Grace Byron ,??? ?? March 4, 2025

Feminist Fascisms

A conversation with Sophie Lewis Wikimedia Commons

Like many, I first read Sophie Lewis after the publication of Abolish the Family, a tract supplementing her first book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Abolish the Familytraces historic movements for “care communization,” the ability of groups to function as networks of connection outside of the state and nuclear family, all while championing the liberation of children, queer kinship, and trans rights at a time when tradwives began to go viral on TikTok. With her third book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, Lewis has crafted a deeply researched inquiry into the antagonistic, imperial, and right-wing turns that women’s rights activists in the West have taken over the past two hundred years. Lewis’s work suggests that only by expanding our understanding of feminism beyond its liberatory instinct to analyze it as a crucial, ever-shifting movement that often colludes with fascism can we on the left strategize against feminism’s own counterrevolutions. Carefully detangling a variety of enemy feminisms like girlbossery, TERFism, and women’s policing, Lewis creates a guidebook to gender emancipation projects that have functioned simultaneously as oppressive forces in the world. We must renew a feminist freedom struggle against fascism, Lewis argues, not least by dealing with the reality of feminist fascisms.

We originally started speaking more over a shared interest in what makes TERFs tick: I attended a class taught by Lewis where she spoke passionately about the importance of understanding the feminist opposition, especially as anti-trans panic continues to stalk our political and daily experience. Actively practicing a feminism against cisness rather than merely paying lip service to trans suffering has to go beyond a gesture of denunciation; it must coalesce into a solidarity that is rooted in collective action rather than personal feeling. The beginning of this collective action, Lewis argues, involves deep analysis of feminism’s capacity for radical change and also for ill. We spoke about Enemy Feminisms over email. Our conversation, which took place over the course of several weeks, has been condensed and edited for clarity.

—Grace Byron

Grace Byron: Today, we’re both witnessing the panic over President Trump’s “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order. It’s a fitting moment to discuss enemy feminisms.

Sophie Lewis: I’ve of course been chewing on the anti-trans executive order in question, with its quasi-feminist language. Given how long I’ve been studying the etiology and developing character of TERF politics at this point, it did not shock me to see the self-described radical feminist J.K. Rowling tweeting approvingly about Trump’s move to outlaw transness by fiat. She implies that the executive order is coming from the right only because the left’s “sex-is-a-social-construct” politics has alienated voters. MAGA is doing this feminist thing, Rowling says, in order to “capitalize” on pro-trans liberals’ “embrace of gender identity” and “betrayal of women and girls.” It does, unfortunately, feel like Enemy Feminisms is more relevant than ever, clichéd as that is.

GB: Can you define what an enemy feminism is?

SL: An enemy feminism is any form of woman-emancipationist ideology that is anti-liberatory. Some enemy feminisms are not simply “in bed with” the real villains but are themselves genuine fascisms, and this is something that the otherwise valuable framework of “white feminism” doesn’t necessarily get at. What the archives tell me is that emancipating womanhood is not inherently incompatible with, for instance, eugenic or imperial violence: often, it’s been quite compatible. This comes down to the definitional composition of the kind of womanhood at the heart of any given emancipationist project.

Just as the so-called “socialism of fools” comes from a truncated analysis of capitalism, resulting in national socialism (i.e., fascism), the feminism of fools, if you will, arises from bad materialism, a diagnosis of the sex/gender system that is fatally foreshortened.This leads it to form a wounded attachment to ontological womanhood. The feminism of cisness, for example, has spread like a pogrom. Today, it is unsurprising to find self-described feminists at the forefront of policymaking to deny gender-affirming health care, or to make bathrooms and sports lockers cissexual at all costs, in the name of women’s rights. Anti-fascist feminists need to fight this activity even though—or even when—it is feminism.

I know that none of this is easy for most people to sit with. Certainly it isn’t easy to get one’s head around Western feminism’s role in historic systems of violence. Sure enough, my claim is that this institutionalized avoidance of oppressive, enemy feminisms needs to end. But perhaps more importantly, my book tries to open up possibilities for excitement—dare I say eros—about what feminism could be, if only we could sit with its past.

GB:I wonder if you can speak a bit about how and where you encounter enemy feminisms in the world; I’m thinking of things like tradwifery, the Red Scaregirls, and organizations like 4B. Are they strands of nihilism, individualism, and pessimism about liberal feminist prospects?

