Sophie Lewis – Abolish the Family

Does the family stand in the way of autonomous love and shared solidarity? And isn’t it enough just to reform it? According to Sophie Lewis, the nuclear family is at the heart of injustice, and needs to be abolished. In her book she shows what the world would look like in which family relations were replaced by affinity, and where care wasn’t privatised and forced, but fulfilling and collective. The family has established itself in the course of capitalist, colonial and patriarchal history. Abolish the Family: a Manifesto for Care and Liberation therefore examines the history of aspirations to abolish the family, continuing in this project with a critique of contemporary familialism and a demand for anti-family politics. Sophie Lewis is a British writer and lecturer now living in the USA. Her breakthrough came with the publication of her book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), in which she drew attention to the precarisation of surrogate motherhood and proposed a new conception of maternal care as a collective endeavour. In her work she deals with themes of care and physicality from a queer perspective, and follows on from the work of feminist authors such as Donna Haraway and Shulamith Firestone.

The book was financially supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic.