Enemy Feminisms: An Evening with Sophie Lewis

"Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant." ―Judith Butler

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.

From the author of Abolish the Family, and huge Lighthouse favourite, comes an absolutely essential, honest and sharp-sighted love letter to feminism - the kind that has the potential to truly set us all free.

Join us as we welcome Sophie on her visit to the UK and let's make this an opportunity to come together, be inspired and envision the role of antifascist feminism in all our lives!

Our speaker:

Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She studied English Literature at Oxford University before pursuing graduate and postgraduate study in environmental theory, political science, and human geography, respectively at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University. However, Lewis now counts herself an ex-academic. Although her writing still appears in journals like Feminist Theory, TSQ, and Signs, she is making her living writing free-lance for magazines like n+1, Harper’s, and the LRB, newspapers like the New York Times, and art websites like e-flux.

Our chair:

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (2018). Nat has been involved in LGBTQ+ collective organising in Edinburgh, London and beyond for over a decade.

With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and their article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ was recently published in Social Text.

Nat’s creative and critical writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism, Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’), and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.