SL:I decided to write this book in the hopes of intervening in what I understand to be a mass disillusionment with liberal feminism. Israel woman-washing the acceleration of a decades-long holocaust in Palestine as somehow a matter of rape revenge—a feminist genocide!—may have put the final nail in liberal feminism’s coffin. I see various “post-liberal” discursive exoduses from the scene of this disillusionment, including, yes, “tradwifery,” “the femosphere,” “reactionary feminism,” and “4B.” (Female anti-feminism and reactionary feminism are distinct phenomena, and both exist.) Ultimately I could not include Red Scarein Enemy Feminisms any more than I could include tradwives, because these phenomena really have to be classified as anti-feminisms. 4B is also very much not an organization; it is primarily an online self-help discourse, which, like “female dating strategy” discourse, are ultimately individualist, nihilism-tinged responses to the failures of liberal feminism.

Many of these reflexes toward radicality come from a rejection of received forms of feminist mobilization and are well-justified. We also see how often and how rapidly they can collapse into nihilist, individualist, edgily trad, or misandrist-separatist pessimisms. I’ve used the term “femopessimism” a lot lately to describe such nodes of feminist fatalism that overlap with Asa Seresin’s viral diagnosis of “heteropessimism,” but are not necessarily hetero. There is a kernel of truth, as such, in Rowling’s excuse for her own rightward lurch, don’t you think? Left feminism has failed to offer a persuasive route forward for women. The unequal labor burden that Marxist feminists called “the double shift,” for example, has stubbornly refused to budge. In the absence of a mass movement wherein reproductive labor is radically redistributed, uncoupled from the organized scarcity of private households, and wrested free from capitalism’s sucking embrace, where is a feminist supposed to turn? Fascism is always waiting to step in here, and much as we might imagine ourselves immune to it, it has seductive aspects for all of us.

GB:A few of the big enemy feminisms that come up are TERFs, Zionists, policewomen (like Kamala Harris), girlbosses, and anti-sex worker advocates. Talk me through how you came to include these specific genres? I’m also interested in their relation to pleasure; there is a very moving pro-pleasure throughline in your work, and I’m curious how you make sense of a tendency for enemy feminisms to posture themselves against pleasure.

SL: Right. I’d already basically finished the book when femo-Zionism reared its ugly head in 2023 to justify the acceleration of genocide in Palestine post-October 7. Luckily, I’d already incorporated quite a bit of discussion of both colonial and settler-colonial feminist origin myths and practices in my chapters on civilizers and imperial “new model Englishwomen.” The enemy feminist archetypes I propose in my two-hundred-year narrative bestiary are doubtless not comprehensive, but they sort of organized themselves organically as I conducted my research. I hope others refine the taxonomy!

For me, as they stand, they are: the anti-anti-racist abolitionist, the civilizer, the prohibitionist, the KKK feminist, the Blackshirt, the policewoman, the pornophobe, the girlboss, the femo-nationalist, the pro-life feminist, and the anti-trans feminist. One thick through-line that connects them is white supremacy, and I would refer everyone to the scholarship of Jessie Daniels, Vron Ware, Kyla Schuller, Ruby Hamad, Serene Khader, Alison Phipps, Terese Jonsson, Gloria Wekker, and others on this question of feminist whiteness.

And you’re absolutely right: there is also a phobic relation to pleasure that cuts across most if not all of these. More specifically, it’s an antipathy to “femme”-ness that unites them, by which I mean the self-consciously artificial labor of pleasure-oriented—and therefore queer, excessive—femininity. Ultimately, I propose that all these enemy feminisms are feminisms of cisness, meaning that they deploy a counterrevolutionary logic that bifurcates and hierarchizes women in relation to a very narrowly defined maternal potential. I try to bring together their different strands by taking up Emma Heaney’s theory of the counterrevolutionary logic of cisness, one which can only be defeated by an internationalist “feminism against cisness” that wholly rejects its taxonomy.

GB:What do you think feminism is good for, if so many “bad” strains of it exist? Can we save feminism from itself? Is that even a helpful framing?

SL:Mm. It’s a great question. We will never have purity, nor am I interested in such a goal. But what I love the most about my chosen feminist ancestors—from Charles Fourier to Pat Parker—is their capacity for a certain kind of revolutionary foolishness, a term that does double duty for me. Foolishness is precisely what is missing from the proto-fascistic ultra-certainty of what I call the “feminisms of fools,” and from what Ann Stoler would call “colonial common sense.” In my book, I sing the praises of a deeply necessary foolishness I miss in politics, which I propose as a denaturalizing, epistemically agnostic stance that speaks to our radical, beautiful, terrifying uncertainty about what the most seemingly basic things are—women, love, the human, you name it—a radical epistemic openness which is unleashed by this elemental, non-negotiable force I call feminism. In the end, unlike many of my closest comrades, I don’t foresee a way forward without feminist-ness. It sounds counterintuitive, perhaps, but this whole book really is a love letter to feminism. I belong to feminism.

