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"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on realizing the implications of knowing that we all actually, materially, make one another, and that this labor continues to be exploited, extracted, and alienated-unequally-at every turn in Capitalism and Patriarchy. Full of brilliant, generative, and also shamelessly biting critique of both bourgeois and communist tracts, feminist and otherwise, Lewis's voice is unique and bracing. I need it; it fills my whole self with reimagined possibilities for making oddkin who are not property. Lewis set out to write an immoderate, utopian, partisan, anti-authoritarian communist defense of surrogates and surrogacy in ramifying registers of meanings and practices, and she has succeeded. Lewis asks the necessary questions, 'Can we parent politically, hopefully, nonreproductively-in a comradely way?' Can we become full surrogates for and with each other? In a book full of fierce demystifications and sharp dissections of injustice masquerading as humanitarianism, nonetheless Lewis convincingly and radically affirms: 'Everywhere about me, I can see beautiful militants hell-bent on regeneration, not self-replication.'"- Donna Haraway
About the author
Sophie Lewis is a writer, translator and geographer living in Philadelphia. She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, an editor at Blind Field: a Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a queer feminist committed to "cyborg ecology" and anti-fascism. She has published her work, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, in Boston Review, Viewpoint, Signs, Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Frontiers, Gender Place & Culture, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, and Salvage Quarterly. Her translations include Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016, with Jacob Blumenfeld), A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp (MIT, 2017) and Unterscheiden und Herrschen by Paula-Irene Villa and Sabine Hark (Verso, 2020). Her next book is tentatively entitled Postwomanhood."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":14849,"3":{"1":0},"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Verdana","16":8}">Sophie Lewis is a writer, translator and geographer living in Philadelphia. She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, an editor at Blind Field: a Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a queer feminist committed to "cyborg ecology" and anti-fascism. She has published her work, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, in Boston Review, Viewpoint, Signs, Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Frontiers, Gender Place & Culture, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, and Salvage Quarterly. Her translations include Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016, with Jacob Blumenfeld), A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp (MIT, 2017) and Unterscheiden und Herrschen by Paula-Irene Villa and Sabine Hark (Verso, 2020). Her next book is tentatively entitled Postwomanhood.
Report
Giving birth is commonly called labor. What happens if all of human pregnancy and gestation is thought from the labor point of view? That's the challenge of Full Surrogacy Now. If it is all labor, then how can that labor be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? Lewis takes one of the most everyday things about being human and thinks it through from the point of view of a cyborg communism. This book goes far into places where few gender abolitionists have ventured and brings us a vision of another life. McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto