ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, challenging and emotionally difficult read...necessary, too

ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
SOPHIE LEWIS
Haymarket Books
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.

In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.

Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh dear. Another excellent, necessary message to everyone in the US lost to a wide audience. I'm in the choir and I still felt hectored, lectured at, and blamed personally by the author's tone.

I did not enjoy the experience.

I can't fault Author Lewis's collection of facts or her citations. Capitalist feminism is indeed a huge existential threat to women's rights. I'd say, however, that the Cult of Mother needed a much, much more savage pounding than capitalism receives. Apparently not one of the author's targets, though, in spite of being so ready to condemn the woman-controlling bodily autonomy denial of abortion restriction.

I question how effective the chapter against "girl-boss" glamorization really is. It's gendered, but is this not a case where celebrating the still-rare sight of women in control of their economic future, and the economy in general, not worth it? I don't think this is the threat to female equality it's presented as, but it's certainly made me consider the issue in a new light. Which, come down to it, is the great strength of this book and books like it, as well as the reason I give it four stars.

So it's style, not substance, that I find unwelcoming and unpleasant. That does not mean I didn't take a lot of positive information, and a hefty amount of psychic homework, away from the read. I found her challenging the hidden enemy in us all bracing and grounds for a lot of self-reflection. Ironic given my whinging about her tone, I know, but in a review for readers I'm not aiming for critical standards of an essay but information, and I hope a shove to get it and read it, for the laity.