indeed non-liberal forms of sort of sisterhood conceptualizations of the political right based on based on sisterliness you know

in order to be comrades we have to also know how to sever ties and draw lines and this I guess is also a different way of expressing things I was expressing in the final chapter and closing as well as opening the sorts of boundaries between ourselves collectively and so on so the sort of

And perhaps also at the level of the individual, you know, we, the amniotechnical is the art of skillful holding, even while being ripped into at the same time as knowing how to let go and block. This is based on the gestational, right? The sort of hydrofeminist, sort of almost like hydraulic thing.

biology of placentation and, you know, parturition and so on. And so, you know, I think feminism is, you know, my probably my primary commitment. I am feminist in a sense, you know, to my very bone. I am sort of stuck here in this field called feminism. I love the, you know, my feminists.

comrades and ancestors, the ones I can find in the archive and the ones that, you know, of whom I can only find traces. And in order to, you know, attempt to revive, this is part of my intent, right? An erotics of anti-fascist feminism in a moment where actually I think many people are not so aware

identified with the label feminist if they are committed to anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism and queer and trans liberation that the label feminist is actually quite sort of unexciting for some people I think in a sense I'm actually wanting it to get

hot again. This is a terrain that I think is deeply important to anti-fascism. Feminism is a great name from my point of view, being a feminist of the Cathy Weeks School of Feminism, for the adequately radical critique of capital that tells us about the ruse of work that tells us how to be

you know, rejecting of capital's ruse that dignified human life inheres in the production of Surplus Valley. This is sort of feminism that gives us the anti-work politics I insist upon in all of my writing, really. And so I'm also saying, you know, comrade feminisms, let's find one another and figure out how to be seductive and appealing and magnetic and

and breathe well, holding on to one another, you know, tenderly, in part because we are not afraid or confused or hesitant to draw the lines of enmity that so obviously need to be drawn and which nonetheless, I think the feminist-ness of the people on the other side of the barricades, whether they're TERFs or FEMO nationalists or what have you, you know, that gives us pause as though it's not...

It's not okay, you know, to call an echt feminist one's enemy, you know. And your love for feminism, as you say, is like really obvious throughout the book. And you begin in the introduction by saying precisely this, that one of the things about enemy feminisms like TERFs is that they're like deeply anti-utopian. So they're not willing to get creative or, you know,

think expansively about what feminism is, but are rather really attached to the structures of domination in our society today. And thank you for giving such a full-fledged answer to your motivations in writing this book. It's really important. And going into the content of the book, I want to ask that as you wrote your conclusion, did

The book in many ways serves as a crucial resource, a mini encyclopedia of cis feminism, as you say. One of the key contentions as we read through this problematic history and present is that we cannot disavow feminist alliances

with fascism, racism, transphobia, and colonialism as being antithetical to feminism or anti-feminist, which all of us, myself included, are often tempted to do by calling girlbosses or anti-sex feminists not really feminists.

And this book says, actually, they are. And it has been clear throughout the Western canon. This is not just limited to the West, but any hierarchical, socially stratified society seems to produce exclusionary feminisms. Some feminists who call out Western capitalist feminism, for instance, are proponents of casteist and elitist visions of feminism themselves, like in South Asia.

So the layers really build up. And here I want to ask you, what makes an enemy feminism feminist?

Great. Yeah, I mean, I have a pretty bargain basement sort of definition of what counts as feminist. I think I worked out for myself that it's a woman-led vindication of women against some kind of definition of patriarchy. I think you have to have those three sort of components in order to catch in your net people like...

you know, I don't know, pro-life feminists, but to exclude trad wives, right? The trad wife movement might say, I think it does say that it's a woman led vindication of women because they think women's best interests matter.

in home, you know, the particular version of homemaking that they, but then there is no against some kind of definition of patriarchy there, right? The Tradwife movement has no definition of patriarchy that it is fighting. It's simply vindictive. So this gives us a way of delineating, you know, or differentiating between feelings

female anti-feminism, you know, so Phyllis Schlafly and so on, and right-wing feminism, a category which prominent commentators today continue to insist cannot exist, right? There

there is no such thing as a right-wing feminist is an opinion that gets op-edded today quite vociferously from certain quarters of feminism. I completely disagree. I think I have the receipts to this end. I think what I'm also doing, Stuti, is a little bit

You know, it's a wrestling with the grammar that we use to talk about problematic or white, etc. Or, you know, the adjectives, the epithets have obviously abounded in critical theory, you know, corporate feminism, governance, feminism, girl boss, neoliberalism, neoliberal feminism, etc.,

Lean in feminism. We know that there are many different flavors, but I think there is a way in which the grammar tends to be one of association. I believe I fall into it too. I believe you just said...

I can't, allied with, you know, basically we're stuck in this way of walking that's like, okay, these, these feminisms are in bed with being weaponized by, instrumentalized by, you know, duped into, you know, co-opted, et cetera. And there's always this linking. Paradoxically, I wonder if there's not a slightly anti-feminist epistemic sort of structure to that, right?

Can the feminism itself not be the main thing? Like, you know, can it not already have a fully formed worldview, an entire kind of theory, an account of the body, of race, of class, you know, of the world, which means that in a sense, you know, we might consider that other forms of domination, practice, movement,

ideology ally themselves with the feminism as it were, right? But I'm not sure that's satisfactory either.

