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Also tired of leftist calls to “abolish the family” w/ no acknowledgment that the construct of “gender” evolved in part to deny enslaved peoples the right to kinship (Spillers) + foreclose nuclear heteronormativity, which is not the same as heterosexuality (Cathy Cohen) https://twitter.com/imaniperry/status/1302765283015262214
I of course understand such a framing from radical feminists as demands to recognize the labor of social reproduction, the isolation of nuclear, heteronormative, homonormative, and couple-centric formations, and the violence of patriarchy.
Immigrant communities fighting unjust family reunification laws, migrants separated at the border, binational queer couples seeking residency, these are further instances of the many constituencies that are not inclined to "abolish the family."
As a political horizon, I get it. Of course, we all want the right to create sustainable, supportive kinship structures. But as an organizing and activist rubric, it reiterates gender as a construct of biopolitical whiteness.
I'm all for an anti-capitalist abolishment of the white nuclear heteronormative family. Here's an idea: Start with Cedric Robinson and Angela Davis. Racial capitalism is capitalism.
This has unexpectedly turned into a thread. I'm on a tear. I encountered yet another white radical feminist call to abandon the family. I get that sheltering in place has given white middle-class people new insight into the trials and tribulations of living w/in a family unit.
As we all know, the shelter-in-place class outsources illness to the essential-yet-disposable labors who don't get to see enough of their families and worry about getting them sick.
Of course "abolish the family" means abolish the capitalist exploitation that forces others to give up their families in order to "make live" the shelter-in-place families.
But then start there: not with those who find the family intrinsically oppressive, but rather those who don't get to even have a choice about how their family and kin formations are structured and lived bc of the on-going violence of biopolitical whiteness and state regulation.
Every leftist should read Hortense Spillers "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe" before rallying to abolish the family. The end.
PS: I want to be really clear here since some are distorting my comments. 1. I completely agree the principals of abolishing the family, starting with abolishing the structures that make some families more valuable than others.
2. I am not saying that any form of activism, especially in regards to immigration, believes in the redemption of the family. 2/
3. The work I find most generative on family structures is from or centers Black Marxist, Black feminist, indigenous, and transnational feminist thinking. 3/
4. My queries here are quite simple: For whom does the rubric of "abolish the family" resonate? Who does it alienate? Does "abolish the family" interpellate peoples whose families have long been abolished? This is a genuine question about effective organizing. 4/
5. I do not know the answers to these questions. I do know that I am often in activist + organizing spaces where I do not feel comfortable advocating to "abolish the family." That is not because any of these spaces are antithetical to the dismantling of the white nuclear family.
6. It is, in part, I think, bc the refusal of the right to kin has been so thoroughly weaponized by slavery, by the state, by settler colonialism, by imperialism, by occupation so as to demand a different organizing lexicon altogether. 6/
I would love to hear about other people's experiences of critiques of family and approaches to abolition in organizing spaces, especially in black feminist, indigenous, Palestine, and immigrant activist spaces. I want to understand to hold these contradictions. 7/
