Femmephilia

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, an original diagnosis of femmephobia in our culture, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

To be femme is to embody a dispossessed femininity, to be freighted with freedom, to refuse to be made proper or institutionalised. To love it is to embrace love for women (be they butch or not) in the broadest sense. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicised femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. Femme labours deserve our care, respect, and support, but instead face dismissal from masculinist antagonists and feminist allies alike.

Where neoliberal women's empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminised people.

'Femmephilia collects seventeen of Sophie Lewis' essays, drenched in excessive, decorative, provocative, seductive prose, devoted to expansive communist femmeinism, founded in the distinction between insurrectionist femme-ness and supposedly natural, normative femininity. The essays are a gorgeous, enthralling, essential addition to our collective intellectual, political and aesthetic wardrobe.' - Lisa Duggan, author of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

'Femmephilia - in the grand tradition of Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Raechel Anne Jolie, and Tourmaline - is a sublimely rendered paean to the sparkly, bold lip-wearing, gender mercurial, world-breaking, worldmaking, radical multitudinousness of femme. Brilliantly warping and weaving personal reflection and cultural criticism, each essay in Lewis' florilegium dazzles with its deconstruction of the mechanisms and machinations of femmephobia, while making a powerful case for us all to be femmephiles (and, bear with me, unabashed 'octophiles').' - Lucie Fielding, therapist, sex educator, and author of Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment and Gender-Pleasure