“Feminism Is a Sine Qua Non of All Genuinely Liberatory Struggles…”
Interview With Sophie Lewis on Enemy Feminisms
August 26, 2025
Sophie Lewis’s most recent book Enemy Feminisms tells the story of feminist thought through the portraits of some of the most reactionary feminists who ever lived. KKK members, cops, fascists and transphobes fill this narrative of distinct but interlinked oppressive feminisms. Counterintuitively, this account stems from Lewis’s deep attachment to feminist thought and commitment to a feminist politics that calls for the liberation of all. In this interview, Lewis and writer Alva Gotby discuss potential for liberatory feminism and the necessity of a reckoning with reactionary feminist thought.
Sophie Lewis is an exacademic based in Philadelphia, and the author of Abolish the Family (Verso, 2022), Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), and, most recently, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses against Liberation Haymarket, 2025).
Above all, the stakes are the strengthening of left anticapitalist and antifascist feminisms, and thus of antifascism more generally. I also (perhaps counterintuitively) want to provoke attentiveness to the skills of “sisterly” disagreement and resilient comradeship. What I mean by this is: Accepting that some of our enemies are feminists by naming the enmities that have always been part of the feminist landscape contributes something vital to the clarification of what is precisely not enmity—that is to say, dissensus, difference, and comradely tension. To be collectively skillful at antagonism doesn’t just mean having the courage to kick fascists’ teeth in (although this part is important). It also means being quick to drop a grudge, eager to exit enmity when it’s safe to do so, and willing to reenter the space of dissensus. After all, in the long run, we want to lose enemies, not keep them. To this end, rather than fantasizing about ideologically converting what is in their hearts, it probably suffices to strip our enemies of their capacity to do harm! A disempowered enemy is hardly an enemy worth keeping.
My book does not “psychologize” much. Instead, it demands a political reckoning with the instinctive charity with which feminists read feminists. In women’s studies, the prevalent habit is to not count opponents as feminists in an attempt to find a way to be “allowed” to love all feminists simply by excluding those we cannot like. But, obviously, this doesn’t work. For a start, if we deem a commitment to white supremacism as a disqualification from the label “feminist” then a huge swath of the Western feminist canon (including many of the biggest names including, for example, Mrs. Pankhurst or Carrie Chapman Catt) simply disappears. How many canonical figures would remain? Are we prepared to say Susan B. Anthony was not a real feminist? Susan Brownmiller? If not, then, for better and worse, we are stuck with accepting that card-carrying Blackshirts and Klanswomen were also echt feminists—specifically, fascist ones. To be sure, our resistance to this approach flows from correct impulses: namely, to defend feminism, to stymie the erasure of women’s contributions, to refuse the incentives for women to build their careers on tearing one another down, and to resist both “trashing” and “matricidal” intergenerational tendencies within the “sisterhood.” Nonetheless, the effect is actually harmful. We’ve been whitewashing genuine feminist enemies instead of defending our communities against them and have been demobilizing ourselves in the process.
Happily, a corollary of dropping the overly “charitable” approach is the liberating insight that feminism is (or can be) a revolutionary force even if it is not an inherent “good.” And once we get our heads around this, the field reopens, welcomingly, to those of us who have felt alienated from the label, empowering us to inhabit the “eros” of feminism anew and collectively make of feminism a force for care communization. Any given feminism creates definitions of things—like sex, humanity, labor, safety, dignity—and these definitions are capable of being understood as feministly racist, feministly colonial, feministly fascist, and so on. (For instance, some feminisms define dignity in terms of respectability or modesty or maternity, and some feminisms define femaleness in terms derived from colonial sexology.) But this doesn’t have to spook us. We needn’t be disheartened because feminism is also absolutely indispensable to antiracism, anticolonialism, and antifascism. So, I see this engagement as practical and urgent because it’s about interrogating how messy and complicated our current and future battle lines are.
The fascistic logic undergirding the self-ascription of innocence (and we see this most obviously right now in Zionism) first links victimization with righteousness and, from there, generates a mandate of near-total impunity such that, in the fantasy, no illegitimate violence could ever be wrought from this position. Settler-colonialism, of course, creates this kind of essentialized figure, who is always the invaded and never the invader. By the same token, enemy feminisms of different kinds—settler-colonial feminisms included—set up a definition of Woman that can more or less do no wrong. They have envisaged their troops as removed from the realm of monetized sex and even that of productive work—meaning nonprostituted, pure, chaste, emblematic of the “free gifts” of maternal “nature” (as opposed to “artificial,” which is to say, nonheterosexual or “femme”).1I will unpack the anticapitalist freight of this analysis more thoroughly, I hope, in a forthcoming essay collection, Femmephilia. Here, what I write is that enemy feminists have “imagined their central subject as hardworking, nondisabled, healthful, and prosthesis-free—these being the unspoken complements to a womanhood that is life-giving (or at least profamily), economically independent (or at least aspiring), nonviolent (or at least law-abiding), and “self-respecting” (neither a body modifier, nor a bottom).”
Overwhelmingly, as you say, the figuration has been white. I explore the late nineteenth-century suffragist “White Queen” on the imperial frontier, the Anglo-Saxon racial avatar of the “New Model Englishwoman” going abroad to clean up the colonies, and the eugenic (or even, literally, national-socialist) fantasy of the uniformed early twentieth-century policewoman of “good breeding.” But one of the interesting features of my two-hundred year history is the emergence of twenty-first century fascist feminisms whose faces, while bourgeois, aren’t necessarily white anymore. In my “Femonationalism” chapter, I get deep into the example of the Black Somali-American “occidentalist” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is both a self-described “liberal feminist” and an overt Islamophobic annihilationist. In my chapter on “KKK Feminism” (an improbable phrase, I grant, but one that is amply justified by the record of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan), I draw links to Antonia Okafor, the Nigerian-American self-described feminist who is both an ambassador for Turning Point USA and the National Director of Women’s Outreach for the Gun Owners of America. Under certain conditions, nonwhite women can partake in the wages of the trope theorized by Jessie Daniels as “nice white ladies.”2Jessie Daniels, Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (New York: Seal Press, 2021). In line with the feminist prolynching advocacy of figures like the temperance leader Frances Willard (and first ordained female bishop in the United States, Alma White), Okafor makes it clear that the supposedly “defensive” firepower she champions is to be placed in the hands of a nationalist sexual elite and used on depraved racialized others. Not unrelatedly, there are a small handful of nonwhite antitrans “sex-based rights” activists in the world right now (for example, the lawyer Allison Bailey in the United Kingdom) who base their feminist cissexism in a version of womanhood that, while structurally still colonial, evidently allows for multiracial buy-in.
On that note, I would be remiss not to mention that I borrow from and build on Emma Heaney’s argument that this figure of innocence, this ideal womanhood you are asking about, is fundamentally a construct of the ideology of cisness—that is, the naturalization of assigned sex.3Emma Heaney and Sophie Lewis, “On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie,” Pinko, February 25, 2025, https://www.pinko.online/on-the-cisness-of-the-bourgeoisie/. Cisness needs to be understood as a weapon in the class war: as a doctrine of biological order; a mechanism for making masculine priority available to certain women; and, not to mention, a technology of both colonization and whiteness. Far from being the original or even prior category in gender politics, it represents the antirevolutionary cooptation of the women’s movement, tearing feminism away from the horizon of care communization and gender abolition and pushing it toward ontological questions and projects of erotophobic securitization. So, when we think about this “essentialized victimhood” of the idea of Woman (as you aptly put it), our task is to uncover the consolations of fascist innocence afforded to certain populations of women over time by this cissexualizing maneuver. This is fundamentally about provincializing cisness and demonstrating that its dynamics and applications over the past two centuries have been irreducibly racializing, colonial, bourgeois, ableist, repronormative, and so on. All in all, I strongly feel cisness is an immensely helpful intersectional heuristic for anticapitalist strategy. For Heaney, cisness is a counterrevolution against feminism. What I am adding is, in part, the extent to which cisness is also a counterrevolution within feminism.
