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FEMMEPHILIA: Sophie Lewis and Brit "Red" Schulte
Past event
Featured Book
Femmephilia
To be femme is to embody a dispossessed femininity, to be freighted with freedom, to refuse to be made proper or institutionalized. To love it is to embrace love for women (be they butch or not) in the broadest sense. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. Femme labors deserve our care, respect, and support, but instead face dismissal from masculinist antagonists and feminist allies alike.
Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Join us as we welcome Sophie Lewis and Brit "Red" Schulte to the store for a discussion of Lewis's new essay collection Femmephilia, an original diagnosis of femmephobia in our culture, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.
To be femme is to embody a dispossessed femininity, to be freighted with freedom, to refuse to be made proper or institutionalized. To love it is to embrace love for women (be they butch or not) in the broadest sense. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. Femme labors deserve our care, respect, and support, but instead face dismissal from masculinist antagonists and feminist allies alike.
Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people.
Featured Author
Sophie Lewis
Sophie Lewis is a writer, utopian, feminist, and ex-academic scholar based in Philadelphia, hailing originally from the UK, France, and Germany. She is the author of Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family, and Full Surrogacy Now. Lewis’s essays and articles appear routinely in magazines such as n+1, Harper’s, The Drift, the LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and the London Review of Books; as well as on her Patreon newsletter, “ReproUtopia.” She teaches online courses on critical theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is working on a book about the liberation of children.
In Conversation With
Brit "Red" Schulte
Brit "Red" Schulte is a community organizer, zine maker, doctoral candidate, and underemployed sex working art historian. They helped organize the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign, transitioned Bluestockings Bookstore into a worker-owned cooperative, and are a founding member of The Support Ho(s)e Collective. Over the last ten or so years, they've organized with Hacking//Hustling, Survivors Against SESTA, Survived & Punished NY, Red Canary Song, and Slutwalk Chicago.
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
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