Author Sophie Lewis Wants You to Be a Better Feminist

Sophie Lewis, photographed by Christopher Leaman.

If you’re someone who rolls their eyes when you hear people describe feminism as “women supporting women,” then Sophie Lewis’s new book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen & Girlbosses Against Liberation, is for you. As Lewis reveals, not all feminists deserve our support: the history of the movement has instead emerged in a fraught net, entangled with colonial violence, white supremacy, and a will to domination. Did you know, for instance, that many of the first suffragettes went on to campaign for fascism in Britain in the 1920s and 30s? Or that for most of the past decade, the CEOs of major American weapons companies—Northrop Gruman, General Dynamics, the defense arm of Boeing, and Lockheed Martin—have been women? If a more paternalistic view of gender tells us that “woman” is a gentle, innocent, moral category, Lewis demonstrates how this has provided cover for participation in a long history of violence. Modern American and European feminisms, she argues, were forged in, not against, empire.

This admission is not a call to abandon feminism, but to rethink and redouble its liberatory efforts. For Lewis, an independent scholar and the writer of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, this means drawing lines and naming the enemies within. Mapping the history of these antagonizing figures, from slave-owners and cops to transphobes, Lewis shows readers the roots of tradwifery, women for Trump, and other modes of contemporary gender fascism that, in her opinion, must be swiftly and decisively severed. Earlier this year,, she joined me for a conversation about the hope of a feminism that is truly liberatory, rooted in community, deprivatization, and care.

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TIA GLISTA: I thought I’d start off by asking you how your new year is going.

SOPHIE LEWIS: There’s a powerful pull of despair one can succumb to in the current state of the world, with the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the fires engulfing L.A., which some are unhelpfully comparing to the fires in Gaza. While there are similar causes, I’m depressed by the attempt to use the climate change and class-related apocalypse in L.A. to make Westerners empathize with colonized and genocided people elsewhere, despite important differences. I’m trying to stave off political despair by fostering meaningful connections and mutual solidarity with my neighbors.

GLISTA: Those meaningful connections seem more valuable than the metaphorical ones people are making between these issues, which feels coordinated with what you discuss in your book about efforts to shore up white feminism through particular images of events in other parts of the world. I wanted to ask, with the rise in nonfiction trade books by academics, who is the ideal audience or reader for your book Enemy Feminisms?

LEWIS: Which books are coming to mind for you regarding that trend? The ones criticizing white feminism published in 2021? 

GLISTA: I’m thinking more generally about academics writing trade books to bring their ideas to a broader public, like Judith Butler’s recent Who’s Afraid of Gender? It seems many big academic names are doing this, partly due to the market but also to reach different audiences. So who were you writing Enemy Feminisms for?

LEWIS: When you mention market reasons, I think part of that conversation should be about which markets academics should engage with. I’ve never been employed in academia post-PhD. Increasingly, many of us, for economic or voluntary reasons, choose not to pursue academic jobs after completing funding-supported PhDs. It’s interesting to consider how academics writing for low pay in magazines could be seen as scabbing, as they often have stable jobs already, while others are trying to survive solely as writers. We should raise class consciousness among academics writing for low pay and stand in solidarity as freelancers. As for Enemy Feminisms‘ audience, I come from a somewhat scholarly background. But as a writer rather than just an academic researcher, I aim to craft accessible, legible sentences for those without the same scholarly background. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, driven by the desire to persuade and communicate. Enemy Feminisms has the potential to reach and discomfort people, perhaps mainly women, with feminist instincts or disaffiliations. It may be harder for liberal feminists to digest than my previous book Abolish the Family, which, despite its provocative title, people are often willing to engage with once they understand the premises behind communizing care and de-privatizing social reproduction. With Enemy Feminisms, I’ve found people reacting defensively, questioning why I’m focusing on the “bad women” in history even if they existed, as if that’s not the main issue. But that’s precisely why I wrote it, in order to grapple with how the feminist banner has been mobilized for reactionary projects. So while I hope it reaches people of all genders and non-academic backgrounds, Enemy Feminisms will likely be most controversial among liberal feminists. Amidst growing disillusionment with liberal feminism, those still identified with it may be unwilling to hear what needs to be heard.

