Enemy Feminisms

While many people used the summer for road trips, adventures, parties and fun, (and the total destruction of Covid tracking, treatment and news infrastructures has meant that people are hardly aware of the current covid wave, it’s actually really hard to even know its happening, although it most certainly is) this summer my partner Sophie and I have been in our house, writing books. This may not exactly be the stuff of Insta fomo and nostalgic movies, but it has been, to this girl, absolutely dreamy. And while it has moments of loneliness, we have also built a community here that has meant people come and visit us, hang out and eat dinner, make sure we’re not totally losing our minds down in the writing hole.

We are also fostering three frankly terrible kittens, one of whom, Voltairine, aka Volt, is in my lap right now, befuddled by how much the fabric of my dress can slip around and occasionally digging her claws in to stay steady. Adorable and sharp.

We read each other our progress day by day, giving each other small edits, encouragement, thinking through the theories and questions at hand. It is a kind of cowriting, cothinking that feels thrilling, we are working together, even if our projects are very far apart (I’m writing about film, IP, and Disney corp, Sophie is writing about the long history of reactionary feminisms). But as a result I’ve read, heard or talked about almost the entirety of Sophie’s book, and let me tell you, it’s a fucking banger. I find myself constantly thinking with its critiques, its theories, its ideas and its histories. It’s going to be an invaluable resource for, as Sophie calls it, via Emma Heaney, a “Feminism agianst cisness”.

But the thing is, summer is ending, and while my book deadline was extended due to having to get a full time job doing data entry (this side of things has been decidedly less dreamy), both of our original deadlines were tomorrow—hilariously, accidentally, for the same editor, at the same press. And Sophie, being the incredible writer she is, sent in her manuscript yesterday.

Completing a massive project, a huge haul like that, can often be unnerving, even disturbing and sad. Your singular focus, your purpose, is spent, and now in the hands of editors and agents and publishers and eventually the public. And months of FOMO or summer longings or just avoided or not faced feelings can come back in a crash.

And so I want to just mark, here, how absolutely stunned and impressed I am with their work, their research, their dedication to liberation, their joy in ideas and their willingness to look at some truly horrible archives of miserable people lol. And I want to put on all y’alls radar Enemy Feminisms, coming out next year from Haymarket. It’s gonna rule.

And if you know Sophie or follow her on social, send her a congratulations. She’s earned it.