Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Full Surrogacy Now adds another piece to this puzzle by considering the flawed conceptualisations of surrogacy non-Marxian feminists commit to. The book seems to add significantly more heft to the conclusion that the continual overlaps between supposed radicalism, and more overtly traditionalist moralising, are no coincidence. And rather than settle for simply providing an aimless critique, the book follows through into a mode of politics I’m quite familiar with, but will only name here and await further discussion: family abolitionism. There will surely be disagreement from some Marxists here, and some will be unhappy to see a reignition of the debate ‘wages for housework’ originally provoked. Difficult questions concerning the Marxologically correct status of the foetus are raised by this line of thinking. But polemical as it may be, this passage clears the way for a much more elevated discussion around child-bearing as a form of labour than we’ve previously enjoyed. So while it sparked my delight as an offensive within feminism, as a point of departure for a contemporary Marxism grappling with labour and the intimate challenges of proletarian embodiment, Full Surrogacy Now is a true breakthrough. Irene Lusztig, The Motherhood Archives, 2013. 91 min, HD video, 16 mm, and archival film. Terms of Engagement

I’ll wager there is no technological “fix” for the violent predicament human gestators are in. Technologies for ex utero babymaking might be a good idea, and the same goes for more ambitious research and development in the field of abortion and contraception. But, fundamentally, the whole world deserves to reap the benefits of already available techniques currently monopolized by capitalism’s elites. It is the political struggle for access and control—the commoning or communization of reprotech—that matters most. It is certainly going to be up to us (since technocrats wouldn’t do it for us, or hand it over to us if they did) to orchestrate intensive scientific inquiry into ways to tweak bodily biology to better privilege, protect, support, and empower those with uteruses who find themselves put to work by a placenta.

Family abolition

This kind of reverence is anathema to Lewis. When I asked her what contemporary feminists she admired, she named the queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks, and the founding members of the Wages for Housework movement as a few examples, but said it’s “a mistake” to have feminist heroes. “You make them and in doing so you’re platforming someone who then is kind of cursed by that,” Lewis said. “They no longer keep learning and growing to the same degree,” potentially hampering new feminist thinking. As with much utopian writing, it is difficult to wrap one’s head around some of the ideas. The visceral stew of queer feminist communist political theory and the biotechnological birthing discussion are sometimes difficult to read. But Lewis does a stellar job at explaining and exploring these alongside a beautiful array of literary and pop culture references. In a particularly important critique of The Handmaid’s Tale and responses to it, Lewis warns that ‘the pleasures of an extremist misogyny defined as womb-farming risk concealing from us what are simply slower and less photogenic forms of violence, such as race, class, and binary gender itself’ (14). While the horrific bodily violations depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel and the TV programme are an emotive rallying point for many feminists, these cannot erase the raced, classed and trans-exclusionary histories of reproductive rights struggles and imaginings of ‘universal womanhood’ rooted in biology. Nonetheless, Lewis sees glimmers of this future everywhere. When she is surrounded by her partner and her friends, she sees that she is “mothered by many.” They are not her biological relatives, but they are each other’s kin in an even truer sense: They have chosen to care for each other without the dictates of the nuclear family structure. In Lewis’ feminist utopia, family has not vanished; it has become more wild, more abundant, and less constrained. Sophie Lewis is at the top of a new generation of scholars and activists thinking the transformation of gestational labor within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism. Neither simply natural nor banally cultural, gestation appears as the unthought core of gender and sexual politics, and the key of a forthcoming womb revolution: trans-Marx meets mammal’s politics!”

