‘FULL surrogacy now’ by sophie lewis
by P.G.
Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis is a provocative book which seeks to reimagine how we birth and raise children.
Lewis introduces readers to her critical enquiry by saying that although feminism has proceeded deep into a deconstruction of essentialist concepts of gender, our ideas about child-bearing and rearing remain woefully essentialist, uncritical and ahistorical. Gestation, on which Lewis’ analysis is focused, is also barely represented in culture at large. Surrogacy, for its part, is explicitly represented as ‘unnatural’ and negative (think The Handmaid’s Tale). This dearth and stigma, in both theory and culture, for Lewis closes off the space to critically examine and, crucially, reimagine child-bearing and rearing.
Full Surrogacy Now sets out to correct both wrongs. It first aims to theorise and historicise gestational and familial practices through the vector of surrogacy, a lightning rod issue for contemporary familial essentialism. Second, it aims to elaborate a reimagined, utopian way for raising new people: the “gestational commune”.
The book’s introduction generates a manifesto-like momentum as Lewis gears up to undertake both (rather large) tasks. Its dialectical threads of critique are insightful, laying bare the internal contradictions in our contemporary understandings of gestation and family. Through in-depth discourse analysis, it demonstrates how our culture at once lionises the biological, nuclear family, while at the same time this form of the family inherently requires non-biological and collectivist social practices. Not only is the wholly self-enclosed nuclear family therefore a fantasist’s sham, but in being a highly sentimentalised, morally loaded cultural fantasy, it casts an especially blinding shadow over the exploitative material practices which underlie it. Indeed, the cultural fantasy of the ‘pure’, asocial, nuclear family actively perpetuates exploitation by stigmatising the very practices it relies upon, of which surrogacy is exemplary.
The book’s standout analysis is that the people - mostly marginalised women - in these shadow forms of gestational and familial work such as surrogacy are constructed as workers, but also as non-workers in a way which compounds their exploitation. Surrogates are workers in that they are constructed as non-family - as people who, with no biological link to the children they bear and therefore having no rights or responsibilities, are just wage labourers ‘doing a job’. Yet as those producing the material conditions for the highly sentimentalised fantasy of the family, they are, or at least should be, doing this as a service out of the goodness of their hearts, out of generosity - they should be ‘doing it for the kids’.
It is this morally blackmailing construction as non-workers, the book brilliantly contends, which is a prime site for struggle and resistance. Through challenging the idea that surrogacy is ‘more than’ work, surrogates can - and do - exercise their collective power as workers to fight against exploitation, using strike and protest methods such as the threat of aborting or stealing the “human biocapital” of the foetus. The book calls on these workers, on all of us, to “seize the means of reproduction” to challenge the fantasy of the family.
Unfortunately the manifesto-like momentum created at the outset is lost somewhat as the book moves into the weeds of discourse analysis. The huge, structural gestures made in the introduction are not followed up by the kind of broad-ranging historical, cultural and political evidence one could be excused for expecting. Instead the analysis is quickly brought down to the level of minutiae, with a discourse analysis methodology applied mostly to a single case study of surrogacy mogul Dr Nayan Patel and her workers. At worst, this left the analysis floating in the amniotics of discourse rather than truly ‘historicising’ anything. This was a real shame given Lewis’ gestures to historical materialism and some pretensions to this approach at the beginning of the book.
The narrowness of evidence was especially frustrating in the final chapter, which attempts to flesh out the promised ‘utopian reimagining’ of child-bearing and rearing. There is certainly an attempt to provide historical evidence of collectivist familial practices, but meagre examples are merely glossed. African American, Papua New Guinean, Cameroonian and Nigerian collectivist family practices are described summarily, and mostly with theory-speak (such as ‘oddkin’, ‘non-genealogical modes’ and ‘othermothering’) rather than with any cultural or historical specificity. Not only does this feel an ironic equivalising of these cultural communities, but is less than compelling for the normative thrust. Lewis’ utopian vision of the “gestational commune” which was conceived in the introduction is never quite brought to term.
Full Surrogacy Now is nonetheless a provocative and scintillating starting point for readers to begin challenging their assumptions about child-bearing and rearing. The capitalist ‘nuclear family’, which involves such intense pretensions to biological essentialism, purity and asociality, always already relies on practices such as medical intervention, surrogacy and child care. The book provokes us to challenge our ideas about the workers who make ‘the family’ possible, and the oppressive moral obligations our culture places on them to accept exploitation because what they do is ‘more than work’. Once we begin to challenge this ideology, we can also begin to reimagine how the family could be.
What if, rather than stigmatising surrogacy as ‘unnatural’ while exploitatively engaging in it, our society respected, recognised and even encouragaed surrogates? What if, rather than limiting the love given to a child to the ‘nuclear family’, we forged a more social, collectivist mode of rearing where a child could be given even more love and support? These glimmers of the gestational commune are pregnant with potential.
To buy Full Surrogacy Now, visit NIBS in the new year.