Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
By Sophie Lewis
Haymarket Books, 320 pages, $22.95
‘Most people live in a crackpot world where the sky is green,” Curtis Yarvin wrote recently. And while “most people,” of course, don’t, extremists on either side of a given issue often do. This is the case for independent academic and essayist Sophie Lewis, a person who has made a career of arguing for green-sky ideas like “full surrogacy now” and the abolition of motherhood and the nuclear family. In Lewis’s latest book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, she sets out to discredit every form of feminism except her own, the obviously correct one in her eyes. This is another green-sky idea that not much of anyone wants, but examining it offers us the opportunity to ask some large and basic questions about feminism, such as: “Has it always been all good?” And: “Is this still a category we need?”
“Feminisms, Lewis argues, have been ‘eugenic, colonial, deadly…’”
Lewis’s flavor of progressivism is by now familiar to everyone in its general outlines if not the specifics. Enemy Feminisms sets out to demonstrate that feminism has historically been a handmaiden to other forms of oppression, and continues to be so to this day. Feminisms, Lewis argues, have been “eugenic, colonial, deadly to indigenous lifeways, explicitly antiblack, knowingly dangerous to sex workers, violent to queer and feminine people, and even, weird as it may sound, misogynistic and patriarchal.” She argues that the history of feminist writing and scholarship has sought to obscure this understanding, thus demonstrating the West’s “cultural allergy to self-knowledge.” And she imagines that facing these truths will help future feminists commit to the radical total revolution of her dreams, which would result in “unmaking the mode of production that underlies the logic of gender,” and a better world for everyone.