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Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic, freelance writer, and self-proclaimed killjoy whose work has sewn many disparate threads of feminism into an ever-expanding quilt, one worth passing down forever. Her newest book, Femmephilia, is a collection of essays in defense and celebration of the femme, ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Diane di Prima. In it, Lewis argues that the policing of "frivolous," self-consciously artificial femininity, the lip gloss, the ornamentation, the appetite, is not a trivial matter but a front in a much larger class war. Lewis is also the author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms, and is currently at work on a book about children's liberation.
Shadowbanned contributor Johanna Summer spoke with Lewis about girlhood shame, fatphobia and transvestigation, the feminist contempt for Marilyn Monroe, and what it means to fight not just for fairness, but for the good life.
Johanna Summer: When I started Femmephilia I was immediately thinking about my own girlhood, specifically being young and negotiating between how I could indulge in the joy of femmeness, but also be taken seriously. Did you have experiences in your own girlhood that inspired your approach to feminism?
Sophie Lewis: I have this memory of going to a friend's birthday party — I was maybe 10 — and, amazingly to me, her father wouldn't let me in unless I took the glitter off my lips. I'd been so excited about it, decorating my lips with red paint and glitter for the party. I laughed because I thought he couldn't be serious, but he was completely serious. On top of that, the girls at the party weren't allowed to play some of the games the boys were. And that hasn't particularly changed, right? Many people have told me they feel they can't be taken seriously lecturing in an academic or business context if they're wearing makeup that will be viewed as frivolous — as trivializing the speaker, incompatible with intellect and authority. Or, if you want to push it further, incompatible with full personhood, because the way self-consciously artificial femininity is policed and punished in the economy of everyday social transactions is linked to depersonalization and dehumanization.
There's something surprisingly subversive about claiming intellectual authority from a position of abundant self-ornamentation, you know? Even though that's a very historically contingent logic — monarchs in history who were male had extremely flamboyant self-presentation — but okay, I'm getting off topic.
JS: I mean, you still remember the shame you felt over the lip gloss and the confusion of why these things seem to be mutually exclusive.
SL: Yeah, real shame, burning up. Actually, not a thousand miles from that moment: I once took a crepe into a field of long grass and flowers. I don't know how old I was — let's say 6 or 7 — and I had such a nice time among the flowers with my crepe full of Nutella. When I came back, all these grown-ups were standing around drinking wine, and they laughed at me because apparently I had chocolate all over my face. There was something about the excess of that chocolate enjoyment — the indecorum, the appetitive too-muchness of enjoying my crepe as a girl who was already chubby. The intense shame I felt has material links to the coloniality of fatphobia and the disciplining of feminized flesh to be as unobtrusive, as small, as contained as possible — and certainly not smearing pleasure all over itself.
It's really fascinating to me how much fatphobia I get from TERFs. There's one TERF who blogged about how much fatter I'd gotten since the last time I lectured. She puts at the top, "This isn't very feminist of me to say, but…" — and it's like, yeah, let's hear it! There's something interesting there on the enemy-feminism front: the idea that feminism is somehow betrayed by the association of the female sex with triviality or self-indulgence. There's a direct conceptual link between that embarrassment — that repudiation of girliness and fatness — and the feminist machismo I'm trying to theorize under the rubric of cisness. We can be feminists against cisness without being trans. We can view the history of feminism, as Emma Heaney invites us to, as a history against cisness — without saying that all feminisms were trans, but recognizing that cisness is body policing, respectability politics, and counterrevolution within feminism.
I'm not saying I'm at the sharp end of any of this systemic violence personally — and that's actually the point. But it's perhaps illustrative of where we're at societally in the class war that I get emails at least once a week that are either fat-shaming or transvestigating me. I got one a few days ago saying that my hairline is as regressive as my views on gender, and then the body of the email said, "That's a male pattern boldness joke, you freak." You don't want to respond to that with, "LOL, well, you got this one wrong," because that's the wrong response. It's like: actually, I pit myself against the logic of cisness you're imposing. Whether or not they have the endogenous sexuation of my particular body wrong misses the point of what they're totally accurately imposing — which is a class war between what I think we can call femmes, the left politicization of femininity, the ensemble of humanity relegated and pulled toward the making of the good life, and those who would capture it into production and reproduction. So, correct: I'm not a convincing woman, and I'm fat. How does that invalidate anything I'm saying?
