Abolish the Family

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

Rather, I would ask you to flip the script and consider that it is the family that is unrealistic and utopian. The family, right now, is supposed to make everybody happy. We are all supposed to be avatars of our little biological team of competitive social reproduction.

Critical cinema scholars have long identified a latently insurrectionary desire at play in horror movies, especially those that depict attacks (often from within) on the propertied white family, the patriarchal regime of housework, or the colonial homestead.15

Yet in “cli fi” and related representations of national emergencies and the apocalypse, authors insist on family as the core relationship we will need to rely on, when all else is stripped away.13

Realist and gothic traditions alike view family as a field of howling boredom, aching lack, unhealed trauma, unspeakable secrets, buried hurts, wronged ghosts, “knives out,” torture attics, and peeling wallpaper

The family is an ideology of work. In the early twenty-first century, as Oster shamelessly details, its credo has become the optimization (via violin-playing and other forms of so-called human capital investment) of a population of high-earning, flexible entrepreneurs

And this extreme unhappiness feels unique, because its structural character—like the structure of capitalism—is cunningly obscured from view

We are grasping at a chance of guaranteed belonging, trust, recognition, and fulfillment. The family dream is our dream of a haven—the very opposite of hunger or straitjackets. Idiomatically, to say that someone is “like family” is meant to convey in the strongest possible terms: “I claim you, I love you. I consider our fates bound up together.” We have no stronger metaphor! But why use this metaphor?

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

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.