Right, I am trying to highlight continuities between very different forms of antiliberatory cisfeminism, while resisting the urge to tie everything up in a neat bow and say, you know, “this is the one mistake they all make” (albeit cisness actually does seem to be a commitment common to all the archetypes). Certainly what you are calling “a very sex-negative position” recurs throughout feminist history to an uncanny degree, arising in counterrevolutionary currents swirling in women’s movements at the end of both the First and the Second Waves. I slightly prefer to call it “erotophobia,” though, because— following certain new contemporary communist-feminist theorizing that is now taking up sex-negativity in a critical-utopian mode in order to declare that “we have never had sex”—I am not especially against “negativity” when it comes to sexuality.4ASCA Research Group, “Sex Negativity,” Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, accessed August 16, 2025, https://asca.uva.nl/content/research-groups/sex-negativity/sex-negativity.html?cb&cb. And while I espouse a sex-radical erotic utopianism myself, I would actually probably agree that all sexual pleasure is tainted in some way under capitalist patriarchy. However, an enormous mistake in feminism is the exclusive focus on sexual danger whereby the other pole of the dialectic of liberation, namely pleasure, is given up.
Look, in this world, sexual labor—in both waged and unwaged forms—is systematically coerced, stolen, exploited, naturalized, invisibilized, denigrated, and mystified. Yet instead of recognizing the common struggle of feminized sexworking and nonsexworking people against rape and sexual violence, the prevailing self-described “radical” feminisms of the West have taken the easy way out since the 1970s by exceptionalizing the sex industry as a source of patriarchal violence over and above for example, the family and the workplace. Today’s resurgent “radfem” femopessimisms routinely characterize sex-worker liberationists and their sex-radical allies as mere “sex-positive” neoliberals at best (and at worst, handmaidens and so on). While this is outrageous, it is also not new. Whereas the received version of the story of the feminist “sex wars” tells of brave antipornography “radicals” versus porn-loving “libertarians,” in reality, the opposing feminist camp was a whore-led sex-radical camp, which differed from its adversaries’ diagnoses of capitalist-patriarchal sexual dynamics overwhelmingly with regard to “what to do about it” rather than on the level of “is it misogynist?” In fact, sex-radicals were probably equally as critical as antisex radicals of the majority of actually-existing “lewd” cultural production.
Anyway, it cannot be accidental that the biggest temporal jump I make in my chronology is the one from the “purity” feminism of policewomen in the 1940s to the SWERF activism I call “cultural feminism” (as in, genuinely “merely cultural”) in the 1970s. As the comrades at the Radical Philosophy editorial collective put it to me, my “Pornophobe” chapter “feels quite pivotal, not least because the stakes are quite literally visceral.” It contains the origin story of TERFism (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) and describes a moment we still inhabit today. I see hauntings from the pornophobic intrafeminist counterrevolution of the 1970s everywhere I look—as in, for example the fleeting popularity in the West of Korean “4B” female-separatist girlboss discourse, or the ongoing enthusiasm for nihilistic “femosphere” self-help online (“Andrew Tate for women…”).5Sofia Mosqueda, “Interested in the 4B Movement? Here are 5 Books to Read,” Her Campus, November 14, 2024, https://www.hercampus.com/culture/books-to-read-interested-in-the-4b-movement/. Pornophobia pervades the discourse of “feminism’s Brexiteers” (as Sarah Franklin once called TERFs) and even tints the ambient “heteropessimism” that Asa Seresin identified in 2019— a cultural formation of righteous complaint that conspicuously does not, however, seek to actually change the drastic disappointingness of men.6Asa Seresin, “On Heteropessimism,” New Inquiry, October 9, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/.
