What Goes Around Comes Around: Fleshy Toxicities Return Home as Kin
March 3, 2022
Feminist critic and scholar Sophie Lewis critically explores the intersection of biopower and hospitality by focusing on surrogacy as a practice that entangles property, labor, environment, and kinship in dynamic ways.
Living human fetuses, conceptualized as genetically “authored” private property, are among the many commodities whose manufacture can now be outsourced to the Global South under capitalism. One of the locations where commercial gestational surrogacy “production” occurs is, as it happens, Bhopal, India, an area synonymous with a giant gas leak. As environmentalists attempted to make known throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Bhopal disaster was inflicted on the Bhopali population by the Union Carbide corporation (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) in 1984. Today, as the feminist neuroscientist Deboleena Roy has shown, the poisonous methyl isocyanate from the gas leak continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in Bhopal. It is making its way back to the Global North via the bodies of “surro-babies” commissioned by, for example, European and American parents. What can this circuit of historic molecular violence, whereby toxicity is returned to its place of origin through the labors of gestating Indian bodies, tell us about the vengeful dimensions of hospitality? How might we think with, against, and beyond the category of “kinship” with our toxic, cyborg children, and their poisoned mothers?
Sophie Lewis is a visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019), which Donna Haraway hailed as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Her non-academic writing has appeared in numerous venues including The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and her Patreon.
DISCUSSIONS
“What Is Family Abolition? A Discussion with Sophie Lewis,”
CAPITALISM/SOCIALISM/DEMOCRACY | Andrew Mitchell Center for The Study of Democracy, December 2022.
Sophie Lewis, Katie Stone, and Caroline Edwards: “Aliens, Vampires, Surrogates: Revolutionising the Gestational Workplace,” Center for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck University, April 28, 2021.
Sophie Lewis and Aleksandra Sidoruk, and Carolina Maciel de França,“Reproduction, Family, and the Body,” School of Resistance, NTGent, December 10, 2020.
LECTURE
Sophie Lewis, “The Kitchenless Gestational Workplace,” Canadian Centre for Architecture, July 22, 2021.
ESSAY
Sophie Lewis, “Mothering Against the World: Momrades Against Motherhood," Salvage Quarterly, September 18, 2020.
What Goes Around Comes Around: Fleshy Toxicities Return Home as Kin
March 3, 2022
Feminist critic and scholar Sophie Lewis critically explores the intersection of biopower and hospitality by focusing on surrogacy as a practice that entangles property, labor, environment, and kinship in dynamic ways.
Living human fetuses, conceptualized as genetically “authored” private property, are among the many commodities whose manufacture can now be outsourced to the Global South under capitalism. One of the locations where commercial gestational surrogacy “production” occurs is, as it happens, Bhopal, India, an area synonymous with a giant gas leak. As environmentalists attempted to make known throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Bhopal disaster was inflicted on the Bhopali population by the Union Carbide corporation (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) in 1984. Today, as the feminist neuroscientist Deboleena Roy has shown, the poisonous methyl isocyanate from the gas leak continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in Bhopal. It is making its way back to the Global North via the bodies of “surro-babies” commissioned by, for example, European and American parents. What can this circuit of historic molecular violence, whereby toxicity is returned to its place of origin through the labors of gestating Indian bodies, tell us about the vengeful dimensions of hospitality? How might we think with, against, and beyond the category of “kinship” with our toxic, cyborg children, and their poisoned mothers?
Sophie Lewis is a visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019), which Donna Haraway hailed as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Her non-academic writing has appeared in numerous venues including The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and her Patreon.
DISCUSSIONS
“What Is Family Abolition? A Discussion with Sophie Lewis,”
CAPITALISM/SOCIALISM/DEMOCRACY | Andrew Mitchell Center for The Study of Democracy, December 2022.
Sophie Lewis, Katie Stone, and Caroline Edwards: “Aliens, Vampires, Surrogates: Revolutionising the Gestational Workplace,” Center for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck University, April 28, 2021.
Sophie Lewis and Aleksandra Sidoruk, and Carolina Maciel de França,“Reproduction, Family, and the Body,” School of Resistance, NTGent, December 10, 2020.
LECTURE
Sophie Lewis, “The Kitchenless Gestational Workplace,” Canadian Centre for Architecture, July 22, 2021.
ESSAY
Sophie Lewis, “Mothering Against the World: Momrades Against Motherhood," Salvage Quarterly, September 18, 2020.