Enemy Feminisms

by Sophie Lewis

It’s a narrative of righteous self-defense against rapacious neoliberal invasion, but in its panic-mongering about genderfluid foreignness, it fuses seamlessly with a much older British feminism of fear. The construct of the trans woman freighted with sexual menace is, after all, one that imagines her not only as an un-woman, but as fundamentally un-British too (European xenophobia has frequently used anti-“American”-ism as the more acceptable cover for feelings about aliens more generally).

I hence hear strong echoes, in TERFism, of two centuries’ worth of “proudly Anglo-Saxon” feminist participation in eugenicist colonial efforts to clean up messy gender (and prostitution) in colonies like British India, where there were substantial populations of non-cisgender indigenes.

For the TERFs dogpiling on my op-ed, not only does trans activism undermine feminism (writ large), but feminist criticism from the left of feminism is antifeminism. It silences women, or so the silenced women in question tell the world every other day on talk shows—or in the pages of the Guardian and (since circa 2021) the New York Times.

By joining in the belittlement of one’s group, one gambles on the chance of being marked as an exception, and thus getting to be part of mankind.

It is possible not to idealize an abused wife even while imagining solidarity with her. Solidarity, actually, requires us not to idealize. Think of the daughter at the heart of the Magic Flute custody battle—she is never consulted on her views, nor would we need her innocence in order to support her. Feminists, perhaps, should try to avoid heroes. No girlbosses, no heroines, no masters.

Any ideology premised on women being either “the goodies” or “victims” would, after all, definitionally have nothing to offer my enraged-yet-suicidal mom.

Every child deserves access to what is currently white upper-class childhood. That is, the right not to pay for ignorance with their life, and space to safely fall off cliffs.

Any one of these things can surely be attacked, for starters, in the name of a sex-egalitarian world? Easier, anyway, than figuring out what unmaking the mode of production that underlies the logic of gender would entail. Easier to visualize the problem as a glass ceiling, a wage differential, an office sex pest, a pimp, a foreign rapist, a male doctor, a husband’s drunkenness, “the” penis, or “gender ideology.” We can destroy these things—right?—by legislating against outrages to motherhood and girlhood; against porn, the veil, sex work, sexual misconduct, intemperance, workplace discrimination, or trans self-determination.

My worry, following Schuller, is that it seems easier for the culture to talk about “white feminism” as a simple matter of “things that were done by feminists who are white” than it is to wrestle with the notion of a feminism that has whiteness baked into its very core.

All in all, a great deal of feminisms have imagined their central subject as hardworking, nondisabled, healthful, and prosthesis-free—these being the unspoken complements to a womanhood that is life-giving (or at least pro-family), economically independent (or at least aspiring), nonviolent (or at least law-abiding), and “self-respecting” (not a body modifier or a bottom).

Feminism is necessarily central to any meaningful anti-fascism. But this does not mean that it is always anti-fascist or even non-fascist. We can’t just bank on that. Rather, our task is to conspire toward a world where women, if that word still exists, will still be horrible and not horrible, but where counterrevolutionary feminism has been stripped of its capacity for violence, and even our feminism is, happily, obsolete.

Mary topped the charts partly because she equated women’s liberty with ideas about Britain’s destiny as a progressive imperial power.

It was thought, for example, that black women had to evolve up to the condition of private cisheteropatriarchal gender, before they moved onto anything else. The feminist novelist and eugenicist Charlotte Perkins Gilman detested the gender division of spheres when it came to white people, but also believed, on the basis of new evolutionary science that the housewife-breadwinner dyad was the highest ambition befitting all “primitives.”

If the goal behind politicizing the “bloodstain’d” commodity of sugar was to bend the gendered ideology of separate spheres—public versus private—then early imperial feminists also contrived to shore up that very dyad by pushing black women precisely into the ideal of marriage they themselves were exiting.

This neo-Britannia was independent, unconfined, and self-sufficient: a well-bred lady and yet, possibly, a wage-earner (how modern!). She was still massively racist.

I have no investment in claiming that Mary Wollstonecraft invented imperial feminism, but she supplied certain templates for feminist reasoning—by analogy to race, with macho reference to national interest, and through the posit of “our” children’s need for mother’s moral authority—that have contributed heavily to the genre.

Today, Western feminists owe it to the rest of the world to take a hard look at the echoes between the antiquated program of sending the “enslaved” Englishwoman overseas, which built indirectly on Wollstonecraft to promote well-educated women as ideal colonists, and the Islamophobic “femonationalisms” and feminist “enlightened fundamentalisms” of our era, which romanticize “empowered” saviorists and aid volunteers, or trumpet women’s suffering under Islamist regimes, only to ban women from wearing the hijab on European beaches.

It is highly likely, then, that Sojourner Truth never said ain’t I, ar’n’t I, or am I not a woman. Not literally, writes the African American studies professor Imani Perry. But “she said it symbolically through her work, through her ‘shadows’”—Truth’s term for the photographic portraits she sold of herself, as cartes de visite. Via these cards, if nowhere else, white women were forced to look at and consider Sojourner’s gender.