“Pornophobia,” by the way, is the coinage of the sex-worker liberationist Carol Leigh to describe the above-discussed antiutopian orientation. The term essentially means the same thing as “whorephobia,” but forces us to confront the etymology of the word porn. Today porn refers exclusively to depictions of sexuality designed to elicit horniness, but it historically designated all of monetized sex—whore life, as it were. This amounts to a fatal exceptionalization and othering of monetized sex vis-à-vis the “civilian,” wherein the embodiment of money-contaminated sex (especially if unrepentant!) becomes abject and hated. Tellingly, it is often impossible to distinguish SWERF discourses about sex workers from that of abusive johns. This is because, since the late nineteenth century, feminist pornophobia has been misogynistically convinced of the absolute power of penile flesh and libido to taint, injure, and degrade womanhood. Unsurprisingly, nowadays, the overlap between this penis-reifying ontology and antitrans ideation is enormous. Consider, in the antipornography 1970s, even the practices of “topping” and “bottoming” within lesbian communities eventually got equated with heteromasochism and male violence, alongside all forms of penetration. This spread by association to people fugitive from manhood—especially trans women—whose yearning for female embodiment and active pleasure in it undermined the cultural feminist definition of femaleness qua bodily suffering. There is no getting around it: monetized sex, and by logical extension transsexuality (which is its own kind of sex-radical practice), is the field where feminist carceralism’s hypocrisies are laid most bare.
As you suggest, be it full criminalization or putatively progressive models of so-called “partial” criminalization—such as Sweden’s infamous “buyer-only” version—modern states’ approaches to sex work have been heavily influenced by feminists of sometimes dramatically different political persuasions. More broadly—on issues ranging from domestic violence, social work, foster care, and adoption to alcohol control, sex education, reproductive rights, and censorship—the capitalist state has benefited greatly from carceral feminism’s idioms, alibis, and personnel in pursuing its ends. Indeed for two whole centuries—for purposes such as the popularization of “family values” and “social hygiene” and the discipline reproductive labor at the level of the nation—modern states have relied extensively on philanthropic “organized womanhood.” Some of this, though by no means all, was feminism right from the beginning. It’s fair to say that states don’t merely legitimize and reproduce enemy feminisms: they absorb and integrate them. “Gender-critical” (antitrans) feminism today is a case in point of how feminist activity can orient itself toward the state in a nationalist mode, specifically a sex-nationalist mode, seeking to have its sovereigntist aspirations as a sex fulfilled through the action of the nation-state. This is a key clue to explaining how one gets to the point of British liberals and self-described radical feminists applauding Trump’s executive order “defending women against gender ideology extremism” in 2025.
Generally, my historical account shows how time and again, when feminist struggles entered phases of rapprochement with the state, they threw “deviant,” indigenous, black, sexualized, or sex-working women under the bus. That Kamala essay you mentioned grapples with the relationship between fascism and liberalism (that is, how, for instance, did the “feminism of cops”—which started off as a Nazi project—become a politics associated with the Democratic Party only a few decades later?).7Sophie Lewis, “Lipstick on the Pigs: Kamala Harris and the Lineage of the Female Cop,” Drift, October 30, 2024, https://www.thedriftmag.com/lipstick-on-the-pigs/. But as you say, there are left-wing presentations of state feminism, too, and the demand for “more women cops,” or for mandatory arrests of violent men, or for harsher sentencing of pimps and rapists, and so on, has been voiced by anticapitalists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. Meanwhile, those “nice” aspects of feminist statism—such as childcare subsidies, child credits and, as you say, parental leave—have been social-democratic policy staples. But as your own work on the role of state-feminist social democracy in privatizing care (that is, shoring up the private family household as a unit of social order) shows so well with reference to the Swedish context, we as left feminists can and must set our sights on nonstatist horizons of care communization.8Alva Gotby, “The State and the Family: Privatizing Care and Welfare in Contemporary Sweden,” South Atlantic Quarterly 124, no.1 (2025): 206–13, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557841. I agree with my comrade and sometimes collaborator M. E. O’Brien in this sense: the abolition of the family, which (by the way) is a perfectly good name for our feminism, seeks a basis for lifemaking that, while not the wage and not the family, is also emphatically not the state.
