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Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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In the interview below, Sophie Lewis explains the ideas and theories behind her work Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. This neoliberal drive for deregulation of human nature is already at work today, in pursuit of a world in which all biological givens and relationships are opt-in, and none ever command special loyalty. Marriages may be dissolved if they are merely boring; bodies may be remodeled at will; parents have no special duty to or authority over their children. In this world the only argument against commercial surrogacy is a critique of capitalism, and infants can safely be entrusted to a string of faceless caregivers without harming their development. Underpinning all this is a vision of human biology as radically plastic, where all of us are hybridized blends of human and machine. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is utopian.

If you believed that, you might wonder: Given that this is all contingent, could we not do better? Could we imagine a kinder human society, freed from the monstrous, unnecessary weight of so-called “human nature” and the oppressive systems it naturalizes? Could we but achieve this, life might blossom into a polyphony of free-flourishing new forms. There will surely be disagreement from some Marxists here, and some will be unhappy to see a reignition of the debate ‘wages for housework’ originally provoked. Difficult questions concerning the Marxologically correct status of the foetus are raised by this line of thinking. But polemical as it may be, this passage clears the way for a much more elevated discussion around child-bearing as a form of labour than we’ve previously enjoyed. So while it sparked my delight as an offensive within feminism, as a point of departure for a contemporary Marxism grappling with labour and the intimate challenges of proletarian embodiment, Full Surrogacy Now is a true breakthrough. Full surrogacy now,” “another surrogacy is possible”: to the extent that these interchangeable sentiments imply a revolutionary program (as I’d like them to) I’d propose it be animated by the following invitations. Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family.” 45Another place Lewis has found family abolitionist themes is in Ari Aster’s horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar, which she wrote about in August for Commune. The essay is Lewis at her best, weaving together the sharp analysis that caught Verso's eye with her idiosyncratic humor and wit. But it is also a somber look at the nuclear household of her childhood, of which we only get a glimpse in Full Surrogacy Now: Though Lewis may have come to her theories about family abolition and surrogacy intellectually, her own family upbringing has played a role that is difficult to ignore. Where babies are still created, it would be via “queerer, more comradely modes” of reproduction than the bourgeois family—though this vision gives little attention to what any ensuing children might themselves want or need. She notes only that “there is no evidence that a childhood spent out of proximity from the womb one originated from correlates with unhappiness.” This may be so, though she offers no reference. But the question is less which womb gestated a baby than it is the potential dissonance between her hopeful vision of “gestational communism” and the elsewhere well-documented infant instinct to form an attachment to a primary caregiver and vice versa. While Lewis would like to replace this inherited love with a more logical kind of affection, one based on earned affinity or “kith and kind,” Ramos’s novel explores the warped devotion of parents. One character in “The Farm,” Ate, tirelessly works as a cook, a maid, and a baby nurse to support her disabled adult son in the Philippines, whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. “Everything Ate did was for him,” Jane observes. Jane is quarantined at Golden Oaks when her one-year-old, Mali, takes her first steps and speaks her first words. She, too, “would do anything for Mali.” And the clients, of course, are willing to “do anything” for their unborn children—that’s why they’ve come to Golden Oaks in the first place.

The full title of Sophie Lewis’s book: Full Surrogacy Now, Feminism Against Family points to how very capacious this text is. But it should also be an immediate signal to readers that this book, which is a book about labor, is not just a call for an improvement in surrogate worker conditions such that commercial surrogacy (and the family form that it maintains) can be defended. Silvia Federici, among others in the Wages For Housework Movement, was explicit that the demand for wages was about more than delivering recognition, improved material conditions and increased autonomy for women in the home (although that too); it was about demanding something impossible for capitalism to meet, which would thus require dramatic societal reconfiguration and redistribution. what breakdown of the family, anyway? The apparent post-normativity of contemporary life is entirely compatible with the establishment of new norms. We continue to be form-determined after we no longer see social forms’ normative force. Put simply: the traditional family, which for Cooper is a family coerced into existence by exigency and normativity, is not broken enough.”Full Surrogacy Now makes a significant contribution to the pressing political project of advocating for the rights of those workers whose labour is so often delegitimised, exploited and criminalised … join[ing] such texts as Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes in combating the white, liberal, trans-exclusionary, whorephobic, ‘feminist’ discourse which is currently dominating conversations around sex work and gestational labour.”

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