• Defending Intimacy against What? Limits of Antisurrogacy Feminisms

    Author(s):
    Sophie Lewis (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Group(s):
    Feminist Humanities, Gender Studies
    Subject(s):
    Bioethics, Feminism, Feminist geography, Reproduction--Philosophy, Social movements
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    solidarity, surrogacy, technophobia, transphobia, whorephobia, Reproduction theory
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6D276
    Abstract:
    As surrogacy services expand globally, more and more nations are moving to ban the practice. Calls for its abolition couched in feminist terms returned to prominence in international public life in 2012. The resurgence follows a lapse since the heyday of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) in the 1980s. In their moral opposition to prostitution (conflated with slavery) and cyborg human embodiment (which critics term “medical abuse”), the agendas of such feminisms and Christian conservatism overlap. This raises the question, what is the enemy against which childbearing is to be defended? This article analyzes the Euro-American and Australian anglophone feminist-abolitionist stance toward surrogacy, contextualizing it in relation to sex-worker-exclusionary antitrafficking, on the one hand, and transphobic imaginaries, on the other. These truncated abolitionisms, I argue, perform opposition to commodification rather than capitalism and encrypt profoundly antifeminist ideas under the guise of fighting patriarchy. Where reproductive assistance is concerned, justice is ultimately hindered rather than advanced by such technophobic body politics.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    doi/full/10.1086/692518
    Publisher:
    University of Chicago Press
    Pub. Date:
    2017-8-17
    Journal:
    Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
    Volume:
    43
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    97 - 125
    ISSN:
    0097-9740,1545-6943
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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