gonna descend to spade-calling are we

But the point is, here, you know: Maybe we can be — and this is complicated — but maybe we are, are fated to be enemies of one another sort of in praxis, in time, in space, case by case almost. I mean — what do I say? — if you’ll indulge me, I guess I’ll read the little section —

Sure!

‘A commitment to impurity in politics, a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism, has to walk hand-in-hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people, if necessary, even kin.’ So in other words, feminists who like me are committed anti-fascists, or anti-fascists who are also feminists, as they must be, . . . need to know the difference between forgiving enemies and giving up the fight against them — um, this has to be crystal clear. I suppose it’s a question of learning to more confidently oppose people whom we understand, or whom we also love, perhaps, or whose other work we use and are indebted to. So a cop is still my enemy when she’s my neighbor and, perhaps, you know, we have all kinds of shared history. That’s really hard. But this is sort of more important than ever in this moment where Democrats use the word ‘fascist’ about, um, Donald Trump and then handed over power, you know, peacefully. We can feel compassion for Q-Anon moms and still liquidate their armory. We can forgive, or whatever, a ‘pro-life feminist’ and still destroy the forced-birth judiciary. I — in a sense, that’s the sort of not personal part of it, or something. I guess that’s aspirational. You know, politics is messy.

What I would say is that the enmity was there before I named it, right? It’s been there. That’s kind of my point.

Something from Sophie Lewis’s conversation with Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield, on the most recent public episode of their show Ordinary Unhappiness, about new book Enemy Feminisms — which she wanted at one point to call (she says, a little beyond the point I excerpt from above) ‘Feminism of Fools.’ It’s useful to listen to her explain what she’d thought to do, there, by way of allusion, before ultimately dropping the idea.