I'm not saying this is achieved in my book, but I'm trying to show, in a sense, the way that feminism is a bit player, even in the minds of passionate feminists, in the sense that we don't give feminism credit for having blood on its hands. It's a significant historical force. How could it not work?

be pervaded by particular forms of bourgeois racializing and class kind of content coding given that feminists

Feminism was forged in the crucible of capital accumulation and, you know, combined and uneven development and imperialism and so on, right? It doesn't actually make sense. But I nonetheless think that we sort of quite unhistorically

imagine that feminism is the good thread, the sort of a pure or innocent or progressive or well-meaning thread rather than the fully fledged program or movement or many centuries long revolution in social relations that I think it's actually epistemically more feminist to regard it as. So as

As my student at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Josie, put it very succinctly one time when we were grappling with this grammatical kind of problem. We are looking at the times when feminism was racism, right? So it wasn't just like allied with racism or wasn't just racist, but literally sexist.

was a fully fledged racism because it is a racialized account of the world that talks about gender, but is also, you know, I guess I reframe this at one point in the book, I think I say that racism often is a patriarchal form of feminism.

Yeah, have I answered that question? Yeah, absolutely.

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like there's a tendency to when something in the past is problematic to claim that it's anachronistic to put today's sort of criteria on Mary Wollstonecraft or someone like that because she's coming out of her own context and she's coming out of her own milieu. But what your book makes really clear is that

is that we have to not expect it to be any different because that is who she was and that's what her work was. And it has a legacy inside feminism, even today, as we understand it today.

am I getting that right or yes I think that's well you know I'm conscious of the way that a certain defensiveness creeps into my voice you know I'm not sort of putting Mary Wilsard Craft in a bin labeled enemies you know the book is not a category game it's not attack

a taxonomy game. It's certainly not trying to provide a list of, you know, individuals that go beyond a certain pale. This is in fact, you know, the point. It's much, much messier than that. Impurity is the point, you know,

I think a toleration, an embrace even of impurity is extremely important to anti-fascist politics, right? So if I were indeed trying to purify, you know, comrade feminism of all, you know, wrong steps, I would be repeating the purgative and purifying move that I'm criticizing in the

the enemy ideologies that I enumerate. And in a sense, that's the perhaps unsatisfying kind of element for people who would like clarity and guidance on, you know, where exactly a line is crossed. The problem is, politics is, I would submit, the

the process of collectively figuring out where those lines are, you know, drawing them collectively, contingently over and over again, and then holding those lines as well. Right. Regardless of, in a sense, um,

you know, who is on the other side of the barricade in a particular moment, you know. So, you know, this is an anti-fascist strategy intervention, I hope, in a sense. And I, so Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, certainly gives us so many wonderful tools. And, you know, I'm not sort of rejecting the gratitude I was inculcated in as a

you know, a middle-class white European girl, um, that, you know, the gratitude one feels for, um, or is encouraged to feel, you know, for certain canonical figures. I'm not, I'm not repudiating that. Um, what is interesting though, is the, um, the, the,

the approach to history that comes up in these critical conversations. So, you know, somehow it falls away that Mary Wollstonecraft was writing at the apogee of the Haitian revolution, you know, where they're not

in fact, you know, anti-colonial revolutionary feminisms in the world in the moment where she was writing. This is ridiculous, right? It's not... There were always, in a sense, two wolves within feminisms. You know, there were always...

an under commons of feminism. You can see the traces of them in a sense in the canonical writings. And so we might not be able to claim them by name as our sort of ancestor, that chosen ancestors, but we can see that there was always a kind of care communizing anti-fascist sort of proposition from below because

because many of the enemy feminist formations are so obviously trying to counter-revolutionarily sort of contain or, you know, suppress them. So, you know, sure, let's be, you know, historically attentive to context and, you know, so on. But I, you know, I think it's,

I think it's a strange thing, the way that the conversation about liberal canonical figures like Susan B. Anthony, you know, with her extraordinarily sort of racist commitments, you know, gets played out in the liberal culture sphere, in the New York Times, in the Guardian and so on, in such a way we can, as feminists, as, you know, feminists at the end of history and the sort of we are all feminists now kind of sense that

um a liberal historian called elizabeth cobb uh talks about you know we can we can sort of wring our hands and say yes that was oh it was very bad you know these racist things that susan b anthony did and then we sort of very swiftly move on to sort of the well she was of her time and you know now we enlarge the tent we we have intersectionality now um and you know

we kind of do a little bit of hand wringing and then a premature gesture of recuperation which means that feminism remains the good object and Susan B. Anthony also of course remains part of feminism you know it's never countenance that somehow she was not

doing feminism even though you know um at the same time that the the purgative approach is sort of feminism has to be anti-racist um you know anti-elitist anti-ableist and you know in order to count in order to count uh but i you know so when it comes to these liberal canonical figures that's how the conversation goes it's it kind of papers over slight contradictions in its um mechanism with with um

with hand-wringing and good faith or whatever, protestations of good faith. And then, you know, when you bring up other people like the first bishop, you know, as a woman to be ordained in the United States, who was a major player, right, in suffrage activism and a great...

and publisher of the works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and so on. Where is that conversation, right? Because that person was a Klan theologian, you know, and she cannot be included on the feminist listicles, even though her sort of concrete achievements when it comes to things like the Equal Rights Amendment and so on are substantial and comparable, you know, to the ones that we can see

treat in this recuperative way, you know, like Stanton and Anthony. And so when you go into the archive and you find the actual, you know, black blouse, as in black shirted, card carrying fascist, you know, KKK promoting, you know, and organizing, or, you know, a

What have you. These figures that do not appear on the feminist listicles ever. It becomes very clear that in order to exclude them from bona fide real feminism, you would have to make an incision that would also exclude all of our, you know, canonical figures.

