Faculty in the Media: On Post-Roe Life in the US, Transgender Marxism, and Praise for Abolish the Family
Faculty member Sophie Lewis recently took to the airwaves to discuss gender, bodily autonomy, social reproduction, and radical politics—first on the podcast Politics Theory Other, then at this year’s Socialism Conference in Chicago. Meanwhile, the New Statesman heaps praise on her latest book Abolish the Family, calling Lewis “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.”
In conversation with Politics Theory Other host Alex Doherty not long after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Lewis parses the import of the decision, noting, on the one hand, how punitive state restrictions on abortion have effectively meant that millions of Americans already were living in a post-Roe situation, and, on the other, what this decision might portend for American liberals’ faith in public institutions. Also up for discussion was Lewis’s recent article in The Nation on why gestation is labor—often “deadly dangerous labor”—and, as such, no one should be forced to perform it.
Next, in Chicago, Lewis was joined by fellow BISR faculty Kade Doyle Griffiths for a live-streamed panel discussion on Transgender Marxism, a recent anthology (Pluto Press) edited by co-panelist Jules Joanne Gleeson, to which Griffiths also contributed an essay. Lewis, Gleeson, and Griffiths, while also taking questions from the audience, ask how we might develop a politics of trans-consciousness through the frame of revolutionary class consciousness, as two “streams of self-knowledge and interlocking struggles.”