A feminist utopianism

Sophie Lewis argues against the 'fatalism' of both 4B and heteropessimism, and calls for a collective movement built on solidarity.

Post-election, interest surged in the 4B movement, and of course it did. Our country had just elected a champion of fascism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Maybe you’ve already seen the graph showing the spike in Google searches in the U.S. for 4B, a South Korean movement to romantically, sexually, and reproductively boycott men. Here’s a companion graph for your consideration—one showing a huge post-election rise in the online use of the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen.”

There is an obvious call and response here—between misogynistic control and women’s resistance.

I have found myself deeply empathetic toward this impulse of mass refusal. I have also been troubled by reports of entrenched transphobia within the South Korean movement. In the midst of that tension, I came across a long thread on X by the scholar Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, that I could not get out of my head. She tackled the transphobia of 4B, as well as its “hyperindividualism” and “fatalism.” You know a tweet thread is good and rich when you feel the need to call up the person who wrote it, just to unpack it all.

I spoke with Lewis about the issues with 4B and her vision for a collective feminist movement built on solidarity. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You draw an interesting connection between the 4B movement and heteropessimism, but let’s start with their differences. Can you give us a brief primer?

Heteropessimism was coined by Asa Seresin in 2019. He is describing a prevalent mood of somewhere between tragedy and boredom—and resentment—amongst self-described straight women about their sexuality, which they view almost like a cage. Seresin says that we, as human beings, remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things that we sincerely decry as toxic, broken.

It was renamed by him, quite rapidly, as heterofatalism, because there were concerns pointed out that heteropessimism might sound a bit like an analog with Afropessimism, which is a body of social theory that talks about the social deaths of people in the wake of slavery. But it is, unfortunately, heteropessimism that has stuck.

It describes a resigned—and, I would add, anti-utopian—kind of misandry among straight women, who basically are saying that they have no intention of quitting heterosexuality. But, also, they have no intention of seeking to collectively transform it. Heteropessimists wish they were not attracted to men, but they're unwilling to strategize a politics that might change the situation responsible for these feelings.

4B is an interesting one, because the way it has been covered in the West is not really consonant with the way that South Korean feminist commentators have tended to describe its existence. There was a real mobilization, a real movement of MeToo in South Korea, but this term 4B has largely been an online chat room phenomenon. There's much evidence that the declining birth rate in South Korea cannot be attributed to this online lifestyle trend.

Even though I have massive critiques of 4B and think that it's a pessimism of its own, I want to insist that it's a different pessimism, because heteropessimism was talking about a perverse commitment to continuing—to date and fuck and make babies with and marry men, while insisting on the right to hate it. 4B is saying, “We quit.”

So, there's this core difference: heteropessimism or heterofatalism is not really trying to do anything about these discontents, right? But 4B is ostensibly a movement invested in change. I was really interested to hear that you see it as its own kind of fatalism, right?

I do. I think this is a discursive separatism, which doesn't even have the vestiges of an anti-capitalist analysis that lesbian separatisms of the women's liberation movement in the Sixties and Seventies were working with. And I’m critical of those as well, because I think there was a counter-revolution within women's liberation in the second wave of feminism, which resulted in a female cultural nationalism taking over the more utopian, trans-inclusive, liberatory projects that wanted to liberate all people, communize care, and abolish the family.

This meme in the South Korean context is explicitly girl-boss-ish in flavor, and very anti-socialist. It's about wealth and achievement and individually breaking the glass ceiling. There's not even a relationship with a movement of revolutionary ambition. It's also very concerning to me that the romanticized version of 4B that many Western feminists seem to have in mind is not paying attention to the ample evidence of queerphobic, transphobic, and homophobic flavors in the various message boards that represent 4B in South Korea.

Also, there is a notion that men are essentially a different, unredeemable kind of species here, right? There isn't a sense that the strikes in question—the four “no's” against marriage, sex, dating, and birth—are contingent on a particular set of political demands being met. It seems rather indefinite and open-ended. Is it really the case that men are unredeemable? That they can never be incorporated into a comradely coexistence with us? I find that a terribly nihilistic worldview.

