Femmephilia: Femininity Against Nature

The Anglophone word “femme” carries a freight borne of many decades of anti-ontological proletarian sex-pleasure. It refers, specifically, to self-consciously artificial femininity, in other words, the collective arts of "girl stuff" deployed against cisness. This is why all revolutionary feminism must be femmephilic, or so it is here argued—because our fight as feminists is not with femininity at all, but with femininity’s abuse. Let us at last confront the false antithesis between the feminine and the feminist, which has dogged cisnormative gender-emancipatory thought for two centuries. Certainly, when bourgeois respectability, white beauty, modesty, servility and hetero-sexiness are compelled from feminized people—when we disproportionately are evaluated as people on the basis of our niceness, and when we are unjustly enjoined toward selflessness—then feminine comportment would seem, straightforwardly, to suck. When, in other words, the privilege of crafting, mending, pleasing, or comforting human beings is gendered, the privilege appears like a burden and a curse. Crucially, though, femininity itself overflows the dams and pipes laid out for it by the Man. It is impossible for “him” to divert it completely. It is more than man-made. Hence the task of abolitionists, if and when we meet with unfreedom in this domain, is to destroy the unfreedom, not the eros. Far from incidental, then, to the horizon of care’s communization, the non-identitarian universalization of femme genderlabor ought to be understood as a primary front of anticolonial and antiwork class struggle.
Sophie Lewis's lecture will be followed by a conversation between Lewis and NYU faculty member Emma Heaney. This event is Organized by the Department of Performance Studies, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, with additional support from XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement.
BIO:
Sophie Lewis is a writer and self-described “recovering academic” who lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her essays appear everywhere from the LRB to n+1, and you can follow or support her writing at patreon.com/reproutopia/or lasophielle.org/. Sophie is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Girlbosses and Policewomen Against Liberation (2025). Her forthcoming books include the essay collection Femmephilia (Haymarket, June 2026), and a monograph from Penguin Random House: The Liberation of Children (2027).

Emma Heaney is a Clinical Associate Professor in the XE Program at NYU. She is a scholar of comparative literature, trans studies, and Marxist Feminism. She's the author of The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory and This Watery Place: Four Essay on Gestation. She's the editor of Feminism Against Ciesnss. Ghost Cousins, a study of the literary reflection of the historical disarticulation of transess from gayness, is forthcoming in 2026. She is currently editing a collection of essays that demonstrate the centrality of cisness to both bourgeois state formation and colonial conquest, entitledProvincializing Cisness.

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