Sophie Lewis: What Goes Around Comes Around: Fleshy Toxicities Return Home as Kin
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
What Goes Around Comes Around: Fleshy Toxicities Return Home as Kin
Lecture by feminist critic and scholar Sophie Lewis
Respondent: Jean Amoura
This event will take place in person and on Zoom. Proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative COVID-19 test + face coverings are required for in person attendance. Read more about our COVID Safety Policy at bemiscenter.org/visit.
Join us to hear feminist critic and scholar Sophie Lewis’s latest research developed in dialogue with I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality. Lewis will critically explore the intersection of biopower and hospitality by focusing on surrogacy as a practice that entangles property, labor, environment, and kinship in dynamic ways. Jean Amoura will respond to the lecture, offering insights borne of her work as a clinical practitioner and medical educator.
Living human fetuses, conceptualized as genetically “authored” private property, are among the many commodities whose manufacture can now be outsourced to the Global South under capitalism. One of the locations where commercial gestational surrogacy “production” occurs is, as it happens, Bhopal, India, an area synonymous with a giant gas leak. As environmentalists attempted to make known throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Bhopal disaster was inflicted on the Bhopali population by the Union Carbide corporation (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) in 1984. Today, as the feminist neuroscientist Deboleena Roy has shown, the poisonous methyl isocyanate from the gas leak continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in Bhopal. It is making its way back to the Global North via the bodies of “surro-babies” commissioned by, for example, European and American parents. What can this circuit of historic molecular violence, whereby toxicity is returned to its place of origin through the labors of gestating Indian bodies, tell us about the vengeful dimensions of hospitality? How might we think with, against, and beyond the category of “kinship” with our toxic, cyborg children, and their poisoned mothers?
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.” Her non-academic writing has appeared in numerous venues including The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and her Patreon.
Jean Amoura is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Nebraska and Director of Nebraska Medicine's Early Pregnancy Assessment Clinic and the Gender Care Clinic. She received her medical degree from the University of Nebraska, completed OB/GYN residency at the University of Michigan, and earned a master’s degree in reproductive and sexual health research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has worked with hundreds of gender-diverse patients of all ages through their transition. She also has a clinical focus on family planning, early pregnancy loss, and complex contraception, with additional attention to advancing medical education on these topics.
Join us for the final lecture in the series:
March 17: Deirdre Cooper Owens: Slavery’s Hospitality and the Extraction of the Black Body
Developed by curator Sylvie Fortin in collaboration with UNO Medical Humanities/Ted Kooser Center for Health Humanities, this lecture series is co-presented by Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and UNO Medical Humanities/Ted Kooser Center for Health Humanities and funded, in part, by Humanities Nebraska.
I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality and its related public programs are generously supported, in part, by:
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724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
402.341.7130
info@bemiscenter.org