"Disliking and liking things with improper intensity"
A Q&A with Sophie Lewis
With her books Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (2025), the writer and theorist Sophie Lewis has earned a reputation as one of our most provocative and incisive political voices. But Lewis crafts more than just manifestos: she writes prolifically on gender and cultural politics with dazzling sweep, theoretical acuity, and humor. Her pieces for The Drift have addressed the long queer feminist history of mermaids and the misadventures of the female cop from the silver screen to the campaign trail. The former essay appears in her new collection Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe, which is out this month from Haymarket. To celebrate its publication, our Essays Editor Lyra Walsh Fuchs spoke with Lewis about mothering against motherhood, antifemininity feminism, and lysergic acid diethylamide.
Femmephilia covers a wide range of subjects. A non-exhaustive list: mermaids (in an essay that first appeared in The Drift); Marilyn Monroe; the myths of Daphne and Apollo and, in another essay, Leda and the Swan; Shulamith Firestone; vampires. What were the most surprising resonances or contradictions between these various topics?
Yes, I hope it feels like an intellectual femme pervert’s florilegium: there’s midwifery, momfluencers, acid-heads, bird-vaginas, and a girl who wants to be a tree. I also realized only belatedly that there are female-separatists both straight and lesbian in these pages, and I think I’m about equally critical of both. Let’s see, what else could I call “surprising”? Perhaps, on some level, that I can adore Shulamith Firestone even while fighting her about so much, but I truly cannot forgive Andrea Dworkin, whose fascistic epistemic syntax really chills my blood.
The essays in this book are thick with theories, citations, stories about your life, and, delightfully, jokes. What’s the role of humor in critical theory?
If a theorist isn’t funny, I’m not having a good time while I’m reading her. And if I’m not having a good time while I’m reading her, why should I trust that she wants the good life for all earthly beings? Aside from that, it’s a secret article of faith with me (as in: I cannot prove this) that there’s no getting at the seriousness of things in the absence of humor. And maybe this thought derives from my quasi-spiritual reverence for lysergic acid diethylamide, but: the base tissue of reality seems to me to be more or less equal parts aching with devastation and funny.
Why is “antifemininity feminism, with its aversion to gratuitous, unserious gender,” as you write, “thriv[ing] in the twenty-first century,” particularly in the media?
“Femininity” has myriad complicit applications and coerced manifestations in white supremacist, ableist, capitalist, trans-eliminationist and colonial systems. “Femme,” in contrast, is a concept of working-class lesbian derivation that joyfully telegraphs that the feminine is self-consciously artificial, chosen, non-ontological, labored. Its guardian spirits are Amber Hollibaugh, Joan Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, and Marsha P. Johnson.
Femininity is also classed. And the reason why media establishment feminists attack its more “unnatural,” “gaudy,” too-much, porny, shameless — i.e., femme — iterations is their commitment to social order. It’s about the defense of class relations. For that reason, though, I’m trying and failing to think of a moment in anglophone feminism’s two-hundred-year history when feminist femmephobia wasn’t a thing. For example, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication (1792) is heavily stuffed with disgust at ladies for getting too excited about novels and delighting in little dogs; just as Susan Brownmiller’s book Femininity inveighs against women (including her not-yet-totally-reformed self) who perform a “fluttery wave goodbye” almost two centuries later.
Our culture’s hegemonic cisfeminist commentators can be deeply macho whenever they feel like it, because they are wedded, above all, to the naturalization of assigned sex. The arrangement that power has historically made is a remarkably permissive allowance of gender freedom for ruling-class (and particularly white) women specifically… but nobody else. Recall J.K. Rowling’s gender performance, puffing on her cigar with her stiff drink on her yacht, celebrating the further purging of trans women from public life via legislation that she bankrolled.
The mission of this collection is a more positive one — the subtitle promises “Love Letters,” and section breaks are indicated with a sweet black heart — in contrast to the sharp criticality of some of your other work, including Enemy Feminisms and your biting essay on Kamala Harris in our pages. How do you think about the relationship between critique and celebration in your own role as a writer?
I like to do both at once. One of my “breakout” essays back in 2017, in fact, was a love letter to Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” that turned into an assault on Haraway’s twenty-first century slogan “make kin, not babies.” I’ve felt compelled a few times to use an early incarnation of a theorist against their less-utopian later selves (Silvia Federici is another example). When it comes to my books, I see that there’s superficially an up-down-down-up thing going on: “full surrogacy now” (positive), “abolish the family” (negative), “enemy feminisms” (negative), and now “femmephilia (aww…). But I see myself as doing the same thing all the time. Maybe I will reach some of the people who were scared off by the more overt haterade, thanks to the friendlier packaging of this beautifully candy-cloud-covered essay collection. Inside, they’ll soon find out that there’s nothing toothless about the femmephilic war on the work society. Disliking and liking things with improper intensity certainly seems to be my m.o.
Next Tuesday, June 9, Lewis will be in conversation on Femmephilia with the writer and Drift contributor Jamie Hood. You can get tickets here.
(If there is a bookstore in St. Louis that will carry this book I will look at it but I doubt that I have exhaustive knowledge of the discourse it is part of)
When I read "Vindication Of The Rights Of Women" it was a LONG time ago (maybe 30 years) and I am not braving the chaos in the room where it is kept to find it but I think Wollstonecraft is saying that the novels and little dogs are a sign that women have been infantilized by society. The Enlightenment atmosphere in which Wollstonecraft is writing promises enormous change in the way that elites at least think and feel about the world and women because of poor sexist education are not confident that they can become part of this new future. Dorothea Brooke 50 years later still believes that a traditional classical education is the key to everything and has "her old companion Pascal".