Enemies, comrades, and the counterrevolutionary logic of cisness

What does the consolidation of far-right power in mainstream politics demand of the Left? On the current terrain of struggle, how can feminism still be an insurgent force? Two recent books emphatically pose that it is especially now, in light of the steady erosion of political freedoms and unrelenting onslaught of capital’s violence, that we should be rethinking emancipatory strategies through comradely feminisms. In Enemy Feminism, Sophie Lewis examines anglophone, Western cisfeminisms to demonstrate that, while self-declared feminists are not all inherently on the right side of history, we should stick with the trouble of identifying and fighting enemies within our movements. In Trans Femme Futures, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift offer a transfeminist perspective on collective liberation by taking seriously generosity, care, complicity, abolition, love and the sensuous. These two new books are essential reading for co-conspirators wanting to take seriously the challenge of building an expansive, insurgent feminism outside of any attachment to the cisness of the bourgeoisie. Both meet the omnipresent appeal to the need for new broad alliances in response to the global rise of the Far Right with resolutely antifascist sharpness. In what follows, I discuss how these books help us navigate important strategic questions: how should we manoeuvre the tension between necessary enmity and urgent coalitions? What are the limits of tolerable levels of dissonance? What does it mean to practice feminism on the side of liberation?