The “bad” news is that digging deep into the history of reactionary and even fascist feminism does make it harder to dismiss the bigoted self-described feminists of today as non-feminist grifters. It is so tempting to make that gesture in the current climate—“That’s not real feminism!”—even though it simply doesn’t work. Yet what I’m trying to say is: this need not confuse us. That is the good news. Learning our multiple antagonistic histories actually strengthens our ability as feminists to fight today’s soi-disant “gender critical” women. How liberating it could be for our movements if feminists understood, once and for all, that a woman’s cry for women’s power is often part of a matrix of domination! It’s not about securing a greater slice of the pie, to borrow a phrase. Nor is it even enough to seize the bakery. Feminism, instead, could be about baking new and unthinkable cakes, if you will, by using recipes that haven’t been invented yet. Which is to say: I don’t know if we can save it from itself so much as explode it from below. A cream-spattered mixed metaphor.

GB: What made you decide to write the book as a series of historical examples rather than, say, a polemic?

SL:Initially, I was curious about the history. I wanted to get a clearer picture of the revolutionary apogee and corresponding counterrevolutionary hegemony in each movement of self-described Western “feminism” over its approximately two-hundred-year trajectory. For instance, over a hundred years ago, the modern feminist project of “women’s policing” took off in the Anglophone world, linked to a fictional sex-trafficking panic about so-called “white slavery,” that was itself a backlash against feminist advances. Several British ex-suffragettes came to believe that fascism alone would complete the work begun by the militant women from 1906 to 1914.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan’s woman leaders and spokeswomen aligned themselves with the feminist movement’s radical fringe by supporting the Equal Rights Amendment when it was first introduced in 1923, just as they had supported the Nineteenth Amendment as a weapon against Black voters. Back in the twenties, “KKK feminism” advocated for female access to divorce and child custody, and berated the selfish man who insisted that woman’s only place is in the home. On both sides of the Atlantic, these race-hierarchized visions of women’s emancipation—for “respectable” non-sex working white cis women only—were fascistic. But if these visions were not real feminism, then neither was the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft or Susan B. Anthony. We have no choice but to give up using “feminist” as a synonym for liberation politics.

Much contemporary thought treats these white-hooded and black-bloused examples of women’s rights history as non-feminisms. In this view, “fascist feminism” is an oxymoronic discourse that “instrumentalizes” or “wields” the language of feminism in order to dupe. And yet, the imperialist and white-supremacist aspects of canonical liberal legacies like Wollstonecraft’s or Anthony’s can be admitted to and apologized for without calling into question their status within feminism or, for that matter, feminism’s integrity. The literary world can talk all day about the racist sins of the suffragettes, never doubting for a moment that the feminism in question can be separated from the racism without losing its core shape. I think you can’t really tackle this incongruity with polemic; you have to get historiographical.

GB: You recently taught a class on TERFs where we discussed “biology” as this complex, socially constructed discourse. I wonder how you might situate TERFs and their recent political gains in our contemporary moment.

SL: TERFs are feminism’s Brexiteers. It is not transness, but their regressive “sex-based rights” ontology, that is the parvenu category. “Cisness,” Emma Heaney writes in [the introduction to] Feminism Against Cisness, “is feminism’s counterrevolution.” Refusing/exposing cisness as an ontological framework is cyborgian—meaning that it refuses “origin stories,” as Donna Haraway insists feminists must do in “A Cyborg Manifesto”—and is therefore good historical materialism. So, what Heaney and Haraway, two differently Marxist women are telling us is that no body is uncontaminated; no one’s embodiment is simply given, unmodified.

After publishing a piece in Viewpoint Magazineabout Haraway, I very memorably got to meet my great teacher in Santa Cruz over breakfast. It was incredible: Donna said to me, “You think you are not, but you are an ecofeminist.” She was quite right. Or perhaps I’d want to say “xecofeminist,” picking up on Alyssa Battistoni’s coinage, which selectively hybridizes “xenofeminism,” a feminism that opposes itself to the “natural,” and “ecofeminism,” a feminism that theorizes the systematic plunder of female bodies and of the earth as two sides of the same patriarchal-capitalist coin. In Alyssa’s words, this means striving toward “an ecofeminism that’s strange, monstrous, and alien, that’s against ‘Nature’ in the sense of the given order of things but interested in nature as it actually exists in the world.”

