Sophie Lewis

I am an unpaid visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and an occasional teacher for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

I'm also a financially struggling writer. In 2019 I published 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." My scholarship has always operated in the spheres of trans feminist cultural criticism and queer social reproduction theory, notably around utopian critiques of the family, Marxism, and Black and abolitionist feminisms.

Currently, my research focuses on the etiologies of eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminisms, including narratives of so-called white slavery past and present, femonationalism, and trans-exclusionary femocratism.

In part by choice and in part because I failed to get myself hired anywhere, I am in exodus from academia. I am a graduate of the University of Oxford (BA English Literature; MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Policy) and the New School for Social Research (MA Politics). I earned my PhD in human geography in 2016, at the University of Manchester. The dissertation, entitled "Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Labor" was situated within the utopian "anti-work" tradition while engaging historical-materialist and critical geographies concerned with the production of nature. It sought, by reframing the semiotic and political economy of the contract pregnancy industry, to make a major intervention into contemporary social reproduction studies.

From 2014 on, I did publish a number of academic publications in peer-reviewed journals such as Feminist Review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Frontiers: Journal of Women's Studies, Gender Place & Culture, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Society & Spaceand Dialogues in Human Geography (my paper ‘Cyborg Uterine Geography’ acts as the anchor for a response forum in the latter publication).

But I have increasingly (and with your support) moved to exclusively non-academic writing. In February 2019 I published an op-ed on “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans” in The New York Times. Further essays and articles have appeared in magazines including Boston Review, The Nation, Dissent,Logic, Mute, Mal, Tank, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Red Pepper, Verso Books (blog), The New Socialist, Salvage Quarterly, Commune, Viewpoint, and, of course, here.

My German-English translations for MIT Press include A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak). My translation of Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa’s account of femo-nationalist Islamophobia in Germany, The Future of Difference, is published by Verso Books (June 2020). I am a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, whose edited collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is published by Common Notions (June 2020). Finally, I am an editor at the feminist film criticism platform Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, whose collection End/And: Feminization in Unending Timescame out in 2017. You can follow me on Twitter at @reproutopia.