Sep 25, 2026 · 1 hr 25 min · 16 segments
This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this…
Sophie LewisGuestStephen DozmanHostYeah, I mean, that brings me right into my first question, which is on this book that we're discussing.
So I first want to kind of set the stage for this conversation by asking about the overarching intention with the book, which as I read it, it felt like it was trying to recover and put together a certain idea of femininity and put that in dialogue with this kind of utopian anti-capitalist politics that you've got running through much of your other work.
I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to that reconstruction you're trying to put together, albeit from a number of different angles.
Well, the interesting thing about Femphilia, and I mean, the full title that was given to it was Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe, is that it does, in fact, continue the care, communizational, and even the enemy feminisms work.
And It is an essay collection and the majority of the pieces inside it were in fact worked on and commissioned over the last years, even though they have been reworked for this format and this particular anthology, if you like, together with new pieces and an introduction.
And when I say the gesture I'm often making, I should have perhaps finished introducing myself to say I am literally a freelance writer.
This is one of the rare cases in the world where this is more or less making ends meet.
So I wanted to say that because methodologically, I think a lot of culture workers obfuscate the material conditions of their, you know, their knowledge production.
So when I mentioned editors commissioning the pieces, that's literally, you know, the way around it is.
I don't have an academic job which enables me to have funding to seek abstractly what I might like to look at.
I have to bend as a as a working writer, the requests into a shape that kind of suits me and can be workable for my project, my political project.
I situate myself above all within, you know, a political abolitionist, revolutionary feminist, anti-capitalist kind of project.
And writing is, you know, complexly the thing I do both to that end and, you know, so that I can eat.
But I'm delineating all the time between the capitalist capture of gendered forms of labor and the dimension of that same labor, that same stuff.
those same aesthetics, those same sort of relational effects that is not completely captured.
And so to be more specific, you know, gender itself is something we have to understand as simultaneously an imposition, like a dehumanizing way of subjecting us to a form of labor discipline.
There is also a pull, a magnetic pull of affinity and a tiny filament of pleasure and of life-making inventivity and creativity and relationality.
It's very difficult to hold on to the bothness the way that things are both, you know, destroying us and still retain a dimension that is full of life.
And that's actually the way I look at femininity, right? The word femme exists, in my opinion, historically, has been theorized by, you know, lumpenproletarian theorists you know, sex workers and lesbians and other forms of, you know, creative, you know, queer innovators in a sense, because there is this need, this political need on the ground for a word that recognizes that capitalist femininity is indeed bad and yet does not succeed in completely capturing femininity as a whole.
And so femme is this word that has emerged from movement, from sexuality, right, from butchery.
Yeah, I mean, that brings me right into my first question, which is on this book that we're discussing.
So I first want to kind of set the stage for this conversation by asking about the overarching intention with the book, which as I read it, it felt like it was trying to recover and put together a certain idea of femininity and put that in dialogue with this kind of utopian anti-capitalist politics that you've got running through much of your other work.
I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to that reconstruction you're trying to put together, albeit from a number of different angles.
Well, the interesting thing about Femphilia, and I mean, the full title that was given to it was Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe, is that it does, in fact, continue the care, communizational, and even the enemy feminisms work.
And It is an essay collection and the majority of the pieces inside it were in fact worked on and commissioned over the last years, even though they have been reworked for this format and this particular anthology, if you like, together with new pieces and an introduction.
And when I say the gesture I'm often making, I should have perhaps finished introducing myself to say I am literally a freelance writer.
This is one of the rare cases in the world where this is more or less making ends meet.
So I wanted to say that because methodologically, I think a lot of culture workers obfuscate the material conditions of their, you know, their knowledge production.
So when I mentioned editors commissioning the pieces, that's literally, you know, the way around it is.
I don't have an academic job which enables me to have funding to seek abstractly what I might like to look at.
I have to bend as a as a working writer, the requests into a shape that kind of suits me and can be workable for my project, my political project.
I situate myself above all within, you know, a political abolitionist, revolutionary feminist, anti-capitalist kind of project.
And writing is, you know, complexly the thing I do both to that end and, you know, so that I can eat.
But I'm delineating all the time between the capitalist capture of gendered forms of labor and the dimension of that same labor, that same stuff.
those same aesthetics, those same sort of relational effects that is not completely captured.
And so to be more specific, you know, gender itself is something we have to understand as simultaneously an imposition, like a dehumanizing way of subjecting us to a form of labor discipline.
There is also a pull, a magnetic pull of affinity and a tiny filament of pleasure and of life-making inventivity and creativity and relationality.
It's very difficult to hold on to the bothness the way that things are both, you know, destroying us and still retain a dimension that is full of life.
And that's actually the way I look at femininity, right? The word femme exists, in my opinion, historically, has been theorized by, you know, lumpenproletarian theorists you know, sex workers and lesbians and other forms of, you know, creative, you know, queer innovators in a sense, because there is this need, this political need on the ground for a word that recognizes that capitalist femininity is indeed bad and yet does not succeed in completely capturing femininity as a whole.
And so femme is this word that has emerged from movement, from sexuality, right, from butchery.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.