Beyond the Family

“Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (FSN)” was released by Verso on May 7th, and there is no doubt that it is already a provocation to Marxists and feminists and to the Marxist-feminist canon. An opening book-length salvo in what will surely prove to be a defining 21st-century debate in the tradition of intense feminist theory wars, FSN introduces a fully-automated, utopian, but politically immediate Marxist transfeminism, taking up the seemingly inhospitable terrain of gestation and biological reproduction as a center of gravity and speculative launching pad. The main idea, elaborated elegantly throughout the book is: “In order to become politically acceptable and ethically tenable, surrogacy must change beyond recognition—but there needs to be more surrogacy, not less!”

Sophie Lewis, a sophisticated skeptic, is keenly aware of critics as they put forward her bold positions. The preemption pays off; they are thorough, leaving no stone unturned, few questions unasked, and moving from these toward a world of revolutionary possibilities. At the outset, Lewis makes no attempt to defend actual existing commercial gestational surrogacy, as it is, for her, part and parcel of the actually existing labor processes tout court. Lewis sees in surrogacy both the horrors of capitalist production and the horizon of a new world, the subjects of a new history, and the fighters of a new revolution, reprising and reinventing Marx’s classic conception of working class gravediggers, now as life-givers.

In her introductory framing, Lewis appears discontent and ruthlessly critical of nearly everything in all the right ways – feminism to this point has too often been tragically gyno-centric and race-blind (at best, and transphobic, bourgeois, elite, and exclusionary – at worst eugenicist and essentializing). For Lewis, surrogacy has been a site of capitalist production in all its destructiveness, and efforts to regulate inevitably appear as criminalization, coming in the form of attacks on the surrogates, vulnerable workers at the bottom of a global supply chain. Utterly unsatisfied with this state of things, Lewis deploys a Marxist analysis to reveal a web of contradictions. Surrogacy, when demystified, gives us a glimpse beyond this world and a way forward. A world where gestators, mothers, children, families, caregivers, and surrogates are categories distinct and separate from each other, and one where conflict and contradiction between these roles are made explicit, and so they could be politicized, negotiated, delinked, and made simultaneously into potential components of social self-realization through anti-romantic scrutiny and pragmatic rearrangement.

The Intersection of Surrogacy, Feminism, and Marxism in Sophie Lewis’s Analysis

The meat of the book begins with a sobering analysis of the 2017 TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Lewis explains in detail how the feminism which flows from the (rightful) fear of the world envisioned by the series is ineluctably white and liberal. It becomes apparent that the “handmaidens” in “The Handmaid’s Tale” face a brutality of forced surrogacy parallel to enslaved and segregated black/African people have faced on this continent for hundreds of years, in a dystopian futuristic universe that aggressively represses and denies this concrete historical source material in a classically Freudian sense. Lewis invokes Angela Davis and other black Marxists and socialist feminist theorists to insist that surrogacy is not a new invention, but a foundational site of reproduction which responds to the dynamic of materialist, historic forces, which connect the history of chattel slavery, settlerism, and the capitalist present. Surrogacy is not now and has never been a singular or homogenous experience but is in all these moments precisely a site of differentiation, extraction, control and the production of ideology of race, gender, work, love, commerce, care, and (in)justice.

If surrogacy is nothing new, neither are the activist and regulatory efforts to end, curtail control and morally locate the practice. The second chapter of the book is a robust history and careful refutation of anti-surrogacy movements, and examines the ways in which criminalization impacts surrogates detailing draconian and punitive methods of eradication and “abolition” as opponents of our era would have it. Anti-surrogacy feminists have rationales and an essentialist view of womanhood which complement and often mutually reinforce the premises and conclusions of anti-prostitution feminists and transphobic feminists. Lewis demonstrates not only the ideological congruence of these positions but their practical political overlap, under the banner of “radical feminism” she makes a convincing case that this small but influential cadre is neither. Lewis documents and historicizes the social basis of this reactionary anti-feminist “feminist” feminist; pointing out that anti-surrogacy activists are often white and not shy about or seemingly ashamed of cultivating alliances and relationships with the hard right and institutional social conservatives. Through this multiplier effect, radical feminists are able to punch above their tiny social weight in pursuing policies that outlaw surrogacy along with those that further isolate and criminalize sex workers, and strenuous objection to legal reforms which will more fully recognize trans people in legal gendered identities that differ from those assigned at birth. Lewis astutely underlines the stark degree to which this policy and ideological agenda disproportionately impacts working class black people and other exploited, marginalized and oppressed people along the lines not only of gender and sexuality but race, nationality, citizenship, language and relationship to the means of production.

Throughout the book, Lewis articulates clearly the outlines of an emerging Marxist transfeminism – for this reason even above its specific content and focus, it is an essential reading for all radical, communist and socialist queer people. One hopes and foresees it’s the first in a wave of new theoretical interventions designed to catch up to and theorize the debates and practice of a new wave of queer and trans marxist, feminist, activists and organization. By debunking anti-trans politics as a point of departure and ultimate conclusion, Lewis adroitly identifies, dissects and transcends reactionary feminisms and radical materialist accounts which extend well beyond radical feminism and often in practice oppose TERFism, and the criminalization of sex work and surrogacy. To do so, she expands on her previous investigations of “bad materialisms,” taking down a range of sex and gender essentialisms, directly confronting liberal, conservative and even radical “common sense” that reinscribe trans-exclusivity and conceptually weak appeals to authority that err in their faith-based reliance on vulgar empiricism, authoritative and authoritarian medicalism, and knee-jerk luddite, moralistic reactions. In its place, Lewis gives us a politics not just inclusive of trans people, but a transfeminism of a cyborg nature that goes well beyond her inspiration in Harraway, one inclusive of the transcendental potential of human mastery biology and technology in social context, while indicating the ways in which this vision sharply diverges from bourgeois ideology in all its liberal, conservative, faux-feminist and even left-populist forms.