Review: Abolish the Family (2022)
“Abolish the family? You might as well abolish gravity or abolish god. So! The left is trying to take grandma away, now, and confiscate kids, and this is supposed to be progressive? What the fuck!?”
This is how Sophie Lewis begins Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. She recognizes that “family abolition” is a shocking term that provokes, among most people, an instinctively negative response. And you know what? I, dear followers, had a rather similar first reaction. And that’s exactly why I wanted to read the book.
Lewis is radical in the original sense of the word; i.e., she tries to get to the root of things. In the first chapter, she offers a welcome and lucid “unpicking” (to borrow her phrase) of what precisely the family is and why it seems natural. Even if you don’t have a taste for theory or history (and there’s a lot in this book), just reading this chapter and getting yourself to question why the family feels so inevitable is worthwhile. Lewis points out the ways in which families are, in fact, extensions of political and economic structures — a way of privatizing care that capitalism refuses to give but that it needs in order to keep tottering along.
The idea of family abolition, then, doesn’t mean kicking your kids out into the street or cutting ties with your grandparents. Rather, it means (as I understand it) taking positive values like caring, sharing and loving and building new social structures that allow us to express them in ways that aren’t dependent on who your parents happen to be. And while I can’t say whether I am totally won over yet, Lewis did force me to rethink my assumptions about what society needs to look like.
(Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, don’t worry — I still love you!)
Finally, it’s weirdly appropriate that I’m writing this review the morning after seeing John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos, one of the most profane attacks on the idea of “family values” ever made. In a way, the film makes its own case for family abolition by castigating the family as a site of unredeemed filth and depicting familial ties — whether through blood or marriage — as little more than opportunities for intimate depravity.
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