Enemy Feminisms
TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lively counter-history from "recovering academic" Lewis (Abolish the Family) takes readers on a tour of the dark side of Western feminism. She explores multiple eras and examples of what she dubs "enemy feminism," a reactionary strain of pro-woman politics that Lewis pegs as promoting conservative, racist, capitalist, or puritanical ideology under cover of its supposed radicalism or liberalism. Her archetypes range from the colonial-era "Civilizer" ("well-to-do British ladies" who "actively nurtured an ethos of condescension toward nonwhite women and men at the center of their pro-woman thought") to the modern "Girlboss," encompassing along the way some of the more controversial feminist positions of recent decades, from the anti-porn crusades of second wave feminist Catherine MacKinnon to the "anti-trans" politics of J.K. Rowling. But she also touches on lesser-known figures, like Josephine Butler, a "flawed but often genuinely subversive feminist" of the Victorian era whose attempts to aid sex workers—who were often being trafficked—ended up leading to "reforms" that simply criminalized the women rather than the pimps, and led in some cases—especially in British colonies—to the state simply taking over as pimp. Throughout, Lewis approaches her subject with a biting wit (on Sophia Amoruso, whose 2016 memoir #Girlboss popularized the term: "Amoruso used to have principles. But then she realized: this is no way to live"). This is sure to entertain and provoke.