And that's not something I'm saying means we should, you know, we should do that. I'm just saying like, you know, the legacy is this complex, right? It is more difficult to swallow than we have hitherto been able to talk about in the conversation about white feminism that peaked around 2021, right? It's not simply some...

some little racist missteps. It's some serious kind of commitments to fascism. So, you know, soi-disant self-described fascism, for example, it's not simply, you know, a metaphor to call some feminisms fascist. At key points in the last two centuries in the West, feminism has been a real offer and a real tool

proposition within fascist organizations and parties. Many articulations of the corporate state were presenting themselves as the next revolutionary stage in the militant women's revolution whose ground had been laid in the early, in the 1910s. And yes, this is what I go into in the

The chapter about the estuary that formed between the British Union of Fascists and the WSPU, the Women's Social and Political Union, the suffragette paramilitary in the United Kingdom, as you know. Which is totally fascinating and really unexpected. Like I didn't expect the chapter on feminist fascists to be about ex-suffragettes. And it was, it's just a whole ride and very important chapter.

to tell the story. And it also gives different meaning to the word feminazi, which is used by like, by like the right wing to denigrate feminists. But while we're talking about this, I want to bring us back to Mary Wollstonecraft and her use of

the metaphor of slavery, which you discuss in the first chapter. And in the very first chapter, you write about the birth of the Anglophone feminist canon with Mary Wollstonecraft with a vindication of the rights of women. You point out the pervasive and ill thought through a metaphor of slavery through which she makes her case. That white women's position in society can be likened to slavery when women

I mean, that's not the case and does not consider white women's position vis-a-vis empire. It's not merely anachronistic to sit with these assertions when this kind of framing has harmful consequences to this day. Could you explain a bit about this notion of the enslaved white woman and what work it was doing back then for feminists?

Yes. Well, perhaps it's worth kind of saying first that the language of enslavement and slavery just permeates, you know, the entire history of Western going to today, right? I think it was just a few years ago that

there was a sign at a slut walk that said, you know, woman is the N word of the world. This, in a sense, is the same kind of statement, you know, that Mary Wollstonecraft was making so provocatively and, you know, strategically, kind of brilliantly, as many people say, you know, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. And, you know, it's also the case that just

a couple of decades ago, there were still metaphors of slavery in certain kinds of dominance, feminism. Andrea Dworkin uses the word very freely. There's all kinds of ways in which it has been reached for as a metaphor. And some of these, I think, are, let's say, much less problematic than others. The core of

of the move, however, is this very deliberate sort of attempt to, I think it's fair to say, sort of usurp the movement energy of abolitionism on the global stage for the bourgeois wife. So there's this completely unashamed

kind of argument that um people have cared so much and gone door knocking and letter writing and sugar boycotting and uh petitioning so many years you know for the enslaved male african in shackles um

And, but, you know, what about, you know, the woman? What about the, and she is always, you know, tacitly here, racialized because, you know, the slave is also racialized. No, sorry, it's also gendered is what I should have said. And, you know, it's a painful thing.

thing about the origin of Western feminism, that it feels the need and makes this strategic choice so much, so deeply, you know, to say, look,

there is an even more innocent, more suffering, more worthwhile, more worthy of your attention slave in your very home, gentlemen, right? You care about the shackles on the plantation African. How could you have overlooked the suffering slave in your very own bed at home?

And this was a shock kind of tactic, but it also really informs the affective kind of structure of early colonial imperial Western feminism. This idea that it's a zero-sum game and essentially a competition. And in much of Stanton and Antony's writing, you can then see the kind

of a certain kind of resentment and jealousy around the slowness of the world to address the woman's cause and enfranchise property owning, educated ladies like themselves in comparison to the same society's ability to address women.

you know, the disenfranchisement of, you know, Africans in the United States, right? So, yeah, people descended from captivity. And, you know, these debates have been much aired, as I said, in this liberal conversation around white feminism, plenty of, you know, good analyses have been sort of recirculated, re-articulated around, you know, what

what Frederick Douglass and others kind of said, um, as committed feminists in these moments, you know, Francis Harper and others, um, kind of saying, well, you know, it just literally is more important, um, for people who have been commodities, you know, um, to, to, to receive political, uh, relief and, uh,

and action than it is for property owning white ladies to receive the ballot. You know, this is something that is supposedly kind of controversial in that moment, but it so obviously is not controversial, right? It's like, you know, when, what does Douglas say, you know, when women, because she is woman,

you know is hounded is hung from lampposts is you know torn from her children I mean I'm paraphrasing this very famous you know or you know always quoted kind of speech you know then she will have a need for the ballot equal to that of the negro right um so it's it's it's sort of simultaneously true that there were these kind of historic uh conjunctures where uh the the issue was uh sort of uh

you know, driven into opposition, but, you know, there at the same time always being these forms of feminism that understand that, you know, that the ballot is not the point anyway, right? That like liberation is not going to come via the state, via representation, you know, that there are these, you know, material issues

care-based spheres of feminist struggle that matter more and which, you know, so, you know, as I say, in feminism, there are two wolves. There are these kinds of definitions that come down to us from,

you know, Wollstonecraft about what feminism is, but at the same time, there is a completely other definition that gets buried. And in my previous work about family abolition, I'm using this memory hold definition, right, in a sense, from Charles Fourier, the inventor of the

the term feminism who says that feminism is the insurgency of women and children, um, against the privatization of care against the private nuclear household against the family, you know, feminism for me is, uh, family abolitionism is the communization of care. Um, and, and it comes with a sort of, uh, you know, a horizon of gender abundance and, um,

you know, post work. But of course, Wollstonecraft's definition is the one that we tend to operate with, which is about, for her, elevating mother within the private nuclear household to a condition of enlightenment,

uh humanness right rationality a sort of proprietary relation to the children in that household and therefore also the nation's future and the uh fourteens of the british empire um and nothing else really has to change it seems you know the the the the uh cell uh the basic kind of um

you know, foundational cell of society doesn't have to be exploded, you know, for Wollstonecraft. Things can sort of be equalized within the family. And that seems like it's probably, in a sense, good enough to count as feminism. And so these are completely antagonistic definitions. They're saying completely different things about what women is and might be or become. They're operating on individuality.