Most egregiously of all, she wrote that the “sibyl” thought little of feminism, implying that abolition and woman suffrage were unrelated causes in a “race” activist’s mind, and therefore that Stowe and Truth could not be fighting the same fight.

In Women, Race & Class (1983), Angela Davis stresses the high intensity of gender-class militancy that existed in the US among mill women in the 1820s and ’30s. Hundreds of large-scale “turn-outs” and strikes by textile employees protested “the double oppression they suffered as women and as industrial workers”

Often dressed up in a Bébé Bwana–esque iconography of feminine purity, armored courage, and radiant whiteness, feminist Zionism has cheered the elimination, via starvation or bombs, of millions of people from the Gaza Strip, well over a year.50 Celebrated in the pages of the New York Times and Daily Mail as “lionesses of the desert,”51 the colonizing queens in the Israeli army—self-styled as enlightened rape avengers—have proven indispensable in the smearing of the global pro-Palestine movement as antisemitic and antifeminist.

it is not only on Game of Thrones that the feminism of the “civilizer” ends in mass slaughter. In the real world, too, historically unprecedented quantities of hell-fire rain on open-air prisons in the name of keeping women safe, and amputated limbs signal woman’s contribution to science and commerce. Genocide is sometimes feminist.

Thus, if Butler truly wanted to abolish the sex-caste system, she needed to stoke the world’s appetite for a revolution in the very gender division of labor. To give another example, dear to my heart, the horizon of care deprivatization known as “abolition of the family” only destroys care in the way that slave emancipation destroyed humanism: it flips it by universalizing and overhauling it, thereby realizing its promise, such that a form of kinship uncoerced by economics becomes possible at last.

Just as temperance allowed women to blame something (booze) for male violence other than marriage and the institution of the private nuclear household, the focus on prostitution, too, was a focus on extrafamilial evil. As such, even the least carceral neo-abolitionists’ obsession with the victimization of the prostitute was, in the end, conservative, and unable to transcend the sexual morality bifurcating women into the groups respectable and fallen.

Today’s “sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists” display a markedly prohibitionist bent—epitomized by their so-called “Nordic model” policy, which nominally criminalizes only the buyers of sex, while pushing sex workers ever deeper underground and coercing them into government-run “exit” programs. This presents a striking contrast to the anti-statism of the surprisingly left-libertarian Josephine Butler, who wanted the police, the medical authorities, and the state generally out of women’s lives.

Whereas sex-worker liberation theorists and feminist organizers in the sex industry have always built platforms from the “workers’ inquiry” up (a perspective some call “sex workers against work”69), Jeffreys, on the contrary, suggests sex workers have nothing to offer feminism. “Studying prostitutes to explain prostitution,” she writes, “is as useful as examining the motives of factory workers to explain the existence of capitalism.”70 Quite useful, then?!

It is instructive to notice the tension between belief in the purity of womanhood generally and the caveat, in the same sentence, that only the “highest type of womanhood”—no doubt maternal, Protestant, and white—is deserving of freedom.

What, though, should grateful daughters in Zarephath use their “hard-won” vote to accomplish? Why, restoring the sanctity of the color line established via slavery, of course.

White violence is always legitimate violence because, in America, it is the police. Lynching is feminism and feminism is the armed wing of the state, because, as White observed, “women have always been the greater sufferers under the violation of law; and those who stand for law-enforcement are the espousers of woman’s cause.”

Lynching did not improve white women’s lives one iota, but lying to oneself about the real source of one’s vulnerability can be an attractive panacea. A woman swallows her own conspiracist and pseudoscientific bullshit about Black men’s savage lasciviousness, even though it bears no or little resemblance to her lived experience or empirical reality, because it’s easier than indicting her own husband, uncle, priest, dad, or the family form itself.

In the US, comparable alt-right figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Ayla Stewart, Lana Lokteff, and Lauren Southern—who are every bit as Islamophobic—typically frame themselves instead as antifeminists, evangelizing racial honor, the “trad” life, and women’s return to the domestic sphere. At the same time, it is not uncommon for these “white baby challenge”-touting “wives with a purpose” to claim feminism as a good whenever doing so feels strategic: “When will we learn that pushing women into the workforce at the expense of our kids is NOT feminist?” and so on.

She frames the self-reliance and safety that come with “concealed carry” laws as “real feminism.” Her moral touchstone and constant refrain is the trope of “the most vulnerable and defenseless human beings,” in whose service Christian gun rights become “the true meaning of the feminism movement.”65 It is perfectly clear, however, from her ambassadorship for the fascist group Turning Point USA, that the “self-defensive” firepower she is championing is to be placed in the hands of a nationalist sexual elite and used on depraved racialized others.

Like the National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch, whose rageful You-Tube videos threaten “every rapist, domestic abuser, violent, criminal thug, and every other monster who preys upon women”67 with imminent (and preemptive), bloody retribution, Okafor conjures a spectral, ignoble male figure with one hand and brandishes a holy automatic at him with the other.

The offer that the feminism of lynchers makes to white women is a devil’s bargain, drawing us into the rewards of whiteness as property if we sign away our solidarity—a wicked compensation for our lack of ownership of other forms of property in capitalist societies.

Klan feminism, after all, is structurally compatible with child sexual abuse even while rhetorically condemning it, since its figuration of sexual threat shores up the sanctity of the familial unit as a stronghold against stranger danger.

Quite the opposite. I would rather honor the history of feminist anti-fascism even as I—because I—attend to the non-synonymity of feminism and anti-fascism. This, to me, seems like the best way to strengthen the arts by which we do turn feminism and anti-fascism into synonyms, via struggle, contingently.

“Let’s add women and stir” has been pleaded for as an alternative to abolishing the police in America since the near lynching of Rodney King by cops in 1991.

It’s a vision of unpatriotic masculinity soothed into submission by uniformed womanhood—at least, womanhood with a badge. The colonial vision of social work it conjures is armed, yet sensitive.

Feminism means cutting the lady cop some slack. Even if she’s “an imperfect protagonist,” the trail of women’s empowerment she’s on is blazed by weapons with state-backed legitimacy. Her feminism is a disciplinary saviorism, a fantasy of a benevolently undemocratic route to sisterhood. Feminist progress, for the cop feminist, is something she can impose from above, compassionately, but also, if need be, coercively. What is she here for? To rescue all of society, and sometimes (especially) to use her womanly instincts to rescue other women—even from themselves.

“We can’t arrest our way to feminist utopia,” notes the feminist labor journalist Melissa Gira Grant, “but that has not stopped influential women’s rights organizations from demanding that we try.”

Why were none of the strippers present at this protest? Weren’t we fundraising for them or something? Was our protest messing with their earnings? I asked a couple of women, but they didn’t know either. Then it dawned on me that no one had even mentioned the dancers over the megaphone. In fact, the more I listened, the more it seemed that we were saying it wasn’t them who were harmed by the club so much as us—the women of the town whose dancing wasn’t on sale. Our message to the lewd business operation was pretty much just “not in our back yard,” I realized.

“How has it come to pass,” asked Alice Echols in 1984, another lesbian feminist, “that some lesbians are in the forefront of a movement which has resurrected terms like ‘sexual deviance’ and ‘perversion?’”

Moral panic had clearly set in. Queer liberation’s light, Amber realized, was dwindling pitifully. The media had institutionalized the feminist anti-porn lawyer Catharine MacKinnon as the spokeswoman for a women’s struggle that she’d barely even participated in.

Joan describes a bitter and crazy new reality: “Lesbian-feminists will turn us in and feel they have made the world safer for women by doing so.” Clearly both historical analogies—the Red Scare and the purity drives—are illuminating. Nestle uses both: “I almost think I have lived too long when I see Lesbians become members of the new vice squad.”

The originator of the phrase “the future is female,” Sally Gearhart, thought that the “proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.”37 Protecting the flock by culling the wolves (in other words, committing androcide) probably sounds reasonable if, like Susan Brownmiller, you are willing to make the claim that “anatomical fiat” decrees human females “natural prey” and human males “the predator,” based on the “inescapable construction” of “genital organs.”

The “new” theory, in a nutshell, was the exceedingly defeatist, conservative, biologically determinist, and anti-utopian view that “nature” unites all women via their cellular potential for motherhood.

The girlboss was born in a conversion-redemption story. “I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam,” the term’s key popularizer Sophia Amoruso wrote in her memoir #Girlboss (2014), “but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy. You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen.”8 Funnily enough, Marx also called capitalism a kind of alchemy, albeit his take was that—to be a capitalist—you combine other people’s work with something you own.

To state the obvious: a wannabe boss, of any gender, espouses the hope of one day being an owner and a dominator instead of a hustler, let alone a comrade. Deep down, we know this; we know the matter is not actually remotely complicated, and that, as journalist Nicole Froio sums it up, “all girlbosses are bastards.”

Does an ambitious woman not deserve to exploit the wage relation, procuring herself a housekeeper, thereby freeing herself up for public feminist accomplishments? Why should the onus not to do so fall particularly on women, who are already at a disadvantage? Remember that Anglo-feminism, in its earliest days, promised middle-class women economic freedom in the form of emigration to a land where servants were “cheap.” In this way, it was imperial feminists claiming racial exceptionalism that paved the way for capitalist feminists claiming moral exceptionalism.

The First Lady may have dissed the girlboss, in other words, but she did not state the obvious—that both shattering glass ceilings at Fortune 500 firms (à la Sandberg) and letting family come first (à la Slaughter) does less than nothing for people scrubbing the floors at both Facebook HQ and the homes of ruling-class politicians.