We are at a terrifying historic juncture. Transphobic annihilationism is currently the number one form of feminism-enabled fascism targeting our communities, as I have sought to help explain over the past decade and also get into in-depth in my final chapter, “Adult Human Female.”9Sophie Lewis, “TERF Island,” Lux no. 11/12 (2024): https://lux-magazine.com/archive/?issue=11&sort=issue_number-desc; Sophie Lewis, “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans,” New York Times, February 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html; Sophie Lewis, “SERF ‘n’ TERF,” Salvage, February 6, 2017, https://salvage.zone/serf-n-terf-notes-on-some-bad-materialisms/. Another of the monsters we face is feminist Islamophobia, whose hydra-heads are everywhere—notably in the Zionist feminism that has reappeared since October 7, 2023 in the form of a pro-Israel femonationalist discourse that paints the holocaust of Palestinians, without apparent irony, as feminist.10Sophie Lewis, “When Genocide is Feminist: Talking Zionist Feminism,” Patreon, April 17, 2024, https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-genocide-is-102514539. (Equally, I wrote for Spectre earlier this year about Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism, criticizing the now six-year-long-and-counting literary revival of Dworkinism in the United States.11Sophie Lewis, “‘Are Women Weak Jews’: On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism,” Spectre, May 27, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/VRETINRM.)
Another site of our battle is the rise of certain self-identified “reactionary feminisms” or feminisms “against progress,” pioneered by “postliberal” or even post-social-democratic figures like Mary Harrington, Erika Bachiochi and Louise Perry, who fight for forced birth, coercive marriage, and trans genocide—all in women’s name—while savvily deploying the language of “care” to recruit and persuade people to their cause in the midst of an all-too-real care crisis. How do we fight all of this, and strengthen our antifascist feminist movements? Gaining the confidence to name these feminisms enemies and cutting through the confusion and demobilization that has sometimes dogged us when it comes to fighting fascists who come (as they sometimes unfortunately do) in genuinely feminist shapes are both pieces of the answer.
It is vital that we think about what constitutes the “eros” of antifascist feminism not least because, on the other side, it is evidently in part the libidinal or erotic dimensions of eugenic feminist cruelty that are helping to magnetize certain populations via affective circuits of ressentiment and schadenfreude—I’m thinking of Kristi Noem rejoicing in front of a concentration camp, or J. K. Rowling puffing on her TERF Island cigar.12Peyton Bond, “Not Our Sister: Kristi Noem as an Enemy Feminist?” Blind Field, June 4, 2025, https://blindfieldjournal.com/2025/06/04/not-our-sister-kristi-noem-as-an-enemy-feminist/; Sophie Lewis, “The UK Anti-Trans Ruling is a Defeat for All Women,” Nation, April 23, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-trans-ruling-analysis-uk/. If their appeal, and their jouissance is drawn from the pleasures of scapegoating, of unambiguous certainty, of strong borders, and of innocence —along with the limitless violence it authorizes—how can we clarify and make palpable what is analogously appealing about our camp?
Let us discuss collectively the best ways to disseminate our erotics—those of definitional open-endedness, interdependent porosity, noninnocence, and solidarity. At the same time, abolition feminism, transfeminism, disability liberationism, and antiwork sex worker militancy is already showing the way. Everywhere I look, I see networks of antipatriarchal mutual aid, DIY-care undergrounds, antiviolence action carrying forward the sea-change that was #MeToo, and rich new seams of feminist theorizing to boot. As you know, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now (my previous books) lifted up the memory and present of a revolutionary feminism whose principal antagonist in the world is the family—which is to say, the privatization of care. Feminism is a sine qua non of all genuinely liberatory struggles because feminism is the idea and the desire that destroys what Kathi Weeks calls “the work society,” productivism, and individualism.13Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011).