“I’ll wager that there is a baby making to be aimed for that will be defined neither by the alienated misery of the status quo nor the silver absolutism of their techno-fix,” writes Sophie Lewis in the introduction to Full Surrogacy Now, her bracing exploration of the gestational surrogacy industry. Aided by technology, gestational surrogacy is biological and social reproduction via network technologies, a fitting form of cyborg becoming for the biotechnology age. Gestational surrogacy is a signature form of labor for our age: a post-factory, homework economy whose potential as a example of worker agency in struggles against capitalism, sexism, racism, and nationalism has not yet been fully recognized or realized. Through listening to surrogates, Lewis shows how common ideas about the givenness of labor relations, the family, and nature in the modern world become untenable. Gestation makes babies while remaking the categories we use to make sense of the world.
Read the full review of Sophie Lewis’s book Full Surrogacy Now at Real Life Magazine.
Danya Glabau 