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Book Review: Sophie Lewis, Enemy Feminisms
40 Plays8 days ago
In this episode, I review Sophie Lewis' Enemy Feminisms.
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello everybody and welcome to Books Up Close. My name is Chris Lloyd. If you are watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast, hello, welcome. If you're new here, thank you for joining us. There's loads of content to go back and listen to and watch. Please go do that.
Subscription Encouragement
00:00:16
Speaker
Whether you are watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast feed, please subscribe to both straight away so that you get all the new episodes. If you're listening on the podcast next week, there will be another interview coming your way on the Friday. So please listen out for that one.
Social Media and Platform Shift
00:00:32
Speaker
follow the Instagram, follow the substack, etc, etc. I might need to move the substack. I realise it's a health site over there, most social media is. So if anyone knows of any good free alternatives to substack that is not platforming terrible people, just let me know.
00:00:47
Speaker
That'd be really helpful.
Introducing 'Enemy Feminisms'
00:00:50
Speaker
So this week I want to talk about Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis. The subtitle, which I'll read, is TERF's Police Women and Girlbosses Against Liberation. If you know Sophie Lewis, you probably know her from her two shorter earlier books,
00:01:05
Speaker
Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. Both of those books really sharp, incisive, clever, thoughtful, radical books that I think are really, really worth reading. This book is slightly different in that it kind of takes a much longer view. It's more of a kind of historical sweep and she really contextualizes so many of the arguments that you see in those two shorter books if you
Book's Analytical Scope
00:01:29
Speaker
like.
00:01:29
Speaker
And this book, Enemy Feminisms, is such a good idea. I think it's a really clear, clever way of framing the whole debate about who gets to be feminist, what do we call feminism these days. And this book has convinced me wholeheartedly. and I'll tell you why for a few reasons. But basically the book kind of goes through, it's kind of chronological in a way, and starts with, link chapter one is called The Enslaved English woman goes abroad and kind of go through abolitionism, prohibitionism, the Klan, the black shirts, through to the police, to anti-sex work, to girl bosses, to femo nationalism, to pro-life feminism, eventually to TERFs or gender criticals, whatever you want
Historical Context of Feminism
00:02:11
Speaker
to call them.
00:02:11
Speaker
And this kind of historical sweep allows Lewis to say, like it's no good disavowing completely certain parts of history where feminism has kind of aligned with anti-liberatory politics, whether that is white women and colonialism,
00:02:31
Speaker
or slavery or racism or anti-transness or anti-abortion folks, right? There are a lot of people who would say, oh, this person isn't a feminist because they are transphobic. This person isn't a feminist because they're racist.
00:02:47
Speaker
Lewis is like, no, no, we need to take seriously the fact that very early versions of feminism were kind of entangled with the project of empire, right? White women going to other countries to install a certain version of femininity, of gender norms.
00:03:04
Speaker
white women using the discourse and language of slavery to fight for their cause, right? We've seen that. Whether it is using the state as a kind of mechanics to prop up your feminist agenda, all of these things Lewis says, like, they are feminism and we need to deal with them as
Promoting Inclusive Feminism
00:03:23
Speaker
feminism. We just need to show that they are on the quote other side or, you know, they are enemy feminisms. They are feminisms are fighting for a very particular small set of women at very particular sets of times.
00:03:34
Speaker
And the conscription of feminism into other da system state systems, state mechanics, into worlds that we might find problematic now or people in the past found problematic.
00:03:47
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To simply say they're not feminist, to cast them outside of the feminist net, does damage to the idea of feminism itself, because the kind of broad tent of feminism moves forward in Lewis's argument. has more bite, has teeth, has specificity, has direction, has a liberatory possible future, because it is clear who it is fighting for.
00:04:10
Speaker
If you simply say, these people are not feminists or these people are outside, are they, aren't they question becomes the dominant question, right? Like, are you in or out? As opposed to yes, we might all be feminists, but what are we fighting for?
Book's Accessibility and Humor
00:04:23
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Where do we sit on that line? Now, I'm doing a very bad job of explaining her argument because Lewis is so so smart and thoughtful, but also nuanced. Like this is like a very good example of a kind of like sweeping history, a kind of critical history that is super readable, super accessible to anyone interested
Endorsements and Reader Encouragement
00:04:42
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in the topic. It's also funny. It's like really funny.
00:04:45
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her writing is beautiful and really precise like she can write a very gorgeous sentence and a really funny sentence and a really wry one there's so much stuff in there to look up everything is tied together so beautifully i highly recommend this book i can't recommend enough um enemy feminisms by sophie lewis there are some amazing ah testimonials or kind of quotes in the inside from you just look at the issue like oh judith butler Tori Piers, Lola Alufemi, Andrea Longchue, Amir Srinivasan, Jordi Rosenberg. I'm like, okay, these are all the people I love, have reviewed their books. We talked Lola recently on here. Like, this is a book in dialogue with really great people, and i highly recommend that you go out and get it.
00:05:29
Speaker
If you have read this book, let me know in the comments or wherever. You can find me on some kind of platform. There are many of the platforms. You can find me all of the places. Tell me what you're reading. Let me know if you buy this book or borrow this book or share it with a friend or talk about it
Community Engagement
00:05:43
Speaker
in a reading group. I really want to hear about where these books are traveling.
00:05:48
Speaker
Until the next time, thank you for watching and listening. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Keep reading and love and solidarity always.