Femmephilia: Essays Against Nature by Sophie Lewis

Femmephilia: Essays Against Nature  by Sophie Lewis
Publishes 16 June
 
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 institutionalized. 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 politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. Femme labors 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 feminized people.
 
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'Sophie Lewis’s love letters to the femmes at the heart of femme-inism are fun, sad, erudite, full of longing and urgency. Whether she is reminding us of Marilyn Monroe’s intellect, rewriting the story of Daphne, transing mermaids, cruising utopia with Monique Wittig or writing about octopus sex, she is funny, irreverent, and sharp as newly manicured nails. This is the right moment for a book of essays on the pleasures, the potential and the awesome power of femininity.' - Jack Halberstam
 
'What better time than an emergency to join Sophie Lewis in ‘squinting at’ and struggling for the femmunist horizon. In that lush future, we’ll work little and care often. The disrespectable, the soft, the creaturely—all are welcome.' - Heather Berg, author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism
 
'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, world-making, 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, author of Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment