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qUCL / GFRN Annual Lecture: 'The Feminism of Fools: When Real Feminists do Fascism'
07 March 2025, 6:30 pm–8:30 pm
qUCL and GFRN are pleased to welcome Dr Sophie Lewis to give their joint annual lecture.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
qUCL and GFRN
Location
-
Location to be emailed via EventbriteUCLLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make waged exploitation any more tolerable and that “nice white ladies” have proven to be, at best, unreliable antiracist allies. But in a time of rising fascism, accelerating settler-colonial genocide, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to be clear that making certain feminisms more “inclusive” is a terrible idea. We have to be willing to fight and defeat certain feminist kin if we want to build the feminist world we all need. In this lecture, Sophie Lewis issues a love letter to feminism by refusing to accept it as an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge “enemy feminisms,” she suggests, can we adequately reckon with the ways these ideologies have pushed their exponents toward anti-liberatory horizons.
We are pleased to have Emrah Karakus, Victoria Mangan and Gala Rexer as respondents.
Just a few extra tickets have been released: https://qUCL-GFRN-enemy-feminisms.eventbrite.co.uk
Launched in 2014, qUCL is a university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields.
Gender and Feminisms Research Network (GFRN) aims is to explore the points where gender and feminist politics intersect with a diverse range of power relations and social movements.
About the Speakers
Sophie Lewis
Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic or independent scholar, and the author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms. She lives in Philadelphia as a writer and radical agitator, and teaches short courses on critical theory online for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Previously, Dr Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University, followed by an MA Politics at the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Geography at the University of Manchester. Articles by Sophie appear everywhere from the London Review of Books to Feminist Theory. You can find all essays listed at lasophielle.org and support this free-lance writing, if you wish, at patreon.com/reproutopia.
Victoria Mangan
Victoria Mangan is a PhD student researching transgender literatures and theories. Her thesis enquires into how we read and interpret trans literature and what this growing body of work might offer literary criticism as a discipline. She is a Wolfson scholar in the humanities and has taught across several departments at UCL.
Gala Rexer
Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). Before joining Warwick, she was a Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the SPRC as well as the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work draws from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and medical sociology and has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Body and Society, Comparative Sociology, The Sociological Review Magazine, and Social Text (Palestine Now Series). Her first book, “Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine” is under contract with the University of California Press.
Emrah Karakus
Emrah Karakuş is an LSE fellow in Gender and Human Rights, and he is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on affective politics, sexualities, and queer intimacies in the Middle East and beyond. He is currently working on his book project, Feeling Debt: Affective Politics of Security and Intimacy in Kurdish Turkey, exploring how the Kurdish notions of debt (bedel), right, and repayment are taken up, adapted, and deployed by queer and trans Kurds as they stake claims to a livelihood. Karakuş’s work appeared in peer-reviewed journals including American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, and Kurdish Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Toplum ve Bilim.