Episode 98: Sophie Lewis's Femmephilia, Gender, Pleasure, and the Politics of Girly Things

In this episode, Sophie Lewis, Danya Glabau, and Paige Sweet hold a conversation in honor of Sophie's new book, Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe. Since at least the 1970s, a dominant strand of Western feminism has regarded femininity with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Given this "feminist machismo," which is an obstacle to liberation, what would it mean to interpret the world through a femmmephilic lens? This discussion takes up questions of power, pleasure, and care labor, as well as feminism's relationships to race, gender, and sexual identity. It asks how to formulate a femme-inism capable of countering contempt for "girly things" in a moment of anti-feminist backlash and argues for a reorientation of collective work towards an effective critique of capital and coercion.