Femmephilia

Sophie Lewis is a writer, utopian, feminist, and ex-academic scholar based in Philadelphia, hailing originally from the UK, France, and Germany. She is the author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now. Lewis’s essays and articles appear routinely in magazines such as n+1, Harper’s, The Drift, the LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and the London Review of Books; as well as on her Patreon newsletter, “ReproUtopia.” She teaches online courses on critical theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is working on a book about the liberation of children.

• IntroductionWhat does “femme” mean, and how is it different from femininity? What kind of anticapitalist potential do femmes offer us? SWERFIt’s impossible to take a meaningful stand against transphobia if, like Catharine MacKinnon, Julie Bindel, and others, you remain a sex work prohibitionist.MermaidOn the transness of the Little Mermaid.VampireA portrait of cis-trans solidarity.DaphneDaphne was a woman who wanted to transition into a tree, and Apollo—you guessed it—was a chaser.MumputzYou can be femme and also femmephobic, a mother against motherhood, including the author’s own mother.MarilynOn the femme queerness of comrade Marilyn Monroe.ShulamithShulamith Firestone on femme labor, against Shulamith Firestone on femme labor.AndreaOn the femmephobia of Andrea Dworkin.CatsOn the antiwork dialectics of cats.OctopusOn the erotophilic promise of the octopus girlfriend.TradwifeThe femmephobic alliance between tradwife and girlboss.MaidMaid memoirs and momfluencers: On the limits of domestic heterofatalism in maid memoirs and by momfluencers.DianeDiane di Prima’s “acid commune-ist” mothering against motherhood.

"Like its author, Femmephilia is irresistible and indispensable. Sexy, cerebral, and exhilarating, this collection of essays both instructs and delights, giving us a grand tour inside the mind of a truly revolutionary thinker. Every word should be shouted from the rooftops and written across the sky."—Anahid Nersessian, author of Keats's Odes“Femmephilia collects seventeen of Sophie Lewis’ essays, drenched in excessive, decorative, provocative, seductive prose, devoted to expansive communist femme-inism, founded in the distinction between insurrectionist femme-ness and supposedly natural, normative femininity. The essays are a gorgeous, enthralling, essential addition to our collective intellectual, political and aesthetic wardrobe.“—Lisa Duggan, author of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed“Femmephilia—in the grand tradition of Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Raechel Anne Jolie, and Tourmaline—is a sublimely rendered paean to the sparkly, bold lip-wearing, gender mercurial, world-breaking, world-making, radical multitudinousness of femme. Brilliantly warping and weaving personal reflection and cultural criticism, each essay in Lewis’ florilegium dazzles with its deconstruction of the mechanisms and machinations of femmephobia, while making a powerful case for us all to be femmephiles (and, bear with me, unabashed ‘octophiles’).”—Lucie Fielding, therapist, sex educator, and author of Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment and Gender-Pleasure“Sophie Lewis’s love letters to the femmes at the heart of femme-inism are fun, sad, erudite, full of longing and urgency. Whether she is reminding us of Marilyn Monroe’s intellect, rewriting the story of Daphne, transing mermaids, cruising utopia with Monique Wittig or writing about octopus sex, she is funny, irreverent, and sharp as newly manicured nails. This is the right moment for a book of essays on the pleasures, the potential and the awesome power of femininity.”—Jack Halberstam, author of Anarchitecture After Everything“What better time than an emergency to join Sophie Lewis in ‘squinting at’ and struggling for the femmunist horizon. In that lush future, we’ll work little and care often. The disrespectable, the soft, the creaturely—all are welcome.”—Heather Berg, author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism“In the lush and provocative Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis approaches femmeness as a sexuality. By this I mean they ask what would happen if we prioritized pleasure, sex, and care over work, productivity, and capitalism. Drawing on an eclectic archive of femmes and femme positions, Lewis illuminates the hidden structures of femme phobia while offering glimpses into what living in femmeness—regardless of gender!— might look like. For Lewis, it is the femme embrace of excess that offers a way through the muck of the world. And there, most delightfully, we find desire, wetness, and fucking.”—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined"Sophie Lewis is sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless.”—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex