Sophie Lewis Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

Feminism

Yes, Some of Our Enemies Are Feminists

A conversation with Sophie Lewis on her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses against Liberation

April 8, 2025 • by Natasha Lennard and Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis, feminist scholar and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), reckons with Western feminism’s problematic history in her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025). In a conversation with Natasha Lennard, Associate Director of the Creative ...

Feminism

Am I a Heteropessimist?

Four years since we learned the word, what does heteropessimism look like today?

April 19, 2023 • by Josephine Houman

Evidently, I am far from alone in the befuddlement I feel about my heterosexual relationship, nor am I the only one noticing the fact that, even though so many of us feel similarly, heteropessimism (and its attendant inaction) persists. ...

Feminism

There Can Be No Nonviolence in Human Gestation

Feminist scholar Sophie Lewis talks to Natasha Lennard about reproductive freedom and why we can embrace abortion as a form of killing

August 30, 2022 • by Natasha Lennard and Sophie Lewis

Even if all the people who currently “mother” in society were suddenly magically treated with respect by courts and medical doctors, left alone by cops and social workers, supported and assisted to become parents, and lavished with strings-free checks courtesy of the state, it would still be necessary to deprivatize ...