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). The Farm” is an ensemble book, told from the perspective of four different characters, but its hero is Jane, a Filipina-American woman in her early twenties, who turns to Golden Oaks after she’s fired from her baby-nurse job and can find no better way to support her infant daughter. in photography—and she’s a restless spirit, desperate for moral clarity and “the knowledge that she is doing something inarguably worthwhile.

Neither simply natural nor banally cultural, gestation appears as the unthought core of gender and sexual politics, and the key of a forthcoming womb revolution: trans-Marx meets mammals politics! Lewis might argue that the goal is not to eliminate these kinds of families at all, but rather to proliferate caring relations. Read it and let’s imagine different constellations of care, love and family beyond the conservative restraint of supposed biology.Full Surrogacy Now is about so much more than gestational surrogacy; it is thinking with ideas of surrogacy to imagine a very different world, once which involves collaborative communal bringing into being and abolition of ‘the family’.

For a business that deals in common ingredients and a mature technology, surrogacy is curiously expensive. the book is particularly strong when it is giving information on sub movements within feminism arguing on surrogacy. According to Lewis, the surrogates usually deliver via C-section when they are thirty-six weeks pregnant, “shaving five weeks or so off production time, delivering the baby just-in-time for collection. 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. In a new book, “ Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family,” the author Sophie Lewis makes a forceful argument for legalization.For instance, one could push for devaluing genetic ties by eliminating surrogacy because it was created to prioritize and continue our esteem for genetic relatedness. The focus is on gendered and raced global class relations and considerations of different models of birthing work, such as surrogacy co-operatives which some surrogates are advocating.

Yet, as far as I can discern, surrogates have not been asked if the radical vision that is promoted in the book—to abolish the family—is what they want either.Lewis fantasizes about replacing the modern family with a “classless commune,” where children don’t belong to anyone—a commune that would eventually render commercial surrogacy obsolete. While this focus on commercial surrogacy in India could have quickly become a ‘save the women of the global south’ saviour approach, Lewis takes seriously the agency of surrogates and their demands as workers. Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America.

To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.Volunteer surrogacy may sound like a perfect way to encourage communal child-rearing, but Lewis says that, in practice, altruistic surrogacy usually has the same dynamic as commercial surrogacy, insofar as a woman still gets pregnant with a wealthier woman’s baby. In this way, the core thesis seems to be a solution developed in isolation from the surrogates (indeed all pregnant people) it largely affects. Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking. We are the makers of one another,” Lewis argues, “and we could learn collectively to act like it” (19–20).