Giving birth is commonly called labour. What happens if all of human pregnancy and gestation is thought from the labour point of view? If it is all labour, then how can that labour be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? That’s the challenge of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, a new book from feminist writer Sophie Lewis.

Join Lewis for a discussion of crucial challenges and questions posed by her book: What are the connections between the bodily labour of gestating and other forms of biological, social, and ecological production and reproduction? How can we politicise (human and nonhuman) work that's treated as natural, taken for granted, and done for free? Why is the concept of "surrogacy" crucial to our collective liberation? And what might organising based on solidarity between the 'shopfloors' of paid and unpaid babymaking have to do with queer liberation, Black revolutionary feminism, Wages for Housework, and the often forgotten horizon of family abolition? Full Surrogacy Now explores these and other issues, making space for taking collective responsibility for children and the radical transformation of notions of kinship.

“The seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for” -- Donna Haraway

“Brings us a vision of another life” -- McKenzie Wark

Sophie Lewis is a writer, translator and feminist geographer living in Philadelphia. In addition to Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), Lewis has translated works including Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016) and A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schupp (MIT, 2017). She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, whose first book is to be published by Common Notions in 2019; an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry; and a queer feminist committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism. Further writings, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, have been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Antipode, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Mute and Salvage Quarterly.

This event is supported by the Geographies of Life research Cluster in the Department of Geography at Durham University.