In Conversation with Sophie Lewis

HEATHER BERG You write with such loving rage. Femmephilia’s form, not just its content, has this glittering, hopeful, pissed-offness that feels very femme to me. Can you talk about how femmeness informs your craft? 

SOPHIE LEWIS I know what you mean about the starry-eyed libidinal ragefulness! No question, I am pissed off—both on my own behalf and on behalf of every other fellow living thing whose birthright of communal luxury is trampled every day by the value-form. Frankly, it doesn’t seem to me desirable to emulate the kind of no-skin-in-the-game tone prized by genteelly macho high-literary essayists or, say, the aristo-Marxists at New Left Review. For that crowd, I think, all “personal” writing is necessarily an individualistic bourgeois detraction from the real business of analysis (as though the truth of a life does not scale up!). But many of us femmephiles sense it’s just the opposite, right? One must take things personally and attend to one’s standpoint in order to reach toward the totality, as the deeply Marxist and femme “Cyborg Manifesto” taught us. One must confront the historical composition of what Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift call the “ensouled bodymind,” whence once is writing, not least because it’s fundamentally bad materialism not to. 

My comrade Emma Heaney recently suggested, after reading Femmephilia, that even though I am often generous with those I disagree with, it’s rather clear that that generosity isn’t borne of a detached peacefulness or disinterested equanimity. I “like things and dislike things very passionately,” she said. Fellas, is it gay to like and dislike things very passionately? Yes. This is also deeply about class: giving too much of a shit is vulgar. I’d like to think that a prole-aligned vulgarianism is the main way that femmeness informs my craft. Faithfulness to “femme” means, in this sense, holding onto the term’s original meaning (born in working-class dyke bars) of appetitive, woman-loving anti-straightness. Femme is the left politicization of femininity: a method characterized by deeply partisan commitment to beautiful living, paired with an insistence on denaturalizing and making visible the gender labor that stitches all that life and all that beauty together for all.

HB I love the idea of femme as “the left politicization of femininity.” You’re making me think about femme as a life project more than it is an identity. We aren’t femme, we do femme. And that doing, animated by a “deeply partisan commitment to beautiful living,” is an incendiary thing. 

In your book you borrow from McKenzie Wark to dream about “femmunism,” a politics that’s big enough for all our mess, raw spots, intensity. Femmunism is necessarily pro-trans, pro-worker (at once anti-productivist and rooted in a deep understanding of who “really makes the world”), and pro-crip. Can you say more about femme tactics? What tactics are most equipped to get us closer to the femmunist horizon? Beyond and alongside making expansive demands, what do we have to do to win “roses with our bread, and hormones too”? 

SL Is it a tactic (?) or rather a strategy (?) if I say harm-reductionist, care-communizing mutual aid praxis that aspires to engulf the whole goddamn world? I’m not sure, but if I were to characterize the flavor of anticapitalist movements’ archetypal, mercurial femme tacticians—if I think of the vibrant down-low DIY rhizomes of our present moment, like the undocumented underground railroads, the abortion networks, the estrogen compounding-and-distribution smugglers—words like opacity, invisibility, cunning, and ungovernability come to mind. Femme militancy is also typically “scrappy” (to use a word I know you’re fond of yourself, Heather), which I take to mean: violent when necessary, skilled at survival, and promiscuously unruly with one’s care. When I wrote Full Surrogacy Now, one of the imperatives I was trying to convey was this scrappiness principle, the idea of fighting for and “mothering” all children, not because one has the moral high ground or proprietary entitlement (i.e., so-called “parental rights”) that comes with official mother status, but precisely because one wishes to destroy patriarchal motherhood and free the kids. 

As you say, a related trait of femmeness is its crip, which is to say, anti-macho, center of gravity. Femmunists are requisitioners of rest, profound enemies of eugenicist and productivity-based valuations of the human, and not afraid of tactical dishonesty. In order to extract resources for our kith, we will sometimes exercise duplicity vis-à-vis the state. That said, I reckon sub-tactics and strategies should always be held lightly and changed up readily. I’ve been mulling the old idea of “strategic essentialism” lately, with all its dangers, and wondering if that is a good description of what is happening when we fight CPS (Child Protective Services) or ICE as family abolitionists. We may appeal to the familism of the law in order to gain concrete wins on the basis that “families belong together,” a thing we don’t exactly believe. But is this a smart way to proceed? Perhaps not, yet perhaps we sometimes don’t have a choice? The extent of our co-option will be measurable by the extent to which we’re simultaneously extending solidarity to runaway kids and mounting challenges to “parental rights” frameworks. While defending criminalized, colonized, persecuted families against the state, it is vital that our movements also be building the abolitionist child-supportive infrastructures that might enable communities to positively supersede not only family policing, but the family.

Really I want to turn the mic back to you, though. On the question of tactics, I hope readers immediately run to get your incredible book Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory, which curates a delicious wealth of wisdom on tactics-related matters for the whore-led insurgency against family, property, work, state, capital, and whiteness. One thing your informants attest again and again is how threatening it is to the ruling class when people practice true mutual aid. We’re talking here about militant and illicit practices that not only “expropriate the expropriators”—via squatting, five-finger discounts, food-liberations and so on—but also attempt to let go, even if just fleetingly, of the logics of “deserving.” What becomes clear is that the danger is always a falling-back into a fundamentally ableist notion that there are more and less “worthy” members of the proletariat (lumpens! prostitutes! scroungers! criminals! vagrants!). By rights, when the left uses the words “lazy” or “parasitic,” it should maybe be meant as a compliment, right? What are children, for instance, if not lazy parasites (complimentary)? But all too often, “parasite” language is reserved for landlords. 

Respectability tactics stem, entre autres, from a kneejerk aversion to hungry “unproductive” bloodsucking vampire-like figures (who are defined by their dependency on others). It’s a phobia or anxiety that dates back at least to that gothic storyteller Karl Marx himself. There is one essay in Femmephilia about vampire-utopia in Torrey Peters that touches on this—like the one I published elsewhere about the Uncanny Valley Girls of Zefyr Liswoski—thinking about the “horror” that wounded, scarred, unrepentant, feasting femmes symbolize to the respectable “pro-worker” and cissexual “family values” imaginary. I feel these intuitions chime with your articulation of a family-abolitionist “lumpen theory” and “hooker communism.” But I’d love to hear your thoughts, if you’re willing. How does a tactic of femmephilia relate to the femmunist lumpenprole anti-identity you excavate, and to the postwork horizon the sex worker left moves toward…? 

HB Yes to parasitism! What Anna Watkins Fisher calls “parasitical resistance” feels like a fundamentally whorish (and so also femmunist) infrapolitical strategy for resource redistribution. I think lumpens do a particularly good job of highlighting just how much parasitism is required to make mutual aid possible. We take what we can from systems as they are, and then we share it. The host (the state, the john) needn’t know, at least until it/ he is almost finished off. But the hooker communist thinkers I’m most moved by aren’t quite sure that that, on its own, is going to “engulf the whole goddamn world.” 

The language of parasitism helps concretize the stakes for me: if we really want to win, the host has to cease to exist. Or, we’ll know we have won because the host will be finally bled dry. But that also means that we’ll no longer have a host from which to draw resources. That raises a whole lot of questions about revolutionary strategy, how we’ll plot our next steps, how we’ll move from parasitism to autonomy. We’re out of space (and nearly out of time, whew, in the world historical sense) so I’ll leave us here, with more questions. I want whores and other femmunists running the room while we keep asking them.