Book Info
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis (2025)
Genre: Nonfiction
LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/32671363/
Acquired from: Library (ebook)
Started reading: October 8, 2025
Finished reading: TBD
Reading Notes
0%: Started reading this to give my brain a little workout and so far it’s working! This is also the first ebook I’m doing a reading log for, and I haven’t decided how to mark down the annotation locations. Based on how my KOreader Sync plugin downloads things (eg without percentages), looks like it’s gonna be grouped under chapter titles.
From “Introduction: Women Are Not Horrible”
Re: why Britain has so many TERFs:
…a national culture of “no-nonsense” anti-utopianism prevails on TERF Island. The “commitment to misery, to being a “bloody difficult woman,’” as writer Asa Seresin puts it, notably by mocking and blocking others’ attempts at self-actualization, is one of the main things driving the stubborn insistence on anti-trans prejudice there
Re: why so many leftist/liberal activist groups end up being weirdly fascist about things:
It is sometimes forgotten that fascists understand themselves as an emancipatory anti-elite revolt against politics. Make no mistake: the point here isn’t that leftism is somehow closer to fascism than liberalism is, but that a fleeting radical instinct or canny inclination toward systemic analyses can, in some cases, slip, plunge, and turn into an enemy politics.
Chapter 2
“Feminist empowerment” through owning slaves like men— yikes
Discusses Sojourner Truth and the many misrepresentations and lies about her/her speeches by so-called allies eg the “Ain’t I a Woman” text was “reconstructed” by suffragist/abolitionist Frances Gage 12 years after it happened, and she used “supposedly archetypical Black plantation slave of the South” (quote from Donna Haraway) dialogue to do it despite ST being from New Amsterdam/New York. This was NEVER mentioned in any of the university classes I took where ST’s speech was assigned reading. wtf!
Chapter 3
This chapter is about white feminists “civilizing” non-white peoples (more or less).
A surprising amount of Victorian women travelers were imperialistic/racist/etc. It’s not so much they wanted to meet people and explore the world but more find freedom and POWER outside of the confines of Western white heterosexual life etc. Very few of them seem to learn anything about life outside of their home sphere and instead just want to confirm their own biases (or the biases of their readers, maybe). Or like, even if they meet locals and talk to them, they’re coming from a position of perceived superiority (see Freys Stark). It’s been a while since I read some of the oldest travel memoirs tho so I’ll have to check back on that later.
Word List
- co-imbrication
- echt feminism
- maroon feminism
- soidisant
- vertiginous
Book List
📚 Sojourner Truth by Nell Painter (1996)
📚 Spinsters Abroad by Dea Birkett
📚 Woman, Class & Race by Angela Davis (1983)
See also: Books Read (2025) / All Reading Logs
tozka | reading log: enemy feminisms by sophie lewis