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The surrogacy industry is worth an estimated 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you?
Full Surrogacy Now brings a fresh and unique perspective to the debate. Rather than making surrogacy illegal or allowing it to continue as is, Sophie Lewis argues, we should be looking to radically transform it. Surrogates should be put front and centre, and their rights towards the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. In doing so, we can break down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share.
This might sound like a radical proposal, she admits, but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship. Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy, helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.
A propos de l'auteur
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.
Résumé
In order to become ethically acceptable, surrogacy must change beyond recognition - but we need more surrogacy, not less!
Commentaire
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