It concerns me greatly that the definition of sex that seems to be operative here is about a resource that women dole out to men and never have appetites themselves. There's not really a call for lesbianism in this pseudo-lesbian separatism. The result is a rather whorephobic flavor. I think there is an evident moral denigration in this framework, given the lack of accounting for groups like sex workers—the women who continue to, you know, sleep with the enemy.

On the flip of the nihilism of seeing men as irredeemable: Post-election, I'm also noticing this rise in ostensibly feminist rhetoric around how women need to, for example, thank men who voted for Kamala Harris. Women need to take better care of men, tend to men, and do this work of mothering men towards recognizing our basic humanity and rights. I have a real strong resistance to that rhetoric.

That's a fascinating observation. That rings really true, and I'm glad you've delineated it like that. I insist we are still in the aftermath of a moment of extreme, positive, radical upheaval in the U.S., in terms of the movement for Black lives, and specifically the uprising for George Floyd, which broke things open to some extent. There were suddenly concepts like police abolition and prison abolition on the mainstream media’s front pages.

In the aftermath, historically, of moments of radical possibility, we see time and time again a retrenchment and a re-alignment of binary sex opposition. We see a re-assertion of gender primacy—the rather false, unnecessary notion that some radical feminisms have taken up in the past, that the primary division or contradiction in human populations is gender. Which I just reject, completely.

We see this in the 19th century. We see it in the interwar period. We see it in the Seventies, with that reactionary backlash and the cultural feminism, or female cultural nationalism, that I was describing earlier. I think we're arguably seeing it in the aftermath of MeToo and George Floyd as well. TERF-ism has suddenly come to America from the U.K. You have the Heritage Foundation platforming groups that call themselves Women's Liberation Front to attack trans life and re-entrench the private nuclear household, the authority of mom and dad over children, and authority more generally over bodily autonomy for minoritized populations, women, and children.

It doesn't surprise me that in that kind of frame, there is a bifurcation on the feminist left between those whose response to this defeat is is to retreat into separatism, and those whose response is to molly-coddle and patronize men, and self-patronize, through implying that there is no shared horizon of liberation between men and women, and that somehow we need to hand out brownie points for the basic expression of political decency.

I want to circle back to the issue of transphobia within the South Korean 4B movement, because I know you make a connection between its transphobia and political lesbianism, which has its own history of transphobia. Is there something inherent to this kind of refusal and separatism that seeds transphobia?

Yeah, that's fascinating. It would be tempting to give a really simple, broad stroke answer, but I really find myself always wanting to resist that, because I'm really against the description of the Western second wave as transphobic and biologically essentialist and racist in a uniform way. It's just not true. We ought to interrogate why we've accepted so easily the writing-off of a whole revolutionary legacy.

There's certainly been a rewriting of that history by the transphobic wing of the women's liberation movement ecology. They have a vested interest in pretending that their ideology was the only one around. And it's just completely wrong—when you go into the archives, you see how trans lesbians were defended physically by hundreds of feminists from the attacks that were leveled at them at events like the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973.

Another side of this is that trans women have also had lesbian separatist politics. Indeed, even today, there are trans women online and off, who insist on a separatist-ish revivalism of the most whorephobic and pornophobic aspects of the second wave.

What is really interesting here is that South Korea is not currently coming out of a moment of left feminist upheaval, but it is importing and translating a large amount of transphobic Seventies and Eighties Western feminism. You know this Sheila Jeffreys character who wrote god knows how many violently transphobic and whorephobic books? She's the main Western feminist being revived and translated in South Korea. It is, like, conspiracist kind of bonkers, really anti-intellectual stuff.

I would reject the idea that it's necessarily automatic that separatism collapses into transmisogyny, but I think it's a pretty imminent possibility, right?

