Please join JHU’s Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality this week for a talk by Dr. Sophie Lewis, ‘Abolish Which Family?: Beyond Expanded Kinship’.

The talk will take place on Wednesday, February 23rd at 4:15pm (EST). The event will be run in a hybrid format—either in person in Gilman 17 on JHU’s Homewood campus, or via Zoom. All are welcome!

If you wish you join remotely, or if you would like to be added to our mailing list, please email wgs@jhu.edu to be receive Zoom details. You’re encouraged to share information about the event with those who may be interested.

• Dr. Sophie Lewis is author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), a powerful interrogation of the labour of surrogacy and gestation, and resulting challenges for conceptions of kinship and reproductive labour; Donna Harraway welcomed the book as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Her new book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, will be published by Verso in 2022. Lewis is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and she is a faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches on “feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks.” She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective and contributor to their edited collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020), and she is part of the editorial team for Blind Field Journal, a Marxist-Feminist online magazine focused on film and cultural criticism. For MIT Press, she has translated A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak). Her scholarship draws upon trans-feminism, Marxist critique, human geography, and Black abolitionist writing in order to analyze the shifting forms of contemporary kinship structures, as they are affected by technological change, new regimes of labour, and trans-species entanglements. She has published widely, in both academic journals (including Signs, Antipode, Society and Space, and Feminist Theory) and popular venues (including The Nation, Commune, Dissent, Logic, Mute, Jacobin, and many more). Her New York Times opinion piece, ‘How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans‘, provided an important public critique of the dominance of trans-exclusionary feminisms in the UK. Her writing is accessible via her regularly updated Patreon, Reproutopia.