entirely different spheres, right? So how is it that the very opening words, and both of them are colonial, neither, you know, neither, I'm not saying Fourier and his definition of feminism is somehow pure or perfect. It's completely problematic as well. But, you know, the opening words of even just Western colonial feminism are

are at odds with each other, not slightly different, not variations on a theme, literally opposites, right? And that's kind of the way we have to think feminism is what I'm saying in this book, right? We have to be able to think of feminism as capacious enough to contain within itself its own enemies, right?

And that's really crazy, but also fascinating. And while we're talking about the way in which U.S. and U.K. early feminists used...

used abolitionist rhetoric what you you term it like pseudo-abolitionist or pseudo-abolitionism in the second chapter and regarding like frederick douglas you say that sojourner truth for example backed douglas um that time at during his speech for the votes for um

black men. And it's the chapter in which you're discussing this kind of anti-anti-racist abolitionism, which is kind of, it's kind of difficult to get a grasp of in our head. So when we're saying anti-anti-racist abolitionism, it is the pseudo abolitionism of opportunistically, I guess, supporting, supporting

abolition in as much as it suits white feminism at the time or what do you mean when you say anti-anti-racist abolitionism yeah i mean in a sense this is not controversial at all within the historical field of study of this era right many um people who wanted to uh quote unquote abolish although i think what the better word here would would be is is sort of um uh

you know, criminalize or illegalize slavery. You know, they were not motivated by universalist anti-racist commitment. This is just not actually very controversial, right? You could be against slavery and not be against slavery.

racial hierarchy you know in fact most most abolitionists in the you know most white abolitionists were not fundamentally against um racial hierarchy and white supremacy they were just against slavery um that's what that's all that that's all that that means of course you know uh getting really into this is is quite useful i think um uh because of the ways in which um

you know, it allows us to see inheritances in logic, you know, that tacitly constructs a white subject for feminism, but also a colonial underclassed one, you know, so this much, you know, liberation is desirable, but no more, you know. And also as a kind of almost like concierge-ist, like,

kind of service mentality where feminism is a handmaiden in someone else's struggle as a nice kind of beneficent you know sort of action but isn't implicated itself right the

So abolition is much more than prohibition for me, right? And for many theorists of abolition, it's not about getting rid of a particular institution per se, although it is about that. It's actually about transforming the world such that the thing that the

in question is, you know, purporting to deliver is actually delivered, right? So that, you know, the system of the slave economy, you know, was ordering the human, you know, and it was at this moment where humanist ideology is efflorescing, you know, about the brotherhood of man,

that there are people freeing themselves from enslavement and saying, you know, nice humanism you've got there, bro. In theory, what if it were, you know, actualized through the sort of turning inside out of this entire society? And it's not finished, this project, right? Illegalizing slavery didn't abolish the world in which slavery is at the core of so many cultures.

still in its... Of course, this is not what the government says in the US right now about the relevance of slavery. People want to say that there's no relevance to slavery anymore. But abolitionists say that slavery has not really ultimately been abolished yet. That remains actually... And the other abolitionists are intertwined with this. Prison and police abolitionists

abolition are sort of are similar moves, even to talk about abolition is to say, what do prisons and the police offer us or supposedly hold out to us? What is the need that they kind of capitalize on that is real human need? It's a sort of need for safety and justice. And so abolition is the building of the world

and the infrastructures and social relations that instantiate something like real justice, something like real safety. And when it comes to the family and care, you know, there's something about unconditional belonging, unconditional freedom,

you know, heldness that the family holds out to us as a promise. And it doesn't deliver that, you know, so care communization or family abolition is about figuring out concretely and materially what sorts of practices, logics, institutions, and, and, and, you know, conditions of possibility, you know, are,

would be relevant around a universal cared forness, you know. So that's kind of what I'm talking about when I when I'm talking about abolition. And very evidently, many early feminisms were OK with a sort of prohibition of slavery, but not in the continuation of the, you know, world ending in a sense project of abolition. Yeah.

And yet there's also a consistent threat of revisionism throughout the different sort of enemy feminist chapters that you go through, including beginning with the case of Sojourner Truth, where there's a very careful revising of her image to be more...

effective at the time but there's also later on when we're talking about fascist feminisms or the suffragettes before that um there's a cleaning and a um revisionist way in which for example suffragettes become kind of a mary poppins type um devoid of armed resistance and fascism uh given all of this and the later chapters where you're discussing the civilizing mission um

feminist fascists and kind of police women, what is the relationship between feminism and violence in terms of colonial violence, vigilantism, and

armed resistance. These are all the threads that kind of come together in those chapters. And also, obviously, carceralism. But it begins first with this relationship to violence. Yeah, that's a really well-formulated question. And it also immediately makes me think of our present context where a certain kind of Zionist feminist violence is really romanticized in the

the mediations of certain kinds of, um,

pro-genocide, basically, or genocide apologistic discourses, social media narratives where the sort of innocence of the settler refracted through narratives about debunked reports about sexual violence committed by the native on the settler and gendered violence is sort of

all the time into a jouissance of cruelty where the, you know, the fascistic sort of feminist violence of an IDF soldier in uniform, you know, a blonde in many cases, you know,

you know, uniformed, quote unquote, lioness of the desert or Zioness is a word that has been coined as well to talk about this kind of Wonder Woman, you know, persona that Israeli sort of Zionist violence takes on when it is kind of brutalized.