GLISTA: I was thinking about the concept of innocence, as you discuss how the category of woman has been seen as moral, gentle, and innocent, and how the innocence of women has been a tool of feminization. This attachment to the fantasy of innocence seems heavily mobilized in the historical research you present, but also remains seductive today. What does innocence mean to you and how do you see it circulating?

LEWIS: That’s a brilliant question. We could answer this with reference to the other group that is victimized by patriarchy, which is children. Patriarchy refers to the father’s power over both women and children. In critical childhood studies, we recognize how ascribing innocence is weaponized as a tool of coloniality and labor discipline, constructing a temporal category that prepares us for exploitation by granting a structurally white subject position of benign dependence within the private nuclear household. However, discussions of women’s innocence have somewhat disappeared even as critical child studies conversations have rightly risen. The left needed to courageously respond to the 1980s patriarchal counterrevolution that smeared feminists and gay liberationists as pedophiles, but instead backed off from feminist politics of children. Attempts at solidarity with children now discuss the fascist effects of their innocence, but have forgotten to apply the same lessons to the category of women. We need to link the two.

GLISTA: This also connects to the shamelessness you highlight—even when women complicit in violence are confronted, they pivot to being unapologetic, like the fascist feminists in Britain adopting Mussolini’s “I don’t give a damn” motto. It feels like an effort to maintain an innocent position. This shamelessness resonates with current right-wing politics, but also the language of 2010s pop feminism, which was focused on this idea of the unapologetic badass woman who is not ashamed of anything. Where do you see the language of recent liberal feminisms colliding with the far-right fascist direction we’re heading?

LEWIS: What intuitively comes to mind is the “dark femininity” turn in contemporary Western culture, the so-called “femosphere” as termed by Jilly Boyce Kay. It encompasses various subcultural trends that position themselves heterogeneously in relation to feminism. Trad wives sometimes paradoxically use the feminist label, while the female dating strategy sphere aims to shamelessly lean into the worst aspects of a nihilistic account of the world characterized by “sex war” between men and women, which has been central to fascisms historically alongside racial nationalism. We’re seeing an anti-utopian adoption of certain frames and conceptual structures by women who see liberal feminism offering nothing to those struggling with the wage relation and unchanged division of labor in heterosexual households. Marxist feminists called this the “double shift,” or the extra unwaged labor shift for the feminized once they return from formal workplaces to the “social factory” of the home. Sociologists still find men barely contribute to housework.

GLISTA: Even among my heterosexual friends, most of the women are both primary breadwinners and do all the domestic labor. It’s remarkable.

LEWIS: We need to resist glib responses. Some socialist feminists simply say anti-capitalist revolution is the solution, which I don’t necessarily disagree with, but we have uncertainty within Marxism, anarchism, and communism about how to positively supersede this sexual division of labor. I believe the private nuclear household, the family, is the correct object of antagonism for feminism. But I’m wary of claiming to know exactly what communized care should look like. It’s unsatisfying to pose such high stakes and radical solutions as the only option, as people reasonably want to know what to do with their lives. It’s easy to criticize trad wives and female dating strategy as anti-liberatory for promoting the idea of no trust between humans and brutally commodifying people in terms of market value. This market sexuality discourse is a scary way to think about humanity. At the same time, we must understand the driving forces. Kamala, Hillary and others offer no critique of markets and the economic dependence of heteronormative women. We need to take seriously people’s need for intimacy and a life not brutalized by work, underlining the necessarily collective, communal character of any solution before getting into details. Unfortunately, trends like female dating strategy are also highly individualistic. As you know, there’s not actually a chapter [in the book] on so-called reactionary feminisms of the present. There’s a little bit about certain characters in this world in the pro-life feminism chapter and in the anti-trans chapter. But I concentrate really explicitly and carefully not on female anti-feminism or on organized womanhood that is ambivalent or changeable in its relationship to the banner of feminism. I’m really concentrating on movements that believe consistently that they are feminisms, right? So that’s why you don’t actually get an extended commentary by me on this dark toxic femininity sphere of today.

