In-Store: Sophie Lewis: Enemy Feminisms w/ Grace Byron

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
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• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/ExBJo-_ZtYQ
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From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.

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.

Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic Anglo-German writer based in Philadelphia whose writing has appeared everywhere from n+1 to the London Review of Books. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, both published by Verso, and you can support her at patreon.com/reproutopia, or lasophielle.org lists all her podcast appearances and articles. Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Liberation, from Haymarket, is her third book.

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens whose writing has appeared in The Cut, Vogue, LARB, The Baffler, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Find her @emotrophywife. Her debut novel Herculine is forthcoming from Saga Press in October.

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