Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe with Sophie Lewis

Yeah, just as a quick kind of start to the conversation, I always like to have guests introduce themselves.

So maybe for listeners who haven't heard of you or aren't too familiar with your work, could you just give us a quick pitch for what you tend to write and focus on?

Yeah, absolutely.

So my name is Sophie Lewis.

I was in academia for several years in lots of different disciplines, beginning with English literature and moving into political theory and political science and environmental science and human geography.

Very promiscuous.

And then I actually quit academia and became a freelance writer full time.

But I My first book was based on my PhD, which was about the commercialization and industrialization in a way of pregnancy.

So commercial gestational surrogacy.

And paradoxically, the sorts of very... potentially anti-capitalist things we can glimpse by looking at the difference or the and the you know the purported differences between uh surrogacy contracts and quote unquote natural motherhood um and that was this kind of you know attempt to reach back into histories of wages for housework extended to the work of pregnancy, which we can come back to since we're going to be picking up on that, I think potentially later in the book we're talking about now.

And then I wrote a follow-up to Full Surrogacy Now, which is not a PN to the capitalist surrogacy industry, but rather a sort of very anti-capitalist approach that nonetheless refuses the distinction, you know, in a way, the exceptionalization of surrogacy.

And I wrote Abolish the Family, which is a very short book introducing the topic of the communization of care to a lay audience.

And it's a very old part of surrogacy.

left socialist utopian anarchist politics to call for the abolition of the private nuclear household, the family form.

And then my most recent book before this one was a book called Enemy Feminisms, which similarly provided a history, but this time in much greater depth of, in a sense, the dark side of women's emancipationist politics in the West and in particular the Anglophone world.

And that was an attempt to really invigorate and clear psychical space for people to have a relationship with feminism that was less confused and less disarmed by feminism.

the phenomenon we see uh uh more and more in our present conjuncture of um you know trans exclusionary uh and you know deeply islamophobic and other formations of um you know bourgeois capitalist sort of feminism claiming feminism which leads to this kind of gesture on the left's part of saying well that's not real feminism which is very understandable nonetheless doesn't give us weapons to fight with or space to maneuver in as anti-fascists.

So I wanted to kind of provide a bestiary and a way of reading history that shows us that we have bad kin as feminists that are not just none of our business, but might be in the house, in the family house of feminism at the same time as they are enemies, serious enough to warrant fighting as such.

You know, not disagreeing with in some cases, but literally treating as antagonists in a class struggle.

So Enemy Feminisms came out in 2025 and covers all kinds of things from pro-life feminists to trans exclusionary feminists.

to police feminism and its long history, to KKK feminism, fascinatingly, and to the synthesis between suffragism or suffragettism and the black shirt fascist movement in Britain.

So, you know, that's where I've recently been.

And this new, most recent collection is quite a different shift in tone.

It's called Femmophilia, and it's certainly perceived by my readers as much, much more, you know, quote unquote, positive and less sort of scary, even though I think the politics are kind of the same underneath the cover.

It's fascinating how a title can really make all the difference.