GLISTA: Right, yes. One of many horrible things that unites so many of the women and women’s groups that are identifying under the banner of feminism in your book is their conviction and their will to authority. They think they know better and know what is right. And this righteousness was very striking. Even as we align ourselves against so many of the things that they stand for, how do we avoid the same kind of righteousness?

LEWIS: Yeah, that’s a brilliant question. This project was originally going to be called The Feminism of Fools. The reason I originally thought that bringing in “fools” in the title would have a double fruitfulness or affordance is because I think foolishness is a very missing and potentially generative category in feminism. As you rightly say, there’s this strangely intense kind of certainty in a lot of feminist formations that I’m looking at, whether you are talking about the West-leading feminists in the late 19th century who went to Kenya to prove that a woman could be a better version of the legendary colonial adventurer Sir Stanley, right? And who was insisting that something very mystical and innate about her femaleness was going to kind of radiate out from her physical person and enable a subjugation of African natives without as much direct violence as the sort of masculine norm in these kinds of safaris and ethnographic incursions into the so-called dark continent.

I think what struck me as potentially interesting about the fool problem is that it’s indicative of what feminists have never been willing to be. These enemy feminists are very not into that, right? Those other “foolish” as in utopian feminisms are my ancestors’ and my forebears’ feminisms. This project is a love letter to feminism, and I’m curious if you feel similarly. The beautiful thing is a sense of collective courage to not know what we might become or indeed what we actually are. There is a certain courage about feminism against cis-ness, as Emma Heaney puts it, that is able to tolerate and embrace a kind of uncertainty about who we collectively, as well as personally, are in gender terms and otherwise. This is why the horizons of abolition are about letting go of the self. And this is also why friendship might also be considered something that has a bitter, painful element in it, because to be a comrade to the people we love in the world is to seek to create a world in which they would necessarily become different people. Sorry, I’m so long-winded.

GLISTA: No, I really love that answer. I love the idea of seeing abolition as creative and generative rather than emptying out. The presence of uncertainty is something that there’s such a low tolerance for right now, and yet that seems to be the seed that is missing. So, towards the end of the book and at different points in our conversation, you’ve mentioned this book as a love letter to feminism and your desire to honor anti-fascist feminists who have been under-recognized. Who should I be looking up on Wikipedia after our conversation?

LEWIS: That’s a beautiful question. I think people should look up Kurdish revolutionary feminism and Jînealogi. I think they should look up the Mães de Manguinhos, which is a project in Argentina where the mothers of police violence victims come together to care for each other and protest for justice. It connects to the struggle to collectively recognize how racialization violates Black mothers’ reproductive freedoms and various statuses as mothers and relates to thinking about “mothering against,” as I’ve called it in the past. Closer to home in North America, I think the most promising sorts of political projects are also around the generative, fruitful intersection of abolishing family policing and abolishing the family. We defend the Black family, for example, against the state or the Indigenous household against the state, and yet we do not romanticize or imagine that the family form is something to be kind of rehabilitated or rescued or defended from criticism simply because it is aspired to or used defensively as a shield by racialized criminalized populations. Sex worker-led movements are often ones to look out for and support your local sex workers, like the Sex Work Against Work initiative. Support your local trans girl underground synthesizing and distributing DIY estrogen or whatever hormone. Those are the things I would highlight.

GLISTA: Great note to end on. Thank you so much for your time.

LEWIS: Well, I’m honored. I hope it’s intelligible and you manage to extract something from my verbosity.

GLISTA: Oh my goodness, yes. You anticipated a lot of my other questions, so I didn’t even have to ask them.

LEWIS: Perfect. Well, it’s been a real pleasure.