presented as feminist because civilizing, because enlightened, because, you know, rationalized in the logic of the lynch mob, really against the barbaric rapist, you know, the indigenous insurgent Muslim Palestinian. And so, you know, I'm thinking about how there is this

this very fascinating kind of, uh, logic of, uh, violence, uh, enablement, violence, kind of, uh, um,

incitement in the very feminist logic that you find in the civilizer chapter, the prohibitionist chapter, the KKK feminist chapter, the black shirt and the policewoman chapter around female inherent nonviolence. And the contradictions sort of make themselves known. They sort of like

just spring open without seemingly of their own you know design like the the civilizer chapter is particularly interesting for me when I found this biography this book about May French Sheldon by Tracy Boisseau I was I was astonished by the neatness of this story about one of

US feminism's very first pinups and celebrities, you know, May French Sheldon, the Lady Stanley, who went on a safari in Kenya and Tanzania to demonstrate that colonizing could be done much better if it was done feministly by a woman, you know, because it would shed so much less blood. And this, by the way, was also connected with logics of capitalist efficiency.

You know, business interests were being represented by the feminist mode of colonizing. And it was a sort of scientific enterprise as well to show how costs could be cut and image could be burnished.

you know, for the empire. Um, and, you know, Mae French Sheldon is, you know, going to Africa to show that you can, you know, dominate and discipline, um, authoritatively, uh, uh,

you know, many African porters who she hired. Although she was fascinatingly also described as traveling quote unquote alone and unescorted, you know, kind of hilarious, kind of, you know, very reminiscent of Daenerys Targaryen sort of making her way through Essos in Game of Thrones, you know. But she, she goes again and she,

is a paid apologist for genocide for Leopold of the Congo, right? And even in the first trip she makes...

you know, it turns out that this kind of bloodless, you know, almost eugenic kind of inspirational mode of getting people to do what you want, like through the radiant force of your womanly virtue rather than through violence, you know, is completely false anyway. She's sort of hitting her porters. She's chopping plums.

bits off bodies in order to get the anklets. It's a gruesome tale and it's extremely neat almost in terms of how

how the feminist insistence on a sort of inherent nonviolence of woman and womanhood kind of splits apart and reveals a will to violence kind of that's at the core of itself, you know. And the black shirt to skip forward, you know, suffragettes, the ex-suffragettes who embraced the British Union and fascists were, you know,

there's so much to say here about the liberal historiographic kind of allergy to really digging into this and the a priori, you know, an anxious, very anxious kind of starting point that some scholars adopt where by definition, there can be no such doctrinal position as fascist feminism or feminist fascism. And that's

you know, that's kind of rather alarmingly kind of like a starting point, you know, rather than something that they allow themselves to entertain and figure out. So in a sense, the book is sort of

in many cases kind of militating against itself finding anything out, right? And it's like, oh, at most we can find feminine fascisms or fascist femininities, you know. But the case actually is that a hell of a lot of bombing has been edited out of suffragist history in the UK context. Sorry, one second, Stuti. You've...

You've pretty much answered what was going to be my next question, which is linked to feminist militarism from the policewomen like Kamala Harris to imperial first ladies like Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, all the way to female IDF soldiers embodied by Gal Gadot, all bringing a fortress of enemy feminisms forward.

Whereas you say any form of subaltern solidarity goes to die, the contemporary iterations of warmongering, militaristic, genocidal feminists, as you just elaborated on, follow so clearly as legacies of early feminist fascists and colonizers you write about in the book, to the extent that one of the key justifications, as we just said, for the genocide in Gaza is on the false.

of avenging mass rape and sexual assault. Could you elaborate a bit about what makes this, what has allowed this militarism to persist now? Yes. I mean, there's an entire apparatus of kind of governance feminism. There's a great cluster right now called governing feminism.

feminist piece talking about a book that digs into some of this. There's such a thing as the Hillary doctrine, I believe, which has presented geopolitical security as a feminist matter. There's so much to say about femo-nationalism, which is the kind of repackaging of

and Sarah Farris is the coiner of this term, um, a very ancient really, uh, uh, narratives about border security, you know, xenophobic narratives about, um, uh, national harmony, um, and gender equality, um, you know, in a mode where, uh, labor markets are being structured, uh,

in the EU for Faris, this is her main example, different countries in the EU, according to the notion that the sort of sexually threatening migrant non-white male needs to be sort of

rendered docile, educated, tamed, using the females of that same population to achieve this end by kind of having a two-tier sort of migration regime where low-paid care workers

sector employment is made available alongside a lot of kind of uh welcome to belgium or welcome to germany kind of indoctrination um uh you know when it comes to to the sort of sisters uh nieces wives mothers etc etc uh of of the men who are figured simultaneously as kind of uh

of the feminist state, right? How does this happen? It's too big of a question, but I think, you know, there was some sense among scholars that the feminationalism framing might have died down. It belonged to the war on terror moment. People thought perhaps it was no longer relevant. And then in the context of the genocide's acceleration,

