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Sophie Lewis (author)

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Sophie Lewis
Born1988
Vienna, Austria
NationalityGerman, British
Education
Alma materUniversity of Oxford, The New School, University of Manchester
Philosophical work
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
InstitutionsUniversity of Pennsylvania
Main interests
Websitelasophielle.org

Sophie Lewis (born 1988) is a German-British writer and independent scholar based in Philadelphia, mainly known for her anti-state communism,[1] transfeminism, literary criticism, and cultural analysis, especially her critical-utopian[2] theorization of full surrogacy,[3] her idea that all reproduction is assisted[4] as well as amniotechnics,[5] and her advocacy for family abolition.[6][7]

Early life and education

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Lewis was born in Vienna and raised between Geneva and France.[8] Her mother, Ingrid Helga Lewis, was a middle-class German liberal who was once a Maoist involved in the West German student movement at the University of Göttingen. Lewis described her childhood in a series of personal essays concerning her family and, later, the death of her mother in 2019. Her maternal grandfather was an Adolf Hitler supporter and served in the Wehrmacht and her maternal grandmother was ex-Jewish. Her parents met in Vienna while her mother worked for the BBC German Service. According to Lewis, her mother discovered her Jewish heritage in 2008; her mother's family, the Sternbergs, had changed their surname and had converted to Christianity shortly before The Holocaust in order to embrace anti-Semitic Gentile life. Lewis's mother was an Anglophile who repudiated German culture and refused to teach her children the German language.[9][10][11]

Career

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After completing her PhD, Lewis published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, which was followed by Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation in October 2022.

Lewis has published many essays since 2013, on topics ranging from Marilyn Monroe[12] to tradwives,[13] in magazines including Harper's Magazine,[12] the London Review of Books,[14] Boston Review,[15] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,[16] Logic(s),[17] The Baffler[18] Lux Magazine,[19] Parapraxis,[9] Tank,[20] The Nation,[21] e-flux,[10] Mal Journal,[22] Dissent,[23] The New Inquiry,[24] Jacobin,[25] The White Review,[26] and Salvage. Lewis's peer-reviewed papers have appeared in the journals Feminist Theory,[11] Paragraph,[27] Feminist Review,[28] Signs,[29] Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies,[30] Gender, Place & Culture,[31] and Dialogues in Human Geography.[32]

Lewis's German-English translations for MIT Press include A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak).[33][34][35] Her translation of Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky's book The Future of Difference: Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism was published by Verso Books in 2020.[36]

Views

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Lewis does not advocate for commercial gestational surrogacy, according to academic Natalie Suzelis, Lewis builds upon Kalindi Vora's analysis of the surrogacy industry by using it to highlight the contradictions of capitalist reproduction.[37] Journalist Marie Solis for VICE explains that Lewis imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, 'mother' no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.[8]

Reception

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Positive reviews of her work have been written in magazines including The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, [38] as well as blogs like Libcom.org.[39]

Right-wing and religious commentators have written negative reviews of Lewis's work.[40][41][citation needed] Some centrist, left-leaning, and social democratic commentators have been very critical of her work, including: Amber A'Lee Frost,[42] Nina Power,[43] Elizabeth Bruenig,[44] Tom Whyman,[45] Angela Nagle,[46] Antonella Gambotto-Burke,[47] and others.[48][49] Most of the criticism is towards her views that children don't belong to anyone and children belong to us all, as described by Richard Seymour in his essay "Notes on a Normie Shit-Storm".[50]

Publications

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  • — (7 May 2019). Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78663-731-4. OCLC 1127958624.
  • — (4 October 2022). Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. Verso Books. ISBN 9781839767197.
  • — (18 February 2025). Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books. ISBN 9798888902493.

References

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  1. ^ O'Brien, ME (15 October 2019). "Communizing Care". pinko.
  2. ^ Stone, Katie (3 July 2023). "Hollow children: Utopianism and disability justice". Textual Practice. 37 (9): 1406. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2023.2231295 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  3. ^ Lane-McKinley, Madeline (10 June 2019). "Unthinking the Family in 'Full Surrogacy Now'". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  4. ^ Lewis, Sophie (10 August 2018). "Mothering". Boston Review.
  5. ^ Danewid, Ida (18 May 2023). "Unmaking Property: The River as Amniotechnics". The Disorder of Things.
  6. ^ "What is Family Abolition?". Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
  7. ^ Kluchin, Abby; Blanchfield, Patrick (16 March 2024). "45: The Fantasy of Family and the Meaning of Family Abolition feat. Sophie Lewis and M.E. O'Brien". Ordinary Unhappiness (Podcast). Buzzsprout.
  8. ^ a b Solis, Marie (21 February 2022). "We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family". Vice. Retrieved 10 October 2022.
  9. ^ a b Lewis, Sophie. "Caren Allstrich". Parapraxis.
  10. ^ a b Lewis, Sophie (September 2020). "With-Women: Grieving in Capitalist Time". e-flux Journal. No. 111.
  11. ^ a b Lewis, Sophie A. (10 January 2022). "Mothering against motherhood: doula work, xenohospitality and the idea of the momrade". Feminist Theory. 24 (1): 68–85. doi:10.1177/14647001211059520. ISSN 1464-7001 – via Sage Journals.
  12. ^ a b Lewis, Sophie (November 2022). "Some Like It Hot: Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society". Harper's Magazine.
  13. ^ Lewis, Sophie (26 April 2023). "Double-Shift: Dialectic of the Tradwife". Dilettante Army.
  14. ^ "Sophie Lewis". London Review of Books.
  15. ^ "Sophie Lewis". Boston Review.
  16. ^ Lewis, Sophie (17 May 2022). "Sexuelle Unlust in der Pandemie: Lustgewinn durch Enthaltsamkeit". Frankfurter Allgemeine.
  17. ^ Lewis, Sophie (3 August 2019). "Do Electric Sheep Dream of Water Babies?". Logic(s). No. 8.
  18. ^ Lewis, Sophie (March 2022). "A Woman is a Woman?". The Baffler. No. 62.
  19. ^ Lewis, Sophie (Autumn 2023). "The Derelict Dads of Bridgerton". Lux Magazine. No. 8.
  20. ^ Lewis, Sophie. "OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: On family abolition and learning from the transgender child". TANK MAGAZINE.
  21. ^ Lewis, Sophie (22 June 2022). "Abortion Involves Killing–and That's OK!". The Nation.
  22. ^ "Mal Journal issue 5". STACK magazines. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  23. ^ Lewis, Sophie (Summer 2021). "The Family Lottery". Dissent Magazine.
  24. ^ "Sophie Lewis". The New Inquiry. 22 August 2022. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  25. ^ Lewis, Sophie (26 March 2015). "Cash and Carry". Jacobin.
  26. ^ Lewis, Sophie (December 2019). "Who Liberates the Slaves?". The White Review.
  27. ^ Lewis, Sophie (2023). "Paul Preciado's Uterine Politics: Abolish the Family or Reclaim Confiscated Queer Genetic Patrimony?". Paragraph. 46: 74–89. doi:10.3366/para.2023.0419.
  28. ^ Lewis, Sophie A. (2017). "Open Space: Less 'Population' Talk, more Kin–Making: On Manchester's Birth Festival". Feminist Review. 117: 193–199. doi:10.1057/s41305-017-0084-5.
  29. ^ Lewis, Sophie (2017). "Defending Intimacy against What? Limits of Antisurrogacy Feminisms". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43: 97–125. doi:10.1086/692518.
  30. ^ Lewis, Sophie (2019). "Surrogacy as Feminism: The Philanthrocapitalist Framing of Contract Pregnancy". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 40 (1): 1–38. doi:10.1353/fro.2019.a719762.
  31. ^ Lewis, Sophie (2018). "International Solidarity in reproductive justice: Surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism". Gender, Place & Culture. 25 (2): 207–227. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1425286.
  32. ^ Lewis, Sophie (2018). "Cyborg uterine geography". Dialogues in Human Geography. 8 (3): 300–316. doi:10.1177/2043820618804625.
  33. ^ "Sophie Lewis".
  34. ^ "Communism for Kids". AK Press. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  35. ^ Ritner, Jesse (27 February 2019). "A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)". Not Even Past. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  36. ^ "The Future of Difference: Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism". Verso Books. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  37. ^ Suzelis, Natalie. "Surrogacy, Value, and Social Reproduction: A Review of Full Surrogacy Now". Mediations. 34 (2). eISSN 1942-2458.
  38. ^ Maglaque, Erin (23 September 2022). "Red love, for all". New Statesman. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  39. ^ "Quick positive comments on Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis". libcom.org. 27 December 2022. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
  40. ^ Harrington, Mary (11 January 2022). "Return of the Cyborgs". First Things. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  41. ^ Sixsmith, Ben; Brian, Paul Rowan (11 July 2019). "A World Without Mothers". First Things. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  42. ^ "Excerpt: /342/ Maybe Don't Abolish the Family? W/ Amber A'Lee Frost". Bungacast. Podbean. 23 May 2023.
  43. ^ Power, Nina (14 December 2023). "Time to ask 'But what about the children?'". The Critic Magazine.
  44. ^ "Mother Wars". Political Theory & a Peony. Wordpress.com. 25 May 2021.
  45. ^ Lewis, Sophie (13 October 2022). "Once again, Tom Whyman doesn't want to abolish the family". Patreon.
  46. ^ Nagle, Angela (15 December 2020). "Products of Gestational Labor". The Lamp Magazine.
  47. ^ Gambotto-Burke, Antonella (7 April 2023). "Sophie Lewis says it's time to abolish the family unit". The Australian.
  48. ^ Lewis, Sophie (20 May 2024). "beyond the backlasch, the beach". Patreon.
  49. ^ Majumdar, Nivedita (Autumn 2019). "Labor, Love, and Capital". Catalyst. 3 (3).
  50. ^ Seymour, Richard (27 January 2022). "Abolition: Notes on a Normie Shitstorm". Salvage. Retrieved 20 May 2024.
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