TERFs, SWERFs and girlbosses: What do we do with ‘bad’ feminists?

The 2010s and 2020s have proven a vital, scary, and embattled period for feminism, full of both hard-fought gains and terrifying backlashes. They have also included a lot of useful criticism about what feminism should look like: criticisms of white feminism, middle-class feminism, feminisms against trans people and sex workers, corporate and consumerist feminism, and ‘girlboss’ culture. ‘That’s not real feminism,’ goes the refrain. But in rejecting bad feminism as not ‘real’ feminism, we may be conveniently airbrushing out the messiness of our ‘real’ feminist history.

“I spent over a decade equating feminism with ‘good’ politics,” writes Sophie Lewis, in her new book Enemy Feminisms. “No one ever explained to me that certain feminisms actively wreak a great deal of evil.” Lewis is a feminist theorist with a reputation as a radical thinker and firebrand: her third release proves characteristically eager to take on, and think carefully about, our closest-held truisms and comfort blankets. She takes us on a whistlestop tour through imperial campaigns, Ku Klux Klan cults, corporate boardrooms and abortion clinics, delving into the shameful and hidden grotesqueries of the feminist canon, and arguing that many feminists throughout history haven’t just been careless or complicit – they have actively been doing harm and doing feminism at the same time, in ways inextricable from each other. So, how do we handle feminism’s vulnerability to being used for counter-revolutionary ends?

We spoke to Lewis over Zoom about misogynist feminism, the fight over feminism’s borders, and her own experiences of ‘enmity’.

Your book’s chapter list is a kind of cast list of enemy feminists: The Policewoman, The Blackshirt, The Pro-Life Feminist. Was there a particular figure you started with when you were conceptualising the book, or did they all come into view at the same time?

Sophie Lewis: This book is quite long in its gestation; I started researching why SWERFs [sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists] are usually, or almost always, TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists], and reading a lot of trans-hostile material that understands itself as radical feminism, back in 2013. In my work through the 2010s, I kept coming back to this fantasy of cis womanhood in TERFism and SWERFism, where womanhood is this suffering-based concept that is innocent, and innocent because it’s unwaged, and that must be protected from those who betray the project of sisterhood by doing things that might imply a pleasure in being a woman – monetising their sexuality, in the case of sex workers, or ‘masquerading’ as women, in the case of trans women. So, the TERF probably came first. But I also grew up in France, which is a hotbed of anti-Islam feminism, and that taught me that women’s rights activism could manifest in ways that were not just ‘complicit’: they could be core actors in shaping the world in far-right ways. That’s a feminist move, right? To point out that feminism hasn’t just been a bit player in history.

So, do you think it would be accurate to say that you started from a somewhat more contemporary perspective, and pushed that further back into history as you were researching the book?

Sophie Lewis: Yes, though I was also drawing on foundational experiences with the historical origins of feminism. As a teenager, I think I was encouraged to be grateful to the suffragettes and to cultivate reverence towards someone like Mary Wollstonecraft, who was cool in some ways, with her engagement with the French Revolution and her strange horniness that she so badly wanted to beat down and repress. But once you grow up and revisit Vindication of the Rights of Woman critically, you realise she is making a peculiarly misogynistic argument for why women should get an education. Most of the text is about how badly women suck. Plus, the entire project is folded into an imperialist and racist argument that liberal feminist defenders and apologists for Wollstonecraft say is simply strategic, that her analogies to the Black enslaved man and the downtrodden oppressed ‘Oriental’ are just tactical and she somehow doesn’t mean them. I’m always amazed by the confident arguments that we can apologise for the racism and the imperialism, and then be left something that is pure and intact feminism – as though gender can even be conceptualised without racialisation, without class relations, without the context of colonialism.

I grew up in France, which is a hotbed of anti-Islam feminism, and that taught me that women’s rights activism could manifest in ways that were not just ‘complicit’

That desire to control the reception of historical women, and to pare away the complexities of their work, seems related to the other obsessions with control that recur throughout the book – controlling the bounds of womanhood, and literally controlling certain female populations, in the case of imperialist and police feminisms. I wonder if there’s a war of sorts going on here in feminism, between control and letting go of control. 

Sophie Lewis: You could also call it a struggle between those who consider real safety to come in through connectedness and openness, and those who think that bordering and fortress-building is the definition of women’s needs. There’s an inter-feminist struggle between people who don’t deny that the world is very full of violence and peril for those who are feminised, but who perceive carceral and protective kinds of solution to that as worse than nothing – who would rather persist in ‘seeking ecstasy on the battlefield’, as Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon put it rather beautifully in the late 70s, rather than inferring from the existence of danger that the responsible, ethical, moral, prudent sort of conduct for all of us is to batten down the hatches and wait for some kind of future post-patriarchal condition before we can start enjoying being embodied.

You’re in an interesting cultural position to write a book called Enemy Feminisms, given your own role in this kind of public struggle. You’re often conceived of as an enemy combatant in the eyes of opposing writers – as an existential threat, even.

Sophie Lewis: Yes, the way that I seem to feature in certain imaginations in the comment arena brings to mind the word ‘enmity.’ There does seem to be something about my thought that produces allergic meltdowns among certain other feminists. I take acid and share some thoughts about an octopus documentary, and apparently this is threatening civilisation and also, implicitly, the dignity of feminism. I would hope that I am writing about the drawing of lines that are not primarily in that chattering sphere of life. It’s not my priority. I’m not interested in getting into personal beefs… though of course everyone says that. But I’m hoping to cultivate an interest in collectives, in not being disarmed or demobilised as feminist collectives because there are feminisms on the side of the blackshirts and the Proud Boys and Girls and other monsters of our contemporary moment. I don’t care whether you think JK Rowling is a real feminist, but I do care if your impression and belief that she is one stops you from fighting her.

You mention in another interview that you’re focusing on feminisms that conceive of themselves as feminisms, but you talk a little about figures like far-right influencer Lauren Southern, and how they discuss misogyny in the alt-right. Is there a potential for people to be doing enemy feminisms who don’t even necessarily conceive of what they’re doing as feminism, or who conceive of it as anti-feminism?

Sophie Lewis: Yes, absolutely! Anti-feminism and feminism are strangely looped into one another and not actually fully extricable from one another. That’s something that certain kinds of thinkers can’t really grasp: surely they’re the opposite of each other? But gender is one of these messy, elusive things where as soon as you touch it, you’re risking reproducing it. Talking about it is almost impossible to do without reinscribing its power in a way you’re trying to exactly oppose. I mentioned the misogyny in western Anglophone feminism’s opening words, Wollstonecraft’s misogyny, identified many years ago by Susan Gubar to great shock. What? What? Misogynist feminism? But that’s exactly it – we don’t have clear bright lines. We have female anti-feminism and right-wing feminism, and they are distinct and sometimes overlapping, they’re difficult to extricate from each other. 

“Gender is one of these messy, elusive things where as soon as you touch it, you’re risking reproducing it. Talking about it is almost impossible to do without reinscribing its power in a way you’re trying to exactly oppose”

Both the heroisation and the villainisation of women are mentioned in the book as pleasures that may need to be given up to do better kinds of feminism. What other kinds of pleasure might we have to think about giving up?

Sophie Lewis: We’re all criss-crossed with the seductions of enemy forms of women’s power. One of the things I’m positing in this book is that in moments of counter-revolution within feminism, there arises movements to retrieve womanhood’s firmness and stability as a territory, with clear outlines, reliable borders. I do think there is a sort of structural yearning for ontological stability that I want to define in terms of a yearning for cisness, and which is driving some of the contemporary movement towards figures of separatism. I think ‘the woman’ has become something that people feel anxious about, because its borders have become a little hazy, and they want to make those borders clearer again by reviving what are, to me, not the treasures of the so-called ‘second wave’ – if we’re using waves, which, to be honest, I don’t – but its counter-revolutionary elements. There’s this desire for something simpler, something more satisfying to anchor yourself in. 

It’s in Margaret Atwood, as well, in the Handmaid’s Tale phenomenon. That is a world that is saying it is dystopian, the worst possible American dystopia, and yet there’s also this sense in its fandom that there is something utopian about the world where nobody can bloody criticise you for supporting Hillary anymore, because women are a sex class, all equally enslaved, and you don’t have to be so bloody conscious of your own privilege. That’s its own kind of regressive pleasure.

Are there any books you would recommend looking at after Enemy Feminisms? Where should people go next?

Sophie Lewis: Revolutionary Feminisms, edited by Brenna Bandar and Rafeef Ziadah, might be a good next step, not just because it’s a palate cleanser but also because it’s addressing the kind of antagonisms internal to feminism. Meanwhile, Serene Khadar’s Faux Feminism ostensibly has an exactly opposite take to mine, in thinking that these bad feminisms aren’t feminisms, but I think many of her arguments are interesting. She’s tackling a thing that terrifies me about our current conjuncture, which is the fact that liberal feminism’s catastrophic failure has left the terrain open for reactionary feminists and non-feminists to claim the terrain of care as theirs. 

I also end the book talking about Feminism Against Cisness, which Enemy Feminisms is deeply in conversation with. I think feminism is capable of being a great name for a sufficiently radical critique of capital in all its racialising and cissexualising dimensions, and I believe Emma Heaney is right that cisness is feminism’s counter-revolution; cisness, ultimately, demeans and brutalises us all. 

Enemy Feminisms is published by Haymarket Press and is out now.