JS: I wanted to ask a question surrounding this phrase you quote in Enemy Feminisms, "feminism of fear," because I think it has to do so much with fatphobia, transvestigating and policing the self. I wanted to connect it to how in Femmephilia, you talk a little bit, surrounding the Dworkin book Scapegoat, about how violence perpetuated by women is supposedly validated by their supposed victimhood in the same way that Israel's violence is somehow validated by the Holocaust, which is a great denial of the actual harm being done. As if trans women are responsible for patriarchy, as if Palestinians are responsible for violence against Jews. I love "feminism of fear" because it acknowledges how fear can act as a sort of psychosis or brings out an inherent fascism in people who identify with social liberalism. It's a distraction of placing blame on the other instead of interrogating where that fear is coming from. Do you have any thoughts on how people can free themselves from this mindset?
SL: I remember, when I was 19, trying to impress a butch by commenting judgmentally on the makeup and clothing choices of a bunch of women out on the street, getting drunk at night. I got clipped for that — very rightly so. I realized I was just mouthing an opinion I thought my mom would have mouthed: that this was somehow embarrassing, trashy, reprehensible. I'm not trying to create a simple narrative of how people can be, like, deradicalized from femmephobia, but the Marilyn essay that opens the collection is linked to these questions, which I get very intense about within the Dworkin context.
I got quite deep into what Dworkin's contemporaries were saying about Marilyn Monroe in the '60s and '70s, and there was an absolutely breathtaking amount of contempt for Marilyn from women's liberationists. What I try to suggest is that Marilyn is one of many figures at that limit point of society's ability to tolerate almost, like, trans individuality. She represents something that threatens private property and the nation by being so open with herself as a purposive gift. It's quite threatening. I'm not saying anyone has to like it, but I am saying the contempt is deeply reactionary.
And I see it as well in the discourse around Bonnie Blue — someone I happen to like a lot less than I like Marilyn Monroe, but whom I also want to defend against a certain kind of contempt that I think is extremely damaging to the horizons of liberation for real living things. I will have criticisms of figures like Bonnie Blue and Katy Perry all day — they are reactionary figures who happen to be feminine — but if we're going to concentrate our ire somewhere, let it be against fascism, against class. Not against the self-conscious artificiality of femininities.
JS: Marilyn is obviously a big part of Femmephilia, and I'm wondering what other media sticks out to you as emblematic or inspiring of a feminist utopia in the same way that Marilyn's work does for you.
SL: Do you have any ideas to get me started?
JS: I've been very comforted by John Waters' work in the last year. I was also recently watching the Little Richard documentary, which is a fascinating cultural moment. He is so beautiful and femme, but he ends up being harmful to queer people through his own fear and religious self-suppression. But at the same time, he directly inspires John Waters and so many other queer musicians and art makers.
SL: Those are fantastic. I was thinking about Divine, and about my partner — when she was pre-transition and the vocalist of a band called Vulture Shit, people used to tell her, without knowing if it was okay, because she hadn't necessarily understood her personal identity yet, that she reminded them of Divine. She reminded me of Divine, too, and there was something so beautiful about that.
I've also been thinking about the Latin American tradition of travesti, puta, and sex-worker feminist writing. There's a book called (So What) If I'm a Puta: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira. There's also The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada, which reminded me of this feminist horizon. And the lives of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Candy Darling, and Bambi. I like Tourmaline's biography of Marsha, which pays attention to the histories of beautification labor as revolutionary — like, we need bread with our roses, and hormones, too. Otherwise, what literally is the point of defeating the ruling class? We have to be fighting for something better than just fairness. We have to be fighting for the good life.
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The glitter was never the problem. Neither was the chocolate, the makeup, or the fat. These were never the real issue. They were just excuses to police people who dared to enjoy themselves openly. Lewis doesn't argue that we should tone it down. She urges us to see the conflict for what it is. Femme excess belongs in the struggle for class liberation because the fight has never been just about getting by or making things fair. It's about everyone having the right to live a full, joyful, abundant life.
Femmephilia is available now.
