by Sophie Lewis Verso 8/31/2021 SKU: 9781786637307 Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the "family." The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions--deception, wage-stealing and money skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly absent; and informed consent is depressingly rare. In Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic. Often, we think of surrogacy as the problem, but, Full Surrogacy Now argues, we need more surrogacy, not less! Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center. Their relationship to the babies they gestate must be rethought, as part of a move to recognize that reproduction is productive work. Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children "belong" to those whose genetics they share. Taking collective responsibility for children would radically transform our notions of kinship, helping us to see that it always takes a village to make a baby. Reviews: "Theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir." -- Jessica Weisberg, New Yorker "An instructive and moving book about the work of babymaking and the best possible future for birthing and raising children. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy's past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. Lewis treats surrogacy as a signal example of what will be integral to any common human flourishing to come: unmaking gender and the family as we know them, to build new kinds of sociality and care for what is not 'biologically' 'ours.' I was floored by it." -- Sarah Brouillette, author of Literature and the Creative Economy "Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking. Sophie Lewis tears down decades of essentialist and contradictory presumptions on labor, motherhood and ownership to offer us the possibility of new ways to live with and for each other. This book is as breathtaking as it is necessary." -- Natasha Lennard, author of Violence: Humans in Dark Times (with Brad Evans) and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life About the Author: Sophie Lewis is a theorist, critic and translator living in Philadelphia. She publishes her work--on topics ranging from dating to Donna Haraway--on both scholarly and non-academic platforms, including Boston Review, Viewpoint, Signs, Science as Culture, Jacobin, the New Inquiry, Mute, and Salvage Quarterly. Her translations include Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (with Jacob Blumenfeld), A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp, and Other and Rule by Sabine Hark and Paula Villa. A feminist committed to cyborg ecology and queer communism, she is a member of the Out of the Woods collective and an Editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.
