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

That which is “social” is not simply anti-profitability but anti-family, she implies. The family—that is, the family shop or seed fund—is the great anti-social institution. And indeed, in a landscape laid to waste by Thatcherite anti-solidarity policies, it really can feel as though there are only families, or races (macro-families), at war with one another or, at best, in competition

Meanwhile, most public or common spaces are not only dedicated to commercial leisure, but designed to cater pointedly to the couple-form or the nuclear brood

even as the family, as a mode of governance, is a brutal economic fact, the family as a lived experience remains a bit of a fiction

On the other hand, the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family. Logically, announcing an intention to “treat you like family” (as so many airlines, restaurants, banks, retailers, and workplaces do) ought to register as a horrible threat.

Of course, the administrative grid of the family does organize where certain forms of help (are legally obligated to) come from. But this has nothing to do with solidarity. The family—predicated on the privatization of that which should be common, and on proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed—is a state institution, not a popular organism. It’s at once a normative aspiration and a last resort: a blackmail passing itself off as fate; a shitty contract pretending to be biological necessity