I didn’t read Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms, strictly speaking; I listened to it on audiobook, which means that I retain more of a vibe-like mental image of the text than the sort of precise recall (together with the ability to actually look things up on the page) that is useful for closely-argued response. So this is a post about that vibe-like mental image, the wafty impression I retain of what I heard, and some of the thoughts I had about what I was hearing as I was listening to it.
I should say at the outset that I thought it was a good book, and unquestionably worth closer engagement than it’s going to get from me here. The problem that emerged for me early on was trying to pull together a coherent picture of the friendly feminism, the comradely feminism capable of living with its own contradictions, from which and for which Lewis was writing.
The enemies were clearly demarcated: feminisms allied to, or articulated through, projects of colonial power, racial supremacy, bourgeois class consolidation, and the patriarchal classification of bodies and organisation through that classification of social roles and prerogatives. It’s not hard for instance to catch first wave feminists talking about the need to elevate “the race” by elevating its womenfolk, or projecting barbarous attitudes towards the status of women onto racial others. When eugenics was part of the lingua franca of bourgeois progressivism, bourgeois feminists expressed their hopes for progress in eugenic terms: good reproduction, both social and biological, lay in the hands and wombs of women, and they should enjoy a moral status commensurate with this responsibility. Sometimes this was opportunistic pursuit of a seat at the table; sometimes something more full-throatedly and ambitiously ideological. There are women in Lewis’s gallery of villains who went exuberantly above and beyond in their persecutory zeal or pursuit of personal glory. The book, it must be said, has a great deal of fun with them.
I am more inclined than Lewis is to view Mary Wollstonecraft sympathetically, as a thinker attempting a vindication of her own right to think, and to function outside of a ludicrously confined social role, in the terms available to her. Wollstonecraft evidently found “feminine” pursuits and prerogatives tiresome, and felt them unworthy of women’s (i.e. her own) intellectual powers. Lewis calls this femmephobia, a word I am still struggling to come to terms with.
The problem for me is that patriarchal complementarianism, the dividing up of the world into separate and unequal gender-stereotypes, needs a certain iconoclasm to dislodge it. I’m dissatisfied with simply saying “actually, femininity is for anyone who wants it”; I agree to a certain extent with the second wave feminist insistence that nobody should want it in its patriarchally-reified form, and that being told one must want it was one form amongst others of mental subjugation. That doesn’t mean I fundamentally object to frivolity in dress or manner, demonstrative emotional vulnerability, care for glamour and ornament, and so on. But these things don’t simply float free of their regimentation by broader patriarchal schemas, and sometimes you have to take a hammer to the mirror that’s imprisoning you.
I think it’s fair enough for someone like Wollstonecraft to respond to being constantly told that she cared too much about the wrong things1 by proclaiming that the things she was being told she must care about were stupid and beneath her. That is a very autistic thing to think and feel, and I feel an instinctive solidarity towards Wollstonecraft in her saying it, notwithstanding the unsisterliness of the sentiment. The point is, it’s a moment of negation, and I don’t feel that Lewis does justice to its motivating context or iconoclastic force: for her, it’s just a notable moment in a long history of enemy-feminist collusion in femmephobic disparagement of silly women’s stuff. I also don’t think it makes sense to enshrine Wollstonecraft’s disparagement of feminine pursuits as vacuous and intellectually enervating as an immutable feminist first-principle: we have it in us to negate the negation in our turn.
To put it very handwavily, I think the friendly-feminism Lewis gestures towards in Enemy Feminisms is a utopian feminism. I don’t mean that as a snarl word, as in “silly, thoughtless, impossible to realise practically” etc, but as a description of its attitude towards negation. The premise seems to be that provided the truly irreconcilable differences, the ones that make enemies of supposed friends, are named and clearly defined, to the exclusion of the enemies in question, we will be left only with differences of the kind that can be worked through together: differences of outlook and predicament, of temperament and intellectual framework. We will finally be able to work together towards the goals of what Janet Halley (who gets a surprising mention, just one, in the book) called “convergentist” feminism, which aims at a complete and consistent covering of all the bases of social justice. This feminism wants it all, morally speaking, and holds a firm axiomatic belief in the compossibility of goods.
I want to be clear that I don’t think this is a bad or silly idea per se. Transphobes have lately been getting a lot of mileage out of the notion that “trans rights” and “women’s rights” are unavoidably at odds, in a way that requires much head-scratching over edge cases, and ultimately the sort of “compromise” that means that trans rights, properly speaking, are at most provisionally recognised, if at all. The utopian response is to refuse the bait and demand a world in which rights are not dichotomised in this way: to insist, through prefigurative practice, that this world already is that world, if unevenly so, and that all we have to do is live in it. We do not have to accept the enemy’s negations, their phobic constructions of trans embodiment, or Islam, or sexuality unmoored from the reproduction of family structures. We can negate them immediately, and work from our own more hopeful premises.
Lewis’s term “full surrogacy” names the desire that the social field should be structured by inter-relatedness, inter-dependency, inter-subjectivity, but never inter-necine struggle. Actually, that’s not fair: in talking about abortion, for example, she clearly affirms that life and death, even life and killing, are inextricably entangled. She describes the process of gestation itself in vividly antagonistic terms. So, again, I want to dispel any sense that her utopianism makes her some sort of lightweight who doesn’t want to acknowledge ugly and conflictual realities. But I do want to suggest that surrogacy, in Lewis’s extended sense of collective and fungible nurture and world-making, can never be “full” (any more, perhaps, than can “automation”). The cost of trying to make it so will be the continual invention of further enemies.
I have occasionally used “caring too much about the wrong things” as a name for the supposedly disordered architecture of attention and investment that characterises some neurodivergent conditions: autistic “special interests” and the like.