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Sophie Lewis

Abolish the Family

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What if we could do better than the family?
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay…
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  • hopeshared an impression15 days ago
    👍Worth reading

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    • hopehas quoted15 days ago
      We can talk about extending kinship to the whole world all we want. If kinship were truly something we valued as made, not given, we wouldn’t have to specify the word “chosen” (as in: “chosen kinship” or “chosen family”) when we are talking about kinship that isn’t imaginable as governmentally ratified (marriage or guardianship based), genetic, or bloodborne.
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      • hopehas quoted15 days ago
        We do not have to reject the language of kinship outright. Collectively, rather, we can begin to torque it. It’s time to practice being kith or, better, comrades— including toward members of our “biofam”—building structures of dependency, need, and provision with no kinship dimension.
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        • hopehas quoted15 days ago
          Before the twenty-first century, Donna Haraway—the philosopher to whom I owe my feminism—was not advocating “kinmaking.” Quite the contrary, in fact. “I am sick to death,” she said in 1997, “of bonding through kinship and ‘the family’”:
          and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information— have been bloody enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more and less than kinship.
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