in Palestine, it became so extremely relevant again. You know, I think it's always lurking, this idea. And it does, I do think it's useful for anti-fascists today to know that it goes back very far. You know, there was a paradoxical kind of narrative that early colonial leaders

feminists used to make about their specific ethnos, right? The Anglo-Saxon or whatever, or the Germanic, or interestingly, the ethnically defined, you know, and this is nonsensical, but, you know, Jew, right? As something that has a

a past of gender equality that colonial projects will help return the population to. So, you know, this was an ingenious kind of move where, you know, the gentlemen of the given civilization were being persuaded that actually feminism was going to return and the, you know, the Anglo-Saxon or whatever, you know,

to its true destiny because its primordial destiny was one of like gender harmony and equality and so feminism wasn't going to mess with colonialism and empire but was going to kind of actualize something really important about the racial horizon written in the stars and then so Zionists very early 19th century Zionists

copied this and so we can really see how feminism isn't just a kind of partner or accessory to colonial endeavor but actually is one of its forms of appearance much as feminism has taken the form of appearance of fascism in certain moments in time. And that can be so central to mass devastation and genocide like we're seeing today.

And in the second half of your book, you move on to investigate more contemporary enemy feminisms who are in some ways the descendants of feminists discussed earlier. In chapter eight, you discuss the anti-sex and anti-porn feminists of the late 70s and 1980s at a time where the second wave was plateauing and turning legit.

losing its earlier radical utopian and generative criticism of patriarchy in favor of legalistic and carceral modes of both moral and literal policing, not far from the likes of earlier iterations that we saw in the first wave.

all through the guise of being anti-objectification or anti-exploitation. The most iconic second wave feminists here involve Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who have made really important contributions to second wave feminism, but both of whom hold deeply anti-sex convictions, which at one point you refer to as Dworkinism. It emerges that there is something about anti-sex feminism that is a shortcut to feminism.

the right in a way, probably because of the carceralism. Who were the anti-porn, anti-sex feminists and what is it that is harmful about their politics?

Well, you know, the nuance here falls out a little bit when we frame it as anti-sex, right? You know, Dworkin and McKinnon would both say that they're not anti-sex. And I don't know, I believe them in a sense. But what I would say that my enmity vis-a-vis their project is, you know, it's a specific case I hope I've laid out convincingly. I'm talking about, you know,

a pessimism, a counter-revolution in women's liberation that they embody and espouse. And in the case of Dworkin, you can see a very explicit turn away from utopianism in her thought, right? She says at the very early seventies, you know, I used to be a hopeful radical. Now I see what my dreams have come to, pornography, right? And so her, you know,

personal investment in many different liberation kinds of movements and struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and

and fascism get reduced to a politics, and I think she is explicit about this, of essentially like securitization for women. It's a cutting off of one arm of feminism's vitally important dialectic that was articulated by the sex radicals as pleasure and danger, right? Without sort of the dialectic that feminism requires in order to not, I think, become

becomes something potentially very dangerous. You need both the element of feminism that struggles for forms of women's autonomy and the element that struggles for something like, you know, a supersession of the sex distinction itself or, you know, gender abolition or abundance to the extent that those two things might look different, which I'm not sure they would. But, you know, so basically, you know,

autonomy and abolition something like that you know um say you know that safety is not to be sniffed at it's an extreme you know the uh you know so much of what dorkin you know enumerates about the um you know the epidemic kind of like you know holocaust-like conditions of sexual violence so you know um that i stress these same things right in abolish the family you know the the the

The way that sexual abuse is woven through our society is something I, too, feel hysterical about. And yet, the sex radical analysis, socialist, feminist, often lesbian analysis, is that if feminism gives up the dedication to

to pleasure, to what Ellen Willis and Linda Gordon called seeking ecstasy on the battlefield, as in it is a battlefield. It is a really dangerous situation that women find themselves in. And yet they insist on seeking ecstasy there anyway. You know, then what we have is not something liberatory, but a sort of fortress, like a sort of a very safe sort of

sell for women to retreat to a separatist analysis. I call this femo-pessimism. Dworkin had a very interesting biography that I also discuss in an essay called Battlefield Ecstasies where her original

sex radicalism, erotic utopianism, and lived experience as a sex worker gets repudiated wholesale after her experience of marriage. And so having been someone who really very appetitively enjoys, you know,

all different kinds of quite kinky sex including hard cocks and being fucked hard she then says that feminism and feminist sexuality requires a soft penis you know this kind of happens over the course of a couple of years she she makes a complete sort of about turn on this point right um and and so i do talk in my chapter on on on porno phobia which is by the way porne in the sense of

the whore, right? The depiction of the lives of whores, not simply what we currently refer to as pornography. You know, I talk about what a severe mistake it is to impute something oppressive to erectile tissue, right? And I talk about the analysis that Beanie Adamshack, the German trans feminist, gives us called Circlusion, which is the antonym of the

of penetration seen from the sort of, in a sense, the opposite standpoint, the standpoint of the, um,

you know, the, the, the, the ring of the finger, you know, uh, secluding the shaft, uh, or, or the, the mouth secluding the nipple or, you know, the, the, the anus, the anal pad, the sphincter, the, uh, the colon, the, the vulva, the vagina secluding, you know, the, the, the, the finger or the dildo or the tongue or the cock or whatever. And, and, and this restores the labor of the fuck E, uh,

to uh you know sexuality's history and um enables us to think about you know women as uh yes you know horny and uh dedicated to their own uh collective uh ecstatic uh transformation right which which really falls out i think of the um

the McDorkinist sort of program, uh, which sees it, I think it's fair to say at best trivial, um, and at worst a kind of, uh, betrayal, uh, of women's dignity, uh, to, to, to, to trifle with, uh, such things as, um, you know, sex while the bodies of women are piling up, you know, um, and,

