Red Emma’s

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.

"Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant." —Judith Butler

“Lewis treats feminism not as an inherent moral good but as a thick tangle of partial, contradictory practices that must be judged on their material effects—and shows us how we might cut our way through. Fearsome and deeply needed.” —Andrea Long Chu, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at New York magazine

Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She studied English Literature at Oxford University before pursuing graduate and postgraduate study in environmental theory, political science, and human geography, respectively at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University. However, Lewis now counts herself an ex-academic. Although her writing still appears in journals like Feminist Theory, TSQ, and Signs, she is making her living writing free-lance for magazines like n+1, Harper’s, and the LRB, newspapers like the New York Times, and art websites like e-flux.

Jules Gill-Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of two books. Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is the first book to shatter the myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Uncovering a surprising archive dating from the 1920s through 1970s, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the concept of gender relies on the medicalization of children's presumed racial plasticity, challenging the very terms of how we talk about today's medical model. A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Books, 2024) explains the origins of the staggering violence faced by transgender women and authors a bold vision for a world freed from its ravages. The book chronicles how violence directed at trans femininity emerged out of state and police repression in a 200 year arc from British India to New York, to American military bases in the Philippines, and throughout Latin America. Focusing on Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor trans women’s survival, its chapters forward a bold vision of trans feminism that could break this centuries’ old structure of violence. Jules has also written for The New York Times, CNN, The Lily (by The Washington Post), Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, The Funambulist, and more. Jules is currently working on a book entitled Transgender Liberalism (under contract with Harvard University Press), a new US history of practices of gender transition through the lens of class.