Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we'll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness. 

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.

About the Author

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.

About the Host 

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory