Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Verso, 2019; hbk £11.99.
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RATING: 75
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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It is in the nature of things that academics disagree with each other. So it strikes me as over-dramatic when Lewis remarks half way through this book that she has become 'a messenger who needs to be shot' for arguing that surrogacy is work, citing in doing so Luna Dolezal's contention that 'Pregnancy cannot be likened to other forms of "work" or labour, and any container or production metaphors are necessarily inadequate' (Dolezal, 2017, p. 320, cited p. 82). Elsewhere she refers to the danger that she will be mistaken for 'a "neoliberal" advocate of the industry' (33), citing as evidence a hostile tweet from Julie Bindel in May 2018 claiming that she 'loves surrogacy' (ft. 12, p. 179). Lewis no more thinks that the surrogate is a 'container' than Dolezal does (she starts out by insisting on the physiological exchanges that take place between the foetus and the body in which it develops), so that is not an issue between them. As regards 'work', Dolezal's argument, from a phenomenological 'body schema' perspective, is that the maternal-foetal relationship is a communicative one in which an important affective bond is established, and hence a subjectivity- and kinship-constituting experience, whether or not there is a genetic link. I'm not sure how she knows this, and in any case it could still be likened to other forms of work in which affective bonds are established and through which subjectivity is constituted. For her part, Julie Bindel is an adamant opponent of commercial surrogacy, who regards it as combining the worst aspects of capitalism and patriarchy, and selfish into the bargain. I begin with these details in the text because I think they are part of a wider defensive attitude that throws off course the development of a positive argument that the title promises - for 'full surrogacy', and against the family. Too much of the text is taken up with the case of transnational commercial surrogacy that has attracted most attention, that of Dr Nayana Patel's Akanksha Hospital and Research Institute in Anand, Gujarat, and too much of Lewis's account is aimed to make it clear, as if it would be doubted, that this is a profit-making venture portrayed as philanthropy, the result being that she adds little to the existing literature (Pande, 2014, Rudrappa, 2015, Vora, 2015) or to the stated themes of the book. At the same time, she is prone to summary judgements, most gratingly in her critique of Mary O'Brien's path-breaking Politics of Reproduction (1981) as 'trans-exclusionary, romantically gynocentric, race-insensitive' (10), and her sententious expression of 'deep disappointment' (136) at a line from Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (1976), wrenched entirely out of context, that seem designed only to advertise her own theoretical and political values.
All this is unfortunate, as there is plenty here all the same to suggest that a sustained defence of 'full surrogacy' allied to a feminist critique of the family as promised in the title would have made for a genuinely innovatory text.
Full Surrogacy Now originated in a Ph.D. thesis (2017a, submitted 2016) composed primarily of four articles either published or in the process of publication (Lewis, 2016, 2017b, 2018a, 2019). Other short publications on the Handmaid's Tale (10-17) and amniotechnics (160-168) appear as set pieces, the latter, oddly, at the very end, where it reads rather like the first chapter of another book yet to come. This one opens with a brief discussion of the perils of pregnancy and the 'techno-fixes' that are available to the rich in particular, surrogacy included: 'capitalist biotech does nothing at all to solve the problem of pregnancy per se, because that is not the problem it is addressing. It is responding exclusively to demand for genetic parenthood, to which it applies the logic of outsourcing' (4), and its logic replicates that of previous eugenic movements. 'What,' though, 'if we reimagined pregnancy, and not just its prescribed aftermath, as work under capitalism - that is, as something to be struggled in and against toward a utopian horizon free of work and free of value?' (9). Mary O'Brien is then invoked and dismissed in two paragraphs. Only after a lively detour via The Handmaid's Tale ('Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race, or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns', 10) do we get an introduction to commercial surrogacy itself, and a contrasting real or full surrogacy. Children do not belong to anyone, nor do they 'reproduce' the genetic substance of their parents. So, via Haraway (1989: 352, the child is a 'randomly assembled genetic package', and 'literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms'):
'There is only degenerative and regenerative co-production. Labour (such as gestational labour) and nature (including genome, epigenome, microbiome, and so on) can only alchemize the world together by transforming one another. We are all, at root, responsible, and especially for the stew that is epigenetics. We are the makers of one another. And we could learn collectively to act like it. It is those truths that I wish to call real surrogacy, full surrogacy' (19-20).
This leads into a statement of intent. Lewis will be 'theoretically immoderate, utopian and partisan regarding the people who work in today's surrogacy dormitories', and aims 'to use bourgeois reproduction today (stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neocolonial) to squint toward a horizon of gestational communism', on the assumption that 'the power to get to something approaching such a horizon belongs primarily to those who are currently workers - workers who probably dream about not being workers - specifically, those making and unmaking babies' (21). She will detail the 'cissexist, antiqueer, and xenophobic logics that police deviations from the image of a legitimate family united in one "healthy" household', 'animated by hatred for capitalism's incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family and its purposive starvation of queerer, more comradely modes'. And she will not speak of 'expectant mothers', 'pregnant women', or even 'pregnant women, men, and non-binary people', but rather of 'pregnant people', as there can be no utopian thought on reproduction that does not involve uncoupling gestation from the gender binary' (22). In short, she takes the experimental stance that 'gestation is work and, as such, has no inherent or immoveable gender' (23). I found Takeshita (2018), whom Lewis cites directly, helpful in filling out the argument here. The introductory chapter is rounded out by a brief section, Gestational Commune (26-9), which begins by waxing lyrical on the prospect of letting pregnancy be for everyone, and overthrowing the family, and goes on, with specific reference to Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex) and Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time) in particular, to suggest that 'too few of the speculative ectogenesis texts grappled at all with the relationship between social reproduction and reproduction of capital - the unequal distribution of technology, and the limits of (the desirability of) automation'. She goes on to say that it is 'important to ask, for example, what the operations might be by which race and sex are technologically dissolved; or where the rare-earth minerals presumably required for the enormous full-time placenta-computers should come from' (28). These two points, on the abolition of the family, and the feasibility, the politics, and desirability of a technological fix, appear to central to a book with the title this one has. But she immediately steps away from them. On the abolition of the family she refers the reader to an as then unpublished article by Michelle O'Brien (2020); on ectogenesis, she describes her query as a 'token question' inspired by Mamo and Alston-Stepnitz (2015); and more generally, she describes herself as 'glossing over' ideas regarding the possibility of 'another surrogacy' and writing as 'an archetypal example of distributed, omni-surrogated creative labour' and acknowledges the 'fiction of individualized authorship' (26-7). It's fine to acknowledge the universal truth that all scholarship builds on what has gone before. But the appeal to Michelle O'Brien and the 'token question' suggest something different: a tacit admission that the full surrogacy/abolition of the family themes are not actually developed in this text. And indeed they are not.
Instead, the second chapter is predominantly concerned with anti-surrogacy movements such as FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) and Stop Surrogacy Now. 'Stung at the unconscious level by what payments for sex and pregnancy potentially reveal about sex and pregnancy', she argues, 'these voices want to abolish the commodification without abolishing the work' (52-3); they are animated, as others too have insisted, by a commitment to the notion of the essential dignity of women as a distinct biological class, and virulent opposition to transsexuality; and they are part (along with the 'corporate feminist NGO-led rescue industry' focused on sex trafficking) of a wider 'neoimperialist humanitarian feminism' (56). Her account is confessedly one-sided, referencing currents in FINRRAGE that articulate a 'family-critical anti-contractarianism' (55 and ft. 84, p. 183) that are not explored further.
In the third chapter, the theme of gestation as work is developed further, initially with a focus on the organisation of commercial surrogacy to maximise the production of value, exemplified by the practice of caesarean delivery at 36 to 38 weeks, 'a regime that subsumes the organic temporality of [the surrogates'] labour into capitalist time' (59). Increasingly, the focus now turns to the Akanshka Hospital (61-71). Here Lewis carries two ideas forward at the same time, the first that gestation in commercial surrogacy is work, and the second that all gestation is work. Neither point should be controversial, but as she illustrates, there is plenty of commentary, largely self-interested, that seeks to minimize or deny this perspective - in the latter case through depictions of the development of the fetus in which the mother's body is airbrushed out of the picture, so promoting the idea of autonomous or even 'miraculous' development, and rendering women's procreative labour invisible. Lewis follows Weinbaum's argument, from 1994, that 'surrogacy as commodified labor power is the exceptional case that compels the redefinition of all forms of biological reproduction' (cited p. 81). But after this introduction of the theme of gestation as work Lewis resumes the account of the Akanksha Hospital in the fourth chapter (84-109). The problem is that its narrow focus on the character and moral standing of Patel's enterprise and of philanthrocapitalism (cf. Lewis 2019) does not advance either of the promised themes of full surrogacy or critique of the family, so the narrative stalls. Only in the following chapter, and then only six pages in, is the theme 'abolish the family' introduced, in typically pugnacious terms: 'assisted reproduction's track record in human rights violations is dwarfed - by any measure - by the track record of the "natural family"', the 'headquarters', she asserts, of 'discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisement' (115-6). One-sided as this is, it justifies a detailed consideration of alternative possibilities for living together, and raising children, inaugurated with reference to a question posed by Shelley Park (2009): 'Is a queer way of parenting people possible?' (117). It is only here that the positive programme of the book gets going, and in just under three pages (117-119) Lewis sets out what could have been the basis for a significant contribution, closing with what might have been the starting point: 'The revolutionary strategy we require in answering the question of how gestational and social reproduction will be untethered from one another remains almost entirely unwritten' (119). The premises from which her answer would begin are that capitalism cannot survive without the family, and that it is necessary to fight for the abolition and transcendence not only of capitalism but also of the heteronormative family. Within this broad framework, the outline discussion is thoughtful and nuanced: the 'bio-family' generally schools its junior members in their role as labour available to capital, and in complementary racial/ethnic identities, and 'the organized regulatory violence known as gender' (citing Griffiths and Gleeson, 2015); but is capable also of practical solidarity and comradeship. However, it is not self-evident that capitalism requires heteronormativity, the private bio-family, or the mobilisation of racial identity, or that alternative social arrangements would be incompatible either with these latter oppressions, or with the reproduction of the proletariat, so all of these themes invite further exploration. But here again she stops short, turning instead to four successive brief reflections. The first three start with 1970s science fiction (Marge Piercy and Ursula le Guin); the labours of gestation and self-reinvention as explored in Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts; and the claim that a 'care crisis' results when Filipina mothers leave their children with others when they migrate to look after other people's children in the global North, but in every case they lead back to the figure of the surrogate. The fourth takes a lead from the critique of the concept of maternal 'generosity' in the third to broach an essentially new theme - the specific conditions which might promote and move us towards 'something like unalienated gestation' - a fundamental issue if the objective is gestational communism. True to form, the one-page discussion ends with questions that could have been the starting point: 'How do we mould an is out of an ought we have largely yet to imagine with regard to gestational nature/culture? That is to say: How do we remake pregnancy according to principles that may themselves be as-yet-unthinkable?' (140). Lewis's answer, which begins with free abortion on demand without apology, affirms 'a politics that has a place for the killing of subjects', and envisages a commitment to 'maximal gestator control' is thoroughly consistent with her overall argument, and indeed entailed by it.
There is something unsatisfactory about a text that only gestures towards this genuinely radical ethical position, while devoting a whole chapter to a critique of philanthrocapitalist commercial surrogacy, and just what it is becomes clear in the first section of the penultimate chapter, 'Another Surrogacy is Possible'. It starts again with Patel's philanthrocapitalism, leading from there to the question, 'How can surrogacy be turned against reproductive stratification?' (146). But on the way there is evidence that Lewis is at cross-purposes with herself. She opens the section with the caution that 'there is no reason to single out surrogacy work for anti-capitalist excoriation' (141), and closes it with the hope that 'this reading has posed a threat to Nayna Patel's philanthrocapitalism, recentering the liberatory desires for a just and liveable - classless - mode of social reproduction which her narratives seek to co-opt, distort and obfuscate' (146). While a proposal for an alternative production model of 'surrogacy for surrogates' requires a critique of commercial surrogacy itself and of the practices and ideologies that sustain it, Lewis's broader project simply assumes that 'in any postcapitalist moment' (42) commercial surrogacy is unlikely to persist, not that the alternative society she envisages depends crucially upon its overthrow. Rather, the overthrow of the heteronormative family and notion of children as property that must accompany the overthrow of capitalism depends upon 'cultivating non-oedipal kinship and sharing reciprocal mothering labours', for which guidance and inspiration can be found across a variety of present and past forms of kinning: on the one hand, 'open adoptions, radical crèches, "GynePunk" experiments, queer parenting households, and plain old neighbours have long been quietly at work building human subjectivities beyond the dyadic template' (147); on the other, 'Inventive kinning has taken place in every corner of the planet ever since the institution of marriage started being forcibly imposed on poor, indigenous and colonized people' (148), and such practices can be reclaimed and recovered. In short, 'Anti-authoritarian oddkin [the term is from Donna Haraway] everywhere, not only in black communities in the Global North, have been experimentally sketching and tentatively building reproductive communes on a micro scale' (149). In the pages that follow, Lewis brings forward a wealth of evidence to support these claims, while noting that current patterns are distorted by class difference:
'equitable polymaternal practices operating at the grassroots level tend to collide in inexpressibly painful ways with the kind of disavowed perversion of polymaternalism that operates in sharply polarized class societies. This is the socialism or "full surrogacy" of the rich that sees wet nurses, nannies, ayahs, and mammies serving upper-class children as full-time "second mothers" while leaving their own children in the care of several already overburdened others' (150).
So the practice of commercial surrogacy is only tangentially related to the broader themes Lewis intends to pursue. If only she had shifted the focus away from it, and expanded this eight-page (147-154) section to 80 pages in order to give real substance to the broader notion of full surrogacy it rests upon (cf. Atanasoski and Vora, 2015), she would have produced the book the title promises. As it is, the chapter concludes with an even briefer section in which a frenetic parade of ideas, allusions and references only hint at what a more substantial treatment might have provided.
More than an opportunity missed, this is an opportunity foregone. But if this is all we are going to get, it is worth reading all the same.
References
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora. 2015. 'Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor', Catalyst, 1, 1.
Kate Griffiths and Jules Gleeson. 2015. 'Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition', Ritual 1.0, 21 June.
Donna Haraway. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge.
Sophie Lewis. 2016. 'Gestational Labors: Care Politics and Surrogates' Struggle', in S. Hoffman and A. Moreno, eds, Intimate Economies, Palgrave, London.
Sophie Lewis. 2017a. Cyborg Labour: Exploring surrogacy as gestational work, Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester.
Sophie Lewis. 2017b. 'Defending Intimacy against What? Limits of Antisurrogacy Feminisms, Signs, 43, 1, 2017, pp. 97-125.
Sophie Lewis. 2018a. 'Cyborg uterine geography: Complicating "care" and social reproduction', Dialogues in Human Geography, 8, 3, 300-316.
Sophie Lewis. 2018b. 'International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism, Gender, Place & Culture, 25, 2, 207-227.
Sophie Lewis. 2019. 'Surrogacy as Feminism: The Philanthrocapitalist Framing of Contract Pregnancy', Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 40, 1, 1-38.
Laura Mamo and Eli Alston-Stepnitz. 2015. 'Queer Intimacies and Structural Inequalities: New Directions in Stratified Reproduction', Journal of Family Issues, 36, 4, 519-540.
Mary O'Brien. 1981. The Politics of Reproduction, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Michelle O'Brien. (2020). 'To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development', Endnotes, 5, 86-137.
Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor, Columbia University Press, 2014.
Sharmila Rudrappa, Discounted Life, New York University Press, 2015.
Chikako Takeshita. 2018. 'From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Materialist Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body', Catalyst, 3, 1, 1-28.
Kalindi Vora, Life Support, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Alys Weinbaum. 1994. 'Marx, Irigaray, and the Politics of Reproduction', differences, 6, 1, 98-128.
All this is unfortunate, as there is plenty here all the same to suggest that a sustained defence of 'full surrogacy' allied to a feminist critique of the family as promised in the title would have made for a genuinely innovatory text.
Full Surrogacy Now originated in a Ph.D. thesis (2017a, submitted 2016) composed primarily of four articles either published or in the process of publication (Lewis, 2016, 2017b, 2018a, 2019). Other short publications on the Handmaid's Tale (10-17) and amniotechnics (160-168) appear as set pieces, the latter, oddly, at the very end, where it reads rather like the first chapter of another book yet to come. This one opens with a brief discussion of the perils of pregnancy and the 'techno-fixes' that are available to the rich in particular, surrogacy included: 'capitalist biotech does nothing at all to solve the problem of pregnancy per se, because that is not the problem it is addressing. It is responding exclusively to demand for genetic parenthood, to which it applies the logic of outsourcing' (4), and its logic replicates that of previous eugenic movements. 'What,' though, 'if we reimagined pregnancy, and not just its prescribed aftermath, as work under capitalism - that is, as something to be struggled in and against toward a utopian horizon free of work and free of value?' (9). Mary O'Brien is then invoked and dismissed in two paragraphs. Only after a lively detour via The Handmaid's Tale ('Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race, or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns', 10) do we get an introduction to commercial surrogacy itself, and a contrasting real or full surrogacy. Children do not belong to anyone, nor do they 'reproduce' the genetic substance of their parents. So, via Haraway (1989: 352, the child is a 'randomly assembled genetic package', and 'literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms'):
'There is only degenerative and regenerative co-production. Labour (such as gestational labour) and nature (including genome, epigenome, microbiome, and so on) can only alchemize the world together by transforming one another. We are all, at root, responsible, and especially for the stew that is epigenetics. We are the makers of one another. And we could learn collectively to act like it. It is those truths that I wish to call real surrogacy, full surrogacy' (19-20).
This leads into a statement of intent. Lewis will be 'theoretically immoderate, utopian and partisan regarding the people who work in today's surrogacy dormitories', and aims 'to use bourgeois reproduction today (stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neocolonial) to squint toward a horizon of gestational communism', on the assumption that 'the power to get to something approaching such a horizon belongs primarily to those who are currently workers - workers who probably dream about not being workers - specifically, those making and unmaking babies' (21). She will detail the 'cissexist, antiqueer, and xenophobic logics that police deviations from the image of a legitimate family united in one "healthy" household', 'animated by hatred for capitalism's incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family and its purposive starvation of queerer, more comradely modes'. And she will not speak of 'expectant mothers', 'pregnant women', or even 'pregnant women, men, and non-binary people', but rather of 'pregnant people', as there can be no utopian thought on reproduction that does not involve uncoupling gestation from the gender binary' (22). In short, she takes the experimental stance that 'gestation is work and, as such, has no inherent or immoveable gender' (23). I found Takeshita (2018), whom Lewis cites directly, helpful in filling out the argument here. The introductory chapter is rounded out by a brief section, Gestational Commune (26-9), which begins by waxing lyrical on the prospect of letting pregnancy be for everyone, and overthrowing the family, and goes on, with specific reference to Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex) and Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time) in particular, to suggest that 'too few of the speculative ectogenesis texts grappled at all with the relationship between social reproduction and reproduction of capital - the unequal distribution of technology, and the limits of (the desirability of) automation'. She goes on to say that it is 'important to ask, for example, what the operations might be by which race and sex are technologically dissolved; or where the rare-earth minerals presumably required for the enormous full-time placenta-computers should come from' (28). These two points, on the abolition of the family, and the feasibility, the politics, and desirability of a technological fix, appear to central to a book with the title this one has. But she immediately steps away from them. On the abolition of the family she refers the reader to an as then unpublished article by Michelle O'Brien (2020); on ectogenesis, she describes her query as a 'token question' inspired by Mamo and Alston-Stepnitz (2015); and more generally, she describes herself as 'glossing over' ideas regarding the possibility of 'another surrogacy' and writing as 'an archetypal example of distributed, omni-surrogated creative labour' and acknowledges the 'fiction of individualized authorship' (26-7). It's fine to acknowledge the universal truth that all scholarship builds on what has gone before. But the appeal to Michelle O'Brien and the 'token question' suggest something different: a tacit admission that the full surrogacy/abolition of the family themes are not actually developed in this text. And indeed they are not.
Instead, the second chapter is predominantly concerned with anti-surrogacy movements such as FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) and Stop Surrogacy Now. 'Stung at the unconscious level by what payments for sex and pregnancy potentially reveal about sex and pregnancy', she argues, 'these voices want to abolish the commodification without abolishing the work' (52-3); they are animated, as others too have insisted, by a commitment to the notion of the essential dignity of women as a distinct biological class, and virulent opposition to transsexuality; and they are part (along with the 'corporate feminist NGO-led rescue industry' focused on sex trafficking) of a wider 'neoimperialist humanitarian feminism' (56). Her account is confessedly one-sided, referencing currents in FINRRAGE that articulate a 'family-critical anti-contractarianism' (55 and ft. 84, p. 183) that are not explored further.
In the third chapter, the theme of gestation as work is developed further, initially with a focus on the organisation of commercial surrogacy to maximise the production of value, exemplified by the practice of caesarean delivery at 36 to 38 weeks, 'a regime that subsumes the organic temporality of [the surrogates'] labour into capitalist time' (59). Increasingly, the focus now turns to the Akanshka Hospital (61-71). Here Lewis carries two ideas forward at the same time, the first that gestation in commercial surrogacy is work, and the second that all gestation is work. Neither point should be controversial, but as she illustrates, there is plenty of commentary, largely self-interested, that seeks to minimize or deny this perspective - in the latter case through depictions of the development of the fetus in which the mother's body is airbrushed out of the picture, so promoting the idea of autonomous or even 'miraculous' development, and rendering women's procreative labour invisible. Lewis follows Weinbaum's argument, from 1994, that 'surrogacy as commodified labor power is the exceptional case that compels the redefinition of all forms of biological reproduction' (cited p. 81). But after this introduction of the theme of gestation as work Lewis resumes the account of the Akanksha Hospital in the fourth chapter (84-109). The problem is that its narrow focus on the character and moral standing of Patel's enterprise and of philanthrocapitalism (cf. Lewis 2019) does not advance either of the promised themes of full surrogacy or critique of the family, so the narrative stalls. Only in the following chapter, and then only six pages in, is the theme 'abolish the family' introduced, in typically pugnacious terms: 'assisted reproduction's track record in human rights violations is dwarfed - by any measure - by the track record of the "natural family"', the 'headquarters', she asserts, of 'discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisement' (115-6). One-sided as this is, it justifies a detailed consideration of alternative possibilities for living together, and raising children, inaugurated with reference to a question posed by Shelley Park (2009): 'Is a queer way of parenting people possible?' (117). It is only here that the positive programme of the book gets going, and in just under three pages (117-119) Lewis sets out what could have been the basis for a significant contribution, closing with what might have been the starting point: 'The revolutionary strategy we require in answering the question of how gestational and social reproduction will be untethered from one another remains almost entirely unwritten' (119). The premises from which her answer would begin are that capitalism cannot survive without the family, and that it is necessary to fight for the abolition and transcendence not only of capitalism but also of the heteronormative family. Within this broad framework, the outline discussion is thoughtful and nuanced: the 'bio-family' generally schools its junior members in their role as labour available to capital, and in complementary racial/ethnic identities, and 'the organized regulatory violence known as gender' (citing Griffiths and Gleeson, 2015); but is capable also of practical solidarity and comradeship. However, it is not self-evident that capitalism requires heteronormativity, the private bio-family, or the mobilisation of racial identity, or that alternative social arrangements would be incompatible either with these latter oppressions, or with the reproduction of the proletariat, so all of these themes invite further exploration. But here again she stops short, turning instead to four successive brief reflections. The first three start with 1970s science fiction (Marge Piercy and Ursula le Guin); the labours of gestation and self-reinvention as explored in Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts; and the claim that a 'care crisis' results when Filipina mothers leave their children with others when they migrate to look after other people's children in the global North, but in every case they lead back to the figure of the surrogate. The fourth takes a lead from the critique of the concept of maternal 'generosity' in the third to broach an essentially new theme - the specific conditions which might promote and move us towards 'something like unalienated gestation' - a fundamental issue if the objective is gestational communism. True to form, the one-page discussion ends with questions that could have been the starting point: 'How do we mould an is out of an ought we have largely yet to imagine with regard to gestational nature/culture? That is to say: How do we remake pregnancy according to principles that may themselves be as-yet-unthinkable?' (140). Lewis's answer, which begins with free abortion on demand without apology, affirms 'a politics that has a place for the killing of subjects', and envisages a commitment to 'maximal gestator control' is thoroughly consistent with her overall argument, and indeed entailed by it.
There is something unsatisfactory about a text that only gestures towards this genuinely radical ethical position, while devoting a whole chapter to a critique of philanthrocapitalist commercial surrogacy, and just what it is becomes clear in the first section of the penultimate chapter, 'Another Surrogacy is Possible'. It starts again with Patel's philanthrocapitalism, leading from there to the question, 'How can surrogacy be turned against reproductive stratification?' (146). But on the way there is evidence that Lewis is at cross-purposes with herself. She opens the section with the caution that 'there is no reason to single out surrogacy work for anti-capitalist excoriation' (141), and closes it with the hope that 'this reading has posed a threat to Nayna Patel's philanthrocapitalism, recentering the liberatory desires for a just and liveable - classless - mode of social reproduction which her narratives seek to co-opt, distort and obfuscate' (146). While a proposal for an alternative production model of 'surrogacy for surrogates' requires a critique of commercial surrogacy itself and of the practices and ideologies that sustain it, Lewis's broader project simply assumes that 'in any postcapitalist moment' (42) commercial surrogacy is unlikely to persist, not that the alternative society she envisages depends crucially upon its overthrow. Rather, the overthrow of the heteronormative family and notion of children as property that must accompany the overthrow of capitalism depends upon 'cultivating non-oedipal kinship and sharing reciprocal mothering labours', for which guidance and inspiration can be found across a variety of present and past forms of kinning: on the one hand, 'open adoptions, radical crèches, "GynePunk" experiments, queer parenting households, and plain old neighbours have long been quietly at work building human subjectivities beyond the dyadic template' (147); on the other, 'Inventive kinning has taken place in every corner of the planet ever since the institution of marriage started being forcibly imposed on poor, indigenous and colonized people' (148), and such practices can be reclaimed and recovered. In short, 'Anti-authoritarian oddkin [the term is from Donna Haraway] everywhere, not only in black communities in the Global North, have been experimentally sketching and tentatively building reproductive communes on a micro scale' (149). In the pages that follow, Lewis brings forward a wealth of evidence to support these claims, while noting that current patterns are distorted by class difference:
'equitable polymaternal practices operating at the grassroots level tend to collide in inexpressibly painful ways with the kind of disavowed perversion of polymaternalism that operates in sharply polarized class societies. This is the socialism or "full surrogacy" of the rich that sees wet nurses, nannies, ayahs, and mammies serving upper-class children as full-time "second mothers" while leaving their own children in the care of several already overburdened others' (150).
So the practice of commercial surrogacy is only tangentially related to the broader themes Lewis intends to pursue. If only she had shifted the focus away from it, and expanded this eight-page (147-154) section to 80 pages in order to give real substance to the broader notion of full surrogacy it rests upon (cf. Atanasoski and Vora, 2015), she would have produced the book the title promises. As it is, the chapter concludes with an even briefer section in which a frenetic parade of ideas, allusions and references only hint at what a more substantial treatment might have provided.
More than an opportunity missed, this is an opportunity foregone. But if this is all we are going to get, it is worth reading all the same.
References
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora. 2015. 'Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor', Catalyst, 1, 1.
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