The idea of family abolition may invoke visions of violent interventions into the loving and caring homes that some of us are lucky enough to have. Where its proponents are really coming from, however, is to argue for a society where mutual nurturance and support are not dependent on a genetic lottery. This is not merely about pointing out that a disconcerting number of homes are not actually safe places but hold acute threats of violence particularly to the women who live there. Instead, if we can learn anything from the experiences that Covid-19 has unleashed, it is that the linked ideologies of the home, the nuclear family and neoliberal individual responsibility are ill-equipped to provide the care that we are all dependent on.
In Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner and Nancy Holmstrom put this point concisely. We all want “kinship, love, and ‘good things to eat’”. It’s just that the family as we currently know it is not necessarily the best way to satisfy those desires. More importantly, the family assumes central responsibility to provide for these needs in a society that fails to do so. Specifically, various authors such as Agnes Heller have argued that capitalism explicitly produces needs it cannot satisfy. Rather than disparaging the things that people who defend the family in its current form want to preserve, Brenner and Holmstrom want to build political momentum to extend “the values now located exclusively in family life – solidarity, respect, and commitment to others’ development – across a society [which] requires the elimination of ‘the family’ in its meaning as a special place for those values.”
The nuclear family does not just hold the promise of fulfilling needs of love and kinship, but as an institution it is built on intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia. As Melinda Cooper points out, for example, welfare restructuring in the United States explicitly enforced a particular model of the married nuclear family that would exclude African-American single mothers from receiving benefits. Defending the “monogamous, heterosexual, many-children family” is therefore not a neutral act of defending the right to a safe and cozy home but is more often than not tied up in other conservative political goals. Thinking about organizing intimacy and care beyond the family is less about taking away safety and coziness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love.
