Cover of Enemy Feminisms by Haymarket Books (2025)
Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine. Feminists across the political spectrum have taken pains to define their troops as chaste and untainted by lust (especially interracial lust); not to mention maternal, i.e., pure, straight, removed from the realm of productive work; and “natural,” that is, not artificial, not “femme,” neither surgically nor chemically enhanced. Black feminisms have a better track record, but of course some Black feminists too have been thoroughly ableist in this way, or whorephobic, or anticommunist. All in all, a great deal of feminisms 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 pro-family), economically independent (or at least aspiring), nonviolent (or at least law-abiding), and “self-respecting” (not a body modifier or a bottom).
All of this was feminism, not liberatory feminism, but feminism in the sense that it contested a patriarchal constraint placed upon a certain group of women, no matter how few. Victorious aristofeminists proceed to co-engineer and enforce patriarchal or eugenic constraints for others; they even expect generalized feminist support for their accessions. Is this “worse” than a hypothetical gentlemen-only alternative domination? No, but nor is such equal-opportunity inequality, such counterrevolutionary fairness, remotely what my team is fighting for. We need to be discerning about any given feminism precisely because feminism is so capacious that it comprises, within itself, its own mortal enemies. I say this (as a reluctant feminist killjoy) because I belong to feminism. It is thanks to and despite people like Wollstonecraft—both!—that feminism can be a force of reaction even as it is an insurgent force that materially creates the right to the city, filling the streets with choreographies and chants denouncing cops, courts, dads, bosses, and the state.
Feminism, in its best instances, is a burning prison: an insistence that life can be worth living and that every person’s pleasure matters. It is, too, the practices that make life livable, wresting care free from the market; freely distributing bread, roses, and hormones; desegregating the generations; bailing mamas out of detention; disempowering rapists in kin networks, churches, and social centers; and expropriating golf courses in order to open spaces of erotic (not necessarily sexual—but also sexual!) encounter. Feminism sometimes flashes an unlit pathway toward a world without whiteness or colonizers. In these moments, it’s an insurrection halting family policing, forced gestating, and every other reproductive injustice.
For many of us, feminism denotes the task of abolishing all organized scarcities, from the private nuclear household to the nation. It’s the deprivatization of love, via the insurgency of mothers of every gender against the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the decoupling of survival from the wage, the destruction of markets, the ecological insistence on interspecies responsibility, the decarbonization of every mégapole, and the communization of continent-wide architecture: waterways, seed banks, and libraries. It’s a local proletarian strike against work (that always already gendered and stolen substance otherwise called alienated labor) and a planetary revolution in values that prioritizes care over accumulation. It’s a perfectly good name, too, for the horizon wherein work’s myriad precarious, abject, wageless, mad, incarcerated, and otherwise remaindered victims are avenged. As a revolutionary movement, feminism abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.
Feminism, in other words, carves out space for autonomous formulations of gender pending revolution. Also known to some as the revolt of femmes against cisness, of sex workers against work, feminism is “black quantum womanism”; junkie communism; multispecies reparations; a queer glitch in the matrix of the given. Feminism is necessarily central to any meaningful anti-fascism. But this does not mean that it is always anti-fascist or even non-fascist. We can’t just bank on that. Rather, our task is to conspire toward a world where women, if that word still exists, will still be horrible and not horrible, but where counterrevolutionary feminism has been stripped of its capacity for violence, and even our feminism is, happily, obsolete.
Excerpt from Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis, published by Haymarket Books. Copyright © 2025 by Sophie Lewis. Reprinted courtesy of Haymarket Books.
