Indeed, as some of you may know, one wing of the British feminist movement even last year hired billboards to declare women “human adult females”.

The surrogacy industry is worth over 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you? While Lewis would like to replace this inherited love with a more logical kind of affection, one based on earned affinity or “kith and kind,” Ramos’s novel explores the warped devotion of parents. One character in “The Farm,” Ate, tirelessly works as a cook, a maid, and a baby nurse to support her disabled adult son in the Philippines, whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. “Everything Ate did was for him,” Jane observes. Jane is quarantined at Golden Oaks when her one-year-old, Mali, takes her first steps and speaks her first words. She, too, “would do anything for Mali.” And the clients, of course, are willing to “do anything” for their unborn children—that’s why they’ve come to Golden Oaks in the first place. 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.” People have been saying to me, ‘Love yourself in the days ahead like she loved you,’” Lewis said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s a terrible idea!’ I need to do a lot better than that and so do all my friends.” Lewis does not offer straightforward policy suggestions. Her approach to the material is theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir. Early in the book, she struggles to understand why anyone would want to get pregnant in the first place, and later she questions whether continuing the human race is a good idea. But she is solemn and unsparing in her assessment of the status quo. A portion of the book studies the Akanksha Fertility Clinic, in India, a surrogacy center that, according to Lewis, severely underpays and mistreats its workers. (Nayana Patel, who runs the clinic, has argued that Akanksha pays surrogates more than they would make at other jobs.) All of the Akanksha surrogates are required to have children of their own already, ostensibly because they know how difficult it is to raise a child and are therefore less likely to want to keep the ones they’re carrying.Lewis has found that when she talks about family abolition people respond as though she’s “not even speaking English anymore … like [I’m] not even making syntactical sense,” she said at the e-flux lecture. “Real brain explosion emoji to the max.” 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. Jules Joanne Gleeson is a comparative gender historian writing from a queer perspective about both pre-modern and contemporary societies. She covers a wide range of related topics, from ethics to embodiment. She is an academic worker, queer phenomenologist, Hegelian Marxist, and Londoner currently based in Vienna. A pivotal illustration of how certain Lewis is of the rightness of this task comes in an anecdote, where she recounts asking her father as a child whether he’d still love her if she turned out to be the milkman’s progeny. She fully expected him to say “Of course,” but received instead “stony, awkward silence.” Lewis recounts being so “devastated” by what this implied that “for the rest of the drive, I could not speak.” Implicitly, the instinctive, unconditional love of a parent for his or her genetic children is reframed as something capricious, exclusionary, and unjust.

To be a radical feminist during these years would have meant being familiar with this text and its central demand, which appeared in leftist pamphlets and literature. Yet just a decade later, any advocacy for family abolition had all but disappeared from feminist discourse. Instead, the movement chose to embrace family values, preferring to fight for the reform—rather than the annihilation—of the nuclear family structure. She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.) At the same time, paradoxically, most actually-existing families (especially but not only the racialized, proletarian, queer iterations that happily cover the earth) don’t even receive the full suite of protections we tend to assume are there to legitimate us. This shores up the Family, as a unit of governance and accumulation. The concrete mechanisms that shore up the Family as a unit of discipline and accumulation are changeable, even ephemeral, but the ideology lumbers on, zombie-like.

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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.” Doing so in the name of freedom and desire, with no regard for what that baby might need, would be to frame a dog-eat-dog world of selfishness, force, loneliness, and caprice as one of infinite richness, possibility, and satisfaction. As with the free-market optimists of the 1980s and 1990s, this vision ignores the role played by norms, constraints, and givens in shielding the weakest among us from predation by the strong. Its utopian sleight of hand is thus profoundly neoliberal in spirit. Incisive and exciting … a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations. ”