Sophie Lewis on «Femmephilia: Femininity Against Cisness»

The Anglophone word “femme” bears a very special conceptual freight borne of many decades of anti-ontological proletarian sex-pleasure. It refers, specifically, to self-consciously artificial femininity, in other words, the collective arts of “girl stuff” deployed against cisness. This is why all revolutionary feminism must be femmephilic, as Sophie Lewis will argue in this colloquium: because our fight as feminists is not with femininity at all, but with femininity’s abuse. Far from incidental to the horizon of care’s communization, the non-identitarian universalization of femme genderlabor ought to be understood, she proposes, as a major site of rehearsal for the future, and a primary front of the anticolonial and antiwork class struggle.

Sophie Lewis is an independent feminist scholar living in Philadelphia, who hails originally from the UK, France, and Germany. Before becoming a full-time freelance writer, Dr Lewis studied literature, politics, and the environmental humanities, earning her four degrees at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and the New School for Social Research in New York. Today, she is a recognized theorist of care communization and queer utopias whose work has been translated into many languages. Her essays appear everywhere from the London Review of Books to n+1, and anyone is welcome to enroll in her short philosophy courses, taught online at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Sophie is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Girlbosses and Policewomen Against Liberation (2025), and the essay collection Femmephilia (Haymarket, June 2026). Her next book, The Liberation of Children, is forthcoming from Penguin (2027). You can follow or support Sophie’s writing at patreon.com/reproutopia/ or lasophielle.org/.

Sophie will be online for the colloquium.

Preparation Reading

Introduction to Femmephilia (Haymarket, June 2026). Available as a paper copy from CML (not for distribution).