Sophie Lewis (author)

Sophie Lewis (born 1988) is a German-British writer and independent scholar based in Philadelphia (USA), 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 "abolition of the family." 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 UK's trans-exclusionary radical feminism is its history of imperialism. Also in 2019, the far-right American TV pundit Tucker Carlson invited Lewis on his show to discuss her advocacy for abortion rights and reproductive freedom; but she replied that she would only come on the show if Carlson donated $10,000 to the Alabama abortion fund Yellowhammer. Instead, the Tucker Carlson Show aired public-domain footage of Lewis speaking about the right to not be pregnant - resulting in her getting dogpiled by "pro-life" activists. Her essay "Mothering Against the World: Mothering Against Motherhood" has been made into a zine by an anarchist collective. In 2022, Lewis was featured on the BBC radio program Sideways, "It Takes A Village."

Lewis gained further 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 an essay published in n+1 magazine: "My Octopus Girlfriend" (2021). Lewis has published many essays since 2013, on topics ranging from Marilyn Monroe to tradwives, in magazines including Harper's, the London Review of Books, Boston Review, faz quarterly, Logic, The Baffler, Lux, Parapraxis, Tank, The Nation, e-flux, Mal, Dissent, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, The White Review, and Salvage. Lewis has published two books through Verso Books; Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, published in 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, is published by Haymarket Books in February 2025.

Biography
Lewis was born in Vienna, where her parents worked as journalists, and raised between Geneva (Switzerland) and France. Her father is English, the son of a working-class father of part Welsh descent and a middle-class English mother. Her mother was a middle-class German liberal who was once a Maoist involved in the West German student movement at the University of Göttingen. She has described her childhood experiences in a series of personal essays concerning her family and, later, about the death of her mother Ingrid Helga Lewis (which occurred in 2019). She has described her maternal grandfather as "Hitler-supporting" and having served in "Hitler's army" and her maternal grandmother as "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 converted to Christianity shortly before the Holocaust "in order to embrace anti-Semitic Gentile life". Lewis' 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, achieving a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, and a master's degree in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy. She further completed, in 2011–2013, a Master's in Politics at The New School in New York City, on a Fulbright Scholarship, and then received ESRC funding to pursue a PhD in human geography between 2013 and 2017, at the University of Manchester. Lewis' PhD thesis, entitled Cyborg Labour: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work, focused on the political economy of the surrogacy industry. 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.

Lewis is based in Philadelphia; she is a free-lance 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. Dr 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 gigs and her Patreon members.

Lewis's peer-reviewed papers have appeared in the journals Feminist Theory, Paragraph, Feminist Review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Frontiers: Journal of Women's Studies, Gender Place & Culture and Dialogues in Human Geography (in the latter journal, Lewis' paper "Cyborg Uterine Geography" is the anchor for a response forum).

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'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 queer feminist theorization of "the antonym of penetration," the essay "On Circlusion." In 2022, Lewis wrote: "I was, in retrospect, clearly inspired by circlusion when I wrote “Amniotechnics.”

Lewis is 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.

Views and reception
Lewis has been described as operating "a strikingly hopeful feminist Marxism." She advocates for children's liberation, communization, family abolition, a free Palestine, trans rights, and climate justice. Her views have been discussed in conversations on podcasts including: This is Hell!, The New Books Network, Verso, Hotel Bar Sessions, The Death Panel, Big Mood, Little Mood with Daniel Lavery, The Podcast for Social Research, The Heteropessimists, Ordinary Unhappiness, e-flux, The LRB Bookshop, Politics Theory Other, The Dig with Daniel Denvir (Jacobin), Against Everything with Conner Habib, The Final Straw, Rabbles, and The Good Robot.

Contrary to some people's belief, Lewis does not advocate for commercial gestational surrogacy. Instead, according to the academic Natalie Suzelis, "Lewis builds upon Kalindi Vora’s analysis of the surrogacy industry by using it to highlight the contradictions of capitalist reproduction." The journalist Marie Solis in 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."

Feminist academics have generally praised Lewis. For example, the historian Erin Maglaque thinks that "Sophie Lewis is our most eloquent, furious and funny critic of how the family is a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment." The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has said that "Sophie Lewis is, as always, sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless." The journalist Melissa Gira Grant opines, "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." The transgender novelist and professor Jordy Rosenberg writes: "Sophie Lewis is at the forefront of a vital queer, trans, feminist communist movement to create an expansive field of revolutionary theory and strategy for today." And the transgender theorist Paul Preciado says: “Sophie Lewis is at the top of a new generation of scholars and activists thinking the transformation of gestational labor within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism." Finally, the author of the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, describes Full Surrogacy Now as: "the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for." Positive reviews have also been posted in magazines like the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as blogs like LibCom. Lewis's work has attracted a bit of international press in Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, Austria, Korea, Latin America, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

Right-wing and religious commentators have written scathing reviews of Lewis, for instance Mary Harrington, Ben Sixsmith. Also, some more centrist, left-leaning, and social-democratic commentators have been very critical of her work, for example: Amber A'Lee Frost, Nina Power, Elizabeth Bruenig, Tom Whyman, Noelle Bodick, Angela Nagle, Nivedita Majumdar and Antonella Gambotto-Burke. Largely because of her views that "children don't belong to anyone" and "children belong to us all," Lewis has attracted a lot of criticism - as described by Richard Seymour in his essay "Notes on a Normie Shit-Storm."

At the same time, Lewis has been invited to lecture on family abolitionism in many countries around the world and she has appeared on dozens of radio shows. Abolish the Family has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, German, Greek, Turkish, French, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, and French. Full Surrogacy Now has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Romanian and Portuguese.