To your point about TERFs’ simultaneous incuriosity about and weaponization of biology: unfortunately for them, it’s a never-ending task to shore up their “science,” because nothing is less natural than nature. Bioconservatives brandish deeply untruthful versions of “biological reality” in their crusades against “body modification,” gestational surrogacy, prostitution, and transition. But it would be a grave mistake to fight this truncated anti-capitalism with its own bad opposite, a technophilic or techno-positivist fix. I will always remind people that Shulamith Firestone’s position in The Dialectic of Sexis that “to envision [ectogenetic techniques] in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare.” Not least because surrogacy as we know it is an enterprise that only makes sense through capitalist private property!

Our task is thus neither to overcome nature nor to return to nature, which are nonsensical endeavors anyway since we ourselves are always already part of nature—capitalism, too, is a way of organizing nature. Our task is to devise a way of producing nature that renders no one disposable.

GB: You have a fairly long section on the sex wars and Andrea Dworkin. How does your book make sense of Dworkinites? I was also taken by your ideas about fighting for pleasure and also the idea that one can encounter and reread Dworkin against herself and her often reactionary ideas about BDSM, porn, and sex.

SL: I do position Dworkinism, ultimately, as an enemy feminism. Dworkin’s early-in-life lurch from BDSM utopianism to anti-BDSM porn prohibitionism and whorephobia is one really heartbreaking case in the book. It is a difficult and sticky historical tragedy, a traumatic ex-sisterly enmity that, above all, could have been avoided, and remains in need of tender working-through. When it comes to this strange Dworkin revival of recent years, I’ve been very worried by her anti-utopianism, the “pragmatic” carcerality of her approach to rape, her intense Zionism, and the depressing pessimism she insisted upon about the place for pleasure in the present.

It kills me that the sex wars are once again being mis-narrated and misrepresented as a conflict between anti-porn “radicals” and sex-positive libertarians, when in reality Dworkin’s feminist adversaries at the time were often neither sex positive nor libertarian, but rather sex radicals committed to “seeking ecstasy on the battlefield,” i.e., insisting on the political importance of pleasure even in the midst of combatting the vertiginous amounts of sexualized violence and danger that women face in the world.

GB: Why do you think so many people are drawn to cop feminism? I found the chapter on this fascinating because the police are one of the things many liberal feminists struggle to imagine abolishing. You link this to our cultural desire for the good female cop, like Kamala Harris, and in the recent TV show Mare of Easttown. There are also so many other versions of this especially in the UK—Vera, Prime Suspect, Rosemary & Thyme. I am, sorry to say, an expert on these shows.

SL: Girl, no need to be sorry on my account. I am as susceptible as the next guy to the allure of feminist copaganda, which is part of why I wanted to think about what was really happening with the “Copmala” and “Momala” mystique in 2024. How did the cop vs. the felon framing of the election repeat uniformed, state-armed performances of public security in defense of women and girls a century ago, when certain well-to-do women—often lesbian and militantly suffragist—first tasked themselves with the maintenance of moral order and sexual hygiene? It seemed potentially very useful to dig into this interesting historical puzzle.

GB:There’s a few allies, or comrades, you draw on in the book. Asa Seresin, Melissa Gira Grant, Jules Gill-Peterson, etc. In the midst of all these enemy forms, what feminists and feminisms do you now look toward and lock arms with?

SL:I’ve already mentioned Emma Heaney and Serene Khader. So I will mention, off the top of my head, Talia Bhatt, cosima bee concordia, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Shuli Branson, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and the profusion of abortion undergrounds, black trans mutual aid initiatives, and DIY estrogen-distribution networks on Turtle Island and beyond. An optimistic reading of available signs points to the possibility that grassroots anti-colonial feminism is on the rise. Some promising organizing that comes to mind in that regard are: the multinational “Feminist Call to Strike for Gaza” on International Women’s Day; Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), South America’s globally networked anti-femicide movement; the Kurdish “invading socialist society” known as Jineoloj?, under the banner of jin jiyan azadi(woman, life, freedom), in autonomous north and east Syria; and the small “Transfeminist International” platform from Greece. If you’ll allow me to wax poetical for a moment, I’d say that the collective song of revolutionary feminism can be heard everywhere people are trying to communize care, or dreaming of dismantling—for all—the inextricably intertwined dominations of the wage, the state, the family, and markets.

Feminist enemies are likely not to be the main enemies we face in any given situation. Still, when we do face them, we shouldn’t hesitate. We didn’t choose the relationship of enmity, but it is only through fighting it out that we will make feminism, one day, insh’allah, obsolete.