So I do think it's important to kind of escalate rather than de-escalate the sex wars. There's a lot of cries contemporarily for a sort of reconciliation. I don't think that's right. You know, I think it throws sex workers down.

for Felix freaks under the bus, you know, to imagine that there can be some kind of conciliation in this particular division. And I also think it's quite relevant that Dworkin's thought tended in an extremely, you know, Zionist direction. At the end of her life, she has a book called Scapegoat, which

in which she finally really says what she thinks women should do, you know, which many of the books prior to that don't really do, right? They don't say what feminism should entail in terms of action. And Scapegoat is a book that looks at the Shoah and looks at the Nakba and

refuses to accept that there might be a genuine comparison to be made between these two holocausts and says that although the Zionist violence against Palestinians is quite severe and serious, it is justified in the way that a woman killing her rapist is justified. It

It's an astonishing, like a blood chilling argument. And she says that what women collectively must do, given the intensity of patriarchy, its immovability in her analysis, is basically Israel for women. And she's kind of serious. She doesn't go into details because it would be absurd to attempt to do so. But she says that women should do woman Israel, as in land and an army where, you know, I

I suppose the rest, which means men, can't own property and are in a sort of apartheid situation. And it's obviously...

memory hold and left out of the Dworkin revival that this is one book she wrote. But I think it's her magnum opus. It's the one that has the most scholarly references. It's the longest. You know, it seems rather relevant to me that this is the political sort of telos of her prior thought. You know, this extraordinarily terrifying proposal, right, that Israel should propose a model for a sort of sexual...

nationalism as a settler colonialism of of womanhood i mean that's a terrifying logical end point um but uh i don't know you also um i want to move to the latter chapters and um

The book ends with a culmination of pinpointing one of the sources of contemporary enemy feminisms, the notion of biological womanhood, which wildly manifests into both turfism and anti-abortion feminism, which was so fascinating to read. I didn't know about pro-life feminism and

at all going into the book. And it's also upsetting to see these forms of feminism because it feels so basic to feminist consciousness, right?

The first thing we learn is that gender is a social construct and gender roles and so on. And yet there is an insistent on radical biological essentialism underpinning the enemy feminisms today. Sorry if I'm using the word too much. How can we attempt to understand the pro-life feminists and TERFs and how much do they have in common? Yeah. I mean, I...

sort of playfully suggest that these two can be understood as a sort of Brexit from feminism. That's actually Sarah Franklin's term. I think it's, you know, basically quite important. And Alexander Stoffel, the theorist, Alex Stoffel, has a serious engagement with not just an analogy here, but the idea that there is real sexual nationalism actually in play. A sort of nationalism of sex, like make sexuation great again. Right.

is the phrase that occurred to me about the fundamental sort of psychical structure of this politics. So, you know, yes, pro-life feminists unfortunately are a thing, as the philosopher Victoria Brown puts it. There is a coherent kind of genealogy of this in Western feminism, and today there are different wings of it, some of them actually using quite anarchistic sort of

anti-carceral abolitionist type language to frame what they do as a sort of liberation of the very most vulnerable in society, which they define as fetuses, right? And then some of the pro-life feminist actors are on the contrary, you know, governance feminists, you know, legal scholars, you

institutionally situated figures like Erika Bakayoki, who was interviewed on the Ezra Klein show and was one of the actors who helped put the final nail in the coffin of Roe versus Wade by bringing together a whole host of women's organizations and feminist individuals to argue that it is against women's dignity and interests to

um, you know, to encourage in any way or to, to normalize or to legitimize abortion. You know, this is sort of the argument that there's something profoundly, you know, uh, anti-female body, you know, about abortion. Um, and so I dig into this and, uh, you know, as, as you know, I am, uh,

I could not be more against this in the most important respects. You know, I've talked about abortion as a question of exit from forced labor, right? I take gestation so seriously in my, in a sense, he-in to gestational labor, full surrogacy now, where I already kind of got into some of these arguments earlier.

where the apparatus we have to work with when we're gestating a fetus is, as it happens currently in terms of our biology, so hostile really to the gestator because the hemichorial placenta is a

you know, it's really designed to keep the fetus alive at all costs over and above the life of the gestating individual, right? That it is actually wild that we can in any sense expect someone to gestate for even a second against their will, right? It's completely bananas to me that that's something that society regularly, routinely expects people to do, you know, to not be...

you know, urgently and resourcefully assisted in exiting the gestational workplace, you know. So that's kind of my starting point. And I don't think at all that in order to have that position, we need to deny that there is a sort of violence involved in the termination of gestating. In a sense, I think it's kind of obvious, right, that

there's a sort of killing involved. Since we take gestating seriously as life-making, as human manufacturing, like,

you know, why are we infantilizing ourselves in a sense by denying when in the liberal approach choice argument, you know, that there's something there that gets extinguished? You know, of course, of course there is. In a sense, I think we could fight better as proponents of reproductive freedom and, you know, gestational decriminalization, gestationalism,

gestational autonomy by ceasing to deny, you know, by dropping this sort of cluster or clump of cells argument, which is, I don't think, a necessary component of insisting that abortion is good, right? That abortion is good for people, good for societies, just good because it's an exit from forced labor.

And I do think it's worth engaging some of the points that the pro-life feminists are sort of monopolizing, you know, because we're seeding the ground, I think, on the left to this counter-revolutionary moment that the TERFs and the pro-life feminists sometimes have really kind of capitalized on where

They position themselves as the custodians of care politics. The self-described reactionary feminist Mary Harrington positions herself as the inheritor of team care throughout history, which goes against team freedom.

