The HBS hosts ask Sophie Lewis why the “family” is a troublesome institution.
In a society that is increasingly structured around isolated self-interested individuals, the family appears to be the one place of refuge, the heart in a heartless world, a space of care in a world of indifference. What then is the case for abolishing it? How does discussing that reveal the role that the family plays in capitalism? And what it might take to create a world in which care and nurturing are available to everyone rather than the lucky few happy families?
To work through these questions, we are joined in this episode by Sophie Lewis author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation.
In this episode, we discuss the following ideas/thinkers/texts/etc.:
- Alexandra Kollontai’s Red Love
- Adrienne Rich
- Bell hooks’ essay “Homeplace (A Site of Resistance).”
- Kathi Weeks
- Barbara Ehrenreich
- Karl Marx on “Primitive Accumulation”
- Social Reproduction Theory
- Anita Bryant
- Neal Patrick Harris
- Sylvia Rivera
- STAR House
- Tiffany Lethabo King
- Silvia Federici
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A very interesting discussion and I look forward to reading Lewis’ “manifesto.” I found myself remembering Shulamith Firestone’s recommendations for abolishing the family and Mary Midgley’s critique of Firestone’s radical feminist recommendation. As Midgley notes in The Ethical Primate, “Some degree of partiality is, then, built into our social nature. It shows itself, not just in favouring kin, but more widely in the way we form attachments, or fail to form them, with all the people who are of importance to us. We are not creatures capable of loving everybody equally, nor even of understanding fully why we do love some people more than others. Attempts to turn us into such creatures – such as those of the Stoics – have usually ended by seriously damaging the whole capacity for love, not by distributing it on rational principles over the whole population.” I wonder how relevant this observation [which I find persuasive] is to Lewis’ manifesto.