Aliens, Vampires, Surrogates: Revolutionising the Gestational Workplace
When:
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Venue:
Online
We’re delighted to welcome Dr Sophie Lewis and Katie Stone who will join Dr Caroline Edwards for a live roundtable discussion of gestational labour. The commodified, often outlawed and invisibilised labour of commercial surrogacy highlights the way in which capitalist biotech moves vulnerable surrogate mothers across borders in a transnational network of business partnership. This gestational workplace - the precarious “pregnancy gig economy” – demands that we reimagine pregnancy, social reproduction, binary gender and the family. We will consider how various monstrous subjects found in utopian and science fiction, from vampires, aliens and parasites to bioengineered Frankensteinian creatures, might offer suggestive glimpses of the kind of gestational communism we all deserve. This event is supported by the Centre for Contemporary Literature (CCL).
Contact name:
Caroline Edwards
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Dr Caroline Edwards
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Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. Caroline's research focuses on the utopian imagination in contemporary literature, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and Western Marxism. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which examines temporal experience and utopian anticipation in contemporary texts by British writers including Hari Kunzru, Maggie Gee, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Jim Crace, Joanna Kavenna, Grace McCleen, Jon McGregor and Claire Fuller. Her work on contemporary writers has also led to two co-edited books of essays: China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015).
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Dr Sophie Lewis
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Dr. Sophie Lewis is a visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019), which Donna Haraway hailed as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Sophie’s scholarship operates in the spheres of trans feminist cultural criticism and queer social reproduction theory, notably around utopian critiques of the family, Marxism, and Black and abolitionist feminisms. Her research currently focuses on the etiologies of eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminisms, including narratives of so-called white slavery past and present, femonationalism, and trans-exclusionary femocratism.
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Ms Katie Stone
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Katie Stone is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism as imagined in science fiction. It seeks to put mainstream science fiction into conversation with feminist, queer and decolonial critical and creative work in order to interrogate the genre’s complicity with various structures of oppression. Katie is co-founder of the research network ‘Utopian Acts’ whose work will be featured in a forthcoming special issue of Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal which she and Raphael Kabo have edited. Katie has written for Foundation, Fantastika and SFRA Review and she is one of the founding members of the research collective ‘Beyond Gender’. She is on Twitter @cyborg_feminist and @UtopianActs.