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Abolish the Family / Sophie Lewis

01  the manual for a good housewife  gala garrido

We have to be real about how the family is not outside of capitalism. Which is not to say love isn't real, that love that happens within the family. On the contrary, I actually agree with people who feel attached to the concept of family, that a lot of the best things we have going on as human beings does take place in this location where we are not universally safe, and a lot of violence happens with impunity.

Sophie Lewis returns to This Is Hell on Tuesday, October 4th to speak with host Chuck Mertz about her new book, Abolish the Family, out on Verso, October 2022.
www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family

Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

Image Source: The Manual for a Good Housewife, Gala Garrido, 2007

Gala-Garrido, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a theorist, critic and translator.

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