On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow is in conversation with Sophie Lewis about her new book, Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe. Lewis describes her journey from being a “queer runaway” child to a professional writer as an adult. Her writing confronts the white, bourgeois feminist worldview and advocates for a radical embrace of “femme” and a future with abundance for all.

In Femmephilia, Lewis challenges readers to take femme seriously because there’s still a confusion about what femininity means, for anti-feminists and feminists alike. Lewis distinguishes femme from femininity, calling the former a verb and a practice in the service of anti-oppression and anti-fascism. In theorizing femme, Lewis unpacks class and capitalism, rape culture, racial supremacy, and coloniality. Lewis says we shouldn’t turn away from “girly” things because in them we can find joy, pleasure, and excess.

They also discuss the invisibilized labor of care work, the ideology of the nuclear family, and Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful presidential bids. Lewis wants us to move away from anti-utopian compromise and believe that we can have bread and roses and hormones too.

Sophie Lewis is a self-described ex-academic and feminist writer living in Philadelphia. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Enemy Feminisms, and finally Femmephilia, an essay collection which just came out a few weeks ago. Her next book is called The Liberation of Children, and will be out from Penguin in 2027.

Featured image of the cover of Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe.

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