# Sophie Lewis (author)

Sophie Lewis (born 1988) is a German-British writer and independent scholar based in Philadelphia, mainly known for her anti-state communism, transfeminism, literary criticism, and cultural analysis, especially her critical-utopian theorization of "full surrogacy", her idea that "all reproduction is assisted" as well as "amniotechnics", and her advocacy for family abolition. Lewis's personal website describes her as a "recovering academic."
In 2019, Lewis was commissioned to write an op-ed in The New York Times to explain "How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans", where she proposed that the reason for the United Kingdom's trans-exclusionary radical feminism is its history of imperialism. She gained notoriety in September 2020 when she tweeted about the multispecies erotic dynamics in the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, a controversy she later referred to as "octopusgate" in a 2021 essay published in n+1 magazine: "My Octopus Girlfriend".
Lewis has published two books through Verso Books; Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, published in May 2019, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, published in October 2022. Her third book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, will be published by Haymarket Books in February 2025.

## Early life and education

Lewis was born in Vienna and raised between Geneva and France. 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.
Between 2007 and 2011, she studied at the University of Oxford, getting a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, and a master's degree in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy. She completed, in 2011–2013, a master's in Politics at The New School in New York City, on a Fulbright scholarship, and then received Economic and Social Research Council funding to pursue a PhD in human geography between 2013 and 2017, at the University of Manchester. Lewis's PhD thesis, entitled Cyborg Labour: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work, focused on the political economy of the surrogacy industry.

## Career

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. Abolish the Family has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, German, Greek, Turkish, French, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, and Czech. Full Surrogacy Now has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Romanian, and Portuguese.
Lewis is based in Philadelphia; she is a freelance writer with an unpaid affiliation as a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. Lewis also teaches online courses on critical theory for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Having departed formal academia, Lewis makes a living as a "para-academic" and cultural critic supported by speaking engagements and Patreon revenue. She has been invited to lecture on family abolitionism in countries around the world.
Lewis has published many essays since 2013, on topics ranging from Marilyn Monroe to tradwives, in magazines including Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books, Boston Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Logic(s), The Baffler Lux Magazine, Parapraxis, Tank, The Nation, e-flux, Mal Journal, Dissent, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, The White Review, and Salvage. Lewis's peer-reviewed papers have appeared in the journals Feminist Theory, Paragraph, Feminist Review, Signs, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, and Dialogues in Human Geography.
Lewis's German-English translations for MIT Press include A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak). 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. Lewis also translated Bini Adamczak's essay "On Circlusion", which inspired her writing on amniotechnics.
Lewis is a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, who edited a collection called Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis.

## Views

Lewis has been described as operating "a strikingly hopeful feminist Marxism." She advocates for children's liberation, communization, family abolition, Palestinian liberation, transgender rights, and climate justice. She has appeared on podcasts to discuss her views, including: This Is Hell!, New Books Network, Verso, Hotel Bar Sessions, Death Panel, Big Mood, Little Mood, Podcast for Social Research, The Heteropessimists, Ordinary Unhappiness, e-flux, London Review Bookshop, Politics Theory Other, The Dig, Against Everyone with Conner Habib, The Final Straw, Rabbles, and The Good Robot.
Contrary to some people's belief upon hearing of her work, Lewis does not advocate for commercial gestational surrogacy. Instead, 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." 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."

## Reception

Feminist academics have generally praised Lewis. Amia Srinivasan has said that her work is "sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless." Melissa Gira Grant opines that "Sophie Lewis and her expansive vision of feminism are desperately needed right now. She makes the work of undoing what 'womanhood' has come to mean look possible and irresistible." Paul B. Preciado has said: “Sophie Lewis is at the top of a new generation of scholars and activists thinking the transformation of gestational labor within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism." Donna Haraway described Full Surrogacy Now as: "the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for." Positive reviews of her work have been written in magazines including The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as blogs like Libcom.org.
Right-wing and religious commentators have written negative reviews of Lewis's work. Some centrist, left-leaning, and social democratic commentators have been very critical of her work, including: Amber A’Lee Frost, Nina Power, Elizabeth Bruenig, Tom Whyman, Angela Nagle, Antonella Gambotto-Burke, and others. 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".
In 2019, far-right American TV pundit Tucker Carlson invited Lewis on his show to discuss her advocacy for abortion rights and reproductive rights; but she replied that she would only come on the show if Carlson donated $10,000 to the Alabama abortion fund Yellowhammer. Instead, Tucker Carlson Tonight aired public-domain footage of Lewis speaking about the right to not be pregnant – resulting in her getting dogpiled by anti-abortion activists. Her essay "Mothering Against the World: Mothering Against Motherhood" was made into a zine by an anarchist collective. In 2022, Lewis was featured on the BBC Radio program Sideways episode "It Takes A Village".

## Publications

* — (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.