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
liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing
family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay
looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the
violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and
insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine
what might come after.