Sophie Lewis

If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.

It’s that it’s existentially petrifying to imagine relinquishing the organized poverty we have in favor of an abundance we have never known and have yet to organize

The economic assumption that behind every “breadwinner” there is a private someone (or someones) worth being exploited for, notably some kind of wife

Similarly: transition out of the family will be tricky, yes, but the family is doing a bad job at care, and we all deserve better. The family is getting in the way of alternatives

Family values are bourgeois economics writ small. As Melinda Cooper demonstrates, under the sign of the family, starting in the late seventies, neoliberals and neoconservatives both essentially reinvented welfare along Elizabethan “poor law” principles: rendering kin, instead of society, responsible for the poor

All of us—even those of us who own no property, who receive no guaranteed care, and who subsist at the blunt end of empire, whiteness, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and class— will have to let go of something as the process of our collective liberation unfolds. If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also

I will hazard a definition of love: to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital. If this is true, then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the “real” mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name.

She may, for instance, sense in her gut that she and the members of her family simply aren’t good for each other, while also loving them, wishing them joy, and knowing full well that there are few or no available alternatives in this world when it comes to providing much-needed care for everybody in question. Frankly, loving one’s family can be a problem for anyone

The family is the reason we are supposed to want to go to work, the reason we have to go to work, and the reason we can go to work. It is, at root, the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society.

Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufactures “individuals” with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness. Like an infinitely renewable energy source, it performs free labor for the market. Like an “organic element of historical progress,” writes Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather, it worked for imperialism as an image of hierarchy-within-unity that grew “indispensable for legitimating exclusion and hierarchy” in general.3 For all these reasons, the family functions as capitalism’s base unit—in Mario Mieli’s phrase, “the cell of the social tissue.”