what breakdown of the family, anyway? The apparent post-normativity of contemporary life is entirely compatible with the establishment of new norms. We continue to be form-determined after we no longer see social forms’ normative force. Put simply: the traditional family, which for Cooper is a family coerced into existence by exigency and normativity, is not broken enough.” The book draws our attention to a tradition of utopian socialist biology, which offers ways of thinking that free us from assumptions about ‘nature’ that are little more than bourgeois ideology masquerading as if they were immutable. A truly egalitarian feminism, Lewis argues, must extend the feminist challenge to sex stereotypes all the way to the origins of life itself. As long as we believe there’s a special bond between women, gestation, and the desire to care for the resulting baby, the sexes can never be exactly equal. So all these must be eliminated. Doing this, she suggests, will open a space for new, communitarian forms of family unconstrained by gender, embodiment, or oppressive bourgeois norms. In search of a love that transcends exclusionary affinities, she argues for liquefaction even of those affections and loyalties that are grounded in blood kinship—or, as she puts it, “capitalism’s incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family.” This can, in her view, be achieved by centering the provisional, de-gendered, denatured, often marginalized or otherwise ambiguous surrogate “gestator.” This achieved, we can dismantle the “stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neo-colonial” apparatus of “bourgeois reproduction,” in favor of “gestational communism”: a world where babies are not the particular obligation of family units, but “universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility.”The everyday “miracle” that transpires in pregnancy, the production of that number more than one and less than two, receives more idealizing lip-service than it does respect. Certainly, the creation of new proto-personhood in the uterus is a marvel artists have engaged for millennia (and psychoanalytic philosophers for almost a century). Most of us need no reminding that we are, each of us, the blinking, thinking, pulsating products of gestational work and its equally laborious aftermaths. Yet in 2017 a reader and thinker as compendious as Maggie Nelson can still state, semi-incredulously but with a strong case behind her, that philosophical writing about actually doing gestation constitutes an absence in culture. Extending this, Full Surrogacy Now adds to our understanding of the treatment of surrogacy by both a detailed exploration of the (western feminist) campaigns to outlaw it, an elaboration of why the attempts to distinguish between surrogacy and other forms of child-bearing on some ontological level reliably fail, and a still more probing view of surrogacy itself, considered here as a labour process (offensive and exploitative not in some particularly outrageous sense, but as labour always is). Pregnancy undoubtedly has its pleasures; natality is unique. That is why, even as others suffer deeply from their coerced participation in pregnancy, many people excluded from the experience for whatever reason—be they cis, trans, or nonbinary—feel deeply bereft. But even so, and even in full recognition of the sense of the sublime that people experience in gestating, it is remarkable that there isn’t more consistent support for research into alleviating the problem of pregnancy. However, I believe that a radical reinterpretation of the concept of motherhood is required which would tell us, among many other things, more about the physical capacity for gestation and nourishment of infants and how it relates to psychological gestation and nurture as an intellectual and creative force. Until now, the two aspects of creation have been held in artificial isolation from each other, while responsibilities of men and women have largely been determined not by anatomy but by laws, education, politics and social pressures claiming anatomy as their justification.” If you believed that, you might wonder: Given that this is all contingent, could we not do better? Could we imagine a kinder human society, freed from the monstrous, unnecessary weight of so-called “human nature” and the oppressive systems it naturalizes? Could we but achieve this, life might blossom into a polyphony of free-flourishing new forms.

If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book, citing the roughly 1,000 people in the United States who still die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth each year—mostly poor women and women of color. “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”Giving birth is commonly called labor. And, as I say in my blurb, the challenge of Full Surrogacy Now is this: What happens if all of human pregnancy and gestation is thought from the labor point of view? If it is all labor, then how can that labor be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? Lewis takes one of the most everyday things about being human and thinks it through from the point of view of a cyborg communism. This book goes far into places where few gender abolitionists have ventured and brings us a vision of another life. Natasha Lennard is a columnist for the Intercept, and teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research. Her next book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life has been gestated alongside Sophie’s and will also be birthed (via Verso) at the beginning of May. However, this depressing state of affairs hasn’t ever been the whole story. From Soviet mass holiday camps for pregnant comrades, to Germany’s inventive (albeit doomed) “twilight sleep” methods—designed to completely erase the memory of labor pain—human history contains a plethora of ambitious ideologies and technological experiments for universally liberating and collectivizing childbirth. It’s admittedly an ambivalent record. Irene Lusztig, director of a beautiful 2013 archival film on this subject, has understandably harsh words for the various early-twentieth-century rest-camps and schools of childbirth she discusses. But, she suggests, you have to hand it to them—even the most wrongheaded of textbooks written a century ago at least stated the problem to be solved in uncompromising terms: “Birth injuries are so common that Nature must intend for women to be used up in the process of reproduction, just as a salmon die after spawning.” 15 Well if that’s what Nature intends, the early utopian midwives and medical reformers featured in The Motherhood Archives responded: then Nature is an ass. Why accept Nature as natural? 16 If this is what childbirth is “naturally” like, they reasoned, looking about them in the maternity wards of Europe and America, then it quite obviously needs to be denatured, remade. 17 Easier said than done. Pioneering norms of fertility care based on something like cyborg self-determination have turned out to be a moving target. The exceptionality and care-worthiness of gestation remains something that has to be forcibly naturalized, spliced in against the grain of a “Nature” whose fundamental indifference to death, injury, and suffering does not, paradoxically, come naturally to most of us.