Related to that, you argue that feminists must resist “partitioning gestures,” including those against men, which you say, “enable capitalism to function in the first place.” Can you talk a little bit more about those partitioning gestures?

I think feminism is the historic movement that seeks to reorganize care on a planetary scale, in a way that really meets people's needs, as opposed to the needs of the state and capital, wherein a private household becomes the factory manufacturing a binary between production and reproduction, between the waged and the unwaged spheres, and, by extension, what we think of as men and women.

That division of labor is really foundational to how we define, for instance, sex workers and people who historically were ungendered and unmothered—for instance, black women in the plantation context, where they worked side by side with men. We are ongoingly incapable of treating the gender of people in those groups as commensurate with the gender of, you know, the unwaged middle-class white mother. This partitioning is what informs a phobic response to those who sell what we think of as sacred bodily labor.

With pregnancy, in commercial gestational surrogacy, it's the same story as around those who sell commodified sex. There's an exceptionalization of the sex industry that comes from a need to police the bounds of womanhood as unwaged labor, because, to some extent, feminism has backed away from the more utopian horizon that it has sometimes espoused of a solidarity between mothers and surrogates, and wives and whores, which would really cast into doubt the whole circuit of accumulation on which our current mode of production rests.

The partitioning is actually doing the state's work for it by policing the boundary between dignified, uncontaminated womanhood and prostituted, victimized womanhood. That's a foundational contradiction internal to feminism that has been being worked out for over 150 years.

Speaking of utopianism, what would an inclusive, collective, and effective movement look like here in the US, given our current circumstances?

That's the million dollar question. I think it involves recognizing that the private nuclear household is not eternal, natural, or inevitable, and that we're actually all caught together in ways that might generate common interest, solidarity, and mutual understanding in this system of dependence on work to live. The family and work are such mutually reinforcing domains of coerced hyper-dependence. Not to say that dependence is bad at all—it’s the condition of life—but the issue is the organized scarcity and non-consensual hyper-dependence we find ourselves in, our little atomized units that are gender machines. That is the level of conversation we have to have.

We are worked to death in the United States. It pits us against one another. Phenomena like tradwifery is easy to laugh at—and I do laugh at them—but they are talking about something real, which is the persistence of the so-called double shift for women, even after all the breakthroughs that feminism was supposed to have delivered. Women are still disproportionately doing the housework. That doesn’t seem to fucking budge. Women are doing work in the waged sphere and they’re doing the majority of the housework. Why, if you’re faced with that double shift, wouldn’t you want to just quit one of the two? That’s what tradwives are pretending to do. In fact, nobody can afford to do that, because the double breadwinner is the only option right now. Those economic conditions cannot be magicked into being. It’s very paradoxical: these tradwives, who are saying that women shouldn’t be in the waged or marketized sphere, are in fact monetizing their very words.

Liberal feminism has to acknowledge that it does not have an answer to it. A movement adequate to the kinds of crises that we’re talking about right now would recognize people’s right to housing, care, and support of all kinds. And it might acknowledge that the monomaternal norm—the norm that says everybody simply has one real mother—is a bit of a fiction. Everyone acknowledges out of one side of their mouth that it takes a village. We need to take this much more seriously.

We allow people to have sole responsibility for the care of dependents—of children and also partners, who are expected to have all of their needs met by their partner or spouse. This is actually bonkers. It’s a backwards way of looking at things to say: “Who has the time for polyamory?” Who has the time for monogamy? How are you supposed to get all of your needs met in an isolated dyadic household? Our needs need to be met more collectively. I want to see a return of things like public or common kitchens, recreation spaces, maybe even laundries or pantries—things that recognize that nobody needs to be doing the same exact tasks over and over and over in their tiny little boxes at the end of a day.

That is what is paramount. Not really questions about whether or not you want to fuck a guy. Any pleasure that women can eke out of the current state of existence is to be affirmed. We don’t need to be pouring more shame on those who take their pleasure with men.