And she means liberal feminism when she talks about team freedom. And, you know, I think the serious problem here is that she has somewhat of a point about feminism.

a kernel of this, right? There is a sense in which bourgeois, you know, capitalist liberal feminism has, you know, proposed a girl boss-ish exit from the sphere of life-making, you know, and has acquiesced to the devalorization of life-making in favor of productive endeavor.

And this is disastrous, I think. Feminism should be, I think, given what I've said about it representing the communization of care for me, the project that insists on care being everybody's privilege and responsibility, and that militates very strongly against the idea that dignity, emancipation,

uh success lies somehow quote-unquote outside you know the the merely reproductive um and so it it terrifies me a bit that these um you know cis feminists and um uh pro-forced births uh feminists are part of the scene right now because they're recruiting effectively you know and i think i think uh

a left feminism while it exists everywhere, you know, abolition feminism, trans feminism, you know, mutual aid projects, you know, transformative and reparative justice endeavors, you know, are alive and well. They're not always coalescing into

theoretical and ideological um refutations of these sort of uh reactionary sort of pseudo welfarist arguments that we're increasingly seeing amidst the generalized exodus from the wreckage of liberal feminism where we see these like you know uh pseudo radical you know very understandable impulses towards something more radical like and they kind of often uh

gives us some kind of bubble that then instantly bursts like the take up of 4B, the Korean sort of sex, marriage, dating, childbearing strike in the US where for a moment, you know, everybody was saying that American women were going to respond to the re-election of Donald Trump by doing the Korean 4B sort of heterosexuality strike.

And then that bubble burst. There's also heteropessimism, which is not really an organized politics, but it's a sort of mood. There's tradwifery and the femosphere, you know, so-called Andrew Tate for women, which presents itself, you know, paradoxically at times as a sort of

you know, a pseudo-radical option for women interested in, you know, systemic analyses. And, you know, there, yeah, this so-called sex-based rights or so-called gender-critical efflorescence has been a long time coming. Many of us have been Cassandra's warning that Turf Island

has the capacity to come to America, has the capacity to go global, will indeed furnish the vocabulary, you know, the policy frameworks, the moral alibis for very much non-feminist, you know,

mushrooming of anti-trans annihilationism, you know, and it has come to pass, right? And if anyone has any doubt at this point that self-described radical feminist, I mean, I would argue cultural feminist or female cultural nationalist, you know, in the tradition of the counter-revolution in the 70s against a broadly speaking

trans-inclusive feminism. Figures like J.K. Rowling are their responsibility for what is happening in the United States in this fascist moment, this genocidal

wave of policy and practice targeting trans people, young and old. If there's any doubt that feminism has borne co-responsibility for this, the individuals at the forefront, the most visible in this movement, are not even denying it. They're claiming credit. J.K. Rowling, she still kind of mouths these

you know, overly familiar, should fool nobody sorts of points about how she remains on the left or whatever. It's just that the left has betrayed feminism and Donald Trump has sort of picked up feminism because the left left it on the ground or something like this, you know, and she applauds the executive order, quote unquote, defending women against gender ideology, extremism, you

Not because she is pro-MAGA in her oppression, but because she is a feminist first and foremost. Well, many of us have been extremely clear about the fascistic tenor in anti-trans, so-called, or self-described radical, perhaps better described as cultural feminism, since at least

You know, the mid 70s, Jan Raymond provided, you know, policy services for the American administration to defund trans health care in 1980. You know, there is a long trail here of receipts. And I think it is very important for anti-fascist feminists to be able to fight this, you know, as though it were fascism, because it is.

Thank you so much for such a thorough answer. And it gives us a lot to think about. And to finish off, I just want to ask you, what do you hope to see for feminism today and the future? Well, perhaps I will answer that by also referring to my upcoming book project, which is The Liberation of Children. I'm writing a book about

by that title for Penguin. And I think one of the neglected components of feminist history is this element that has to do with solidarity with children and children's collective autonomy. You know, there's a book by Madeleine Lane McKinley coming out about this year. Several of us in the sort of

trans feminist, Marxist, family abolition milieu attempting to revive care, communisation politics have been, you know, writing and talking about the politics of childhood and children as part of that for many years at this point. But I think in this moment of cis supremacy and cis re-entrenchment sort of

what Emma Heaney tells us is feminism's counter-revolution. You know, cisness for her is best understood that way. And cisness is, for her, a provincialized category, right? We could talk about it as, you know, relevant to, yeah, you know, Mary Wollstonecraft's politics because it's not a term that requires a trans group to define itself against. It's a particular category

understanding of sex that naturalizes its assignation and comes with a whole very useful, I think, analytically sort of set of colonial and racial and ableist baggage sort of coded into it. This moment is perfect, I think, for reviving what some of feminism's earliest formulators insisted is a core element

of resistance under patriarchy and a core kind of category generated by patriarchy, which is the category of the child. So that not just women, but children are the bearers of anti-patriarchal historical, you know,

responsibility. So that's kind of what I would hope for as well in practice, like a taking seriously of children's insurgencies against climate catastrophe, against the carceral imposition of cisness and against the swallowing of the world by the tyranny of work.

And thank you. That's wonderful. I'm very excited for the next book. And Sophie Lewis, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation and for joining me here at the New Books Network. Thank you. If you're interested in learning more, make sure to pick up a copy of Sophie Lewis's book, Enemy Feminisms, Turfs, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Feminism.

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