Vortragsreihe "Kunst - Forschung - Geschlecht"
Sophie Lewis
Beyond the (private nuclear) family, and the for-profit care industry, too
Mittwoch, 12. Jänner 2022
18:00 - 20:00 Uhr
Via ZOOM
Auf Grund der aktuellen Coronasituation findet die Veranstaltung via ZOOM statt. Link wird bei Anmeldung zugeschickt.
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Students please sign in at https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2021W/S03478/ by 20 October 2021, other interested persons please send an email to gender@uni-ak.ac.at.
© Bildcredits: Christopher Leaman
The life-organizing principle of the family, as Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh identified in the 1982, is fundamentally
“anti-social.” Today, in the 21st century, under conditions of generalized care crisis (which capitalism’s latest pandemic has only exacerbated) the centuries-old
call to “abolish the family” is once again to be heard on the Left. Three elements define “the family,” according to antiwork
philosopher Kathi Weeks: (1) the couple-form, (2) kinship concept tied to biogenetics, and (3) the privatization of social reproduction. It is this third element that enables us to understand that the commodified care-labor performed by private nannies, cooks,
cleaners and professional carers inside bourgeois households everywhere is part and parcel of the functioning of the family
rather than some kind of supplement. This structural, omnipresent in-flow of surrogate labor in the private nuclear household
is one of two meanings of the phrase “full surrogacy.” The second utopian rather than dystopian, prescriptive rather than
descriptive meaning is the idea that in a world liberated from private property, the word “surrogacy” ceases to be intelligible,
because humans are all the makers of one another and the family-form no longer regulates who is “real” kin and who is not.
In this talk I will reformulate arguments for moving beyond the family and the care industry (the two are inseparable), drawing
from After the Family: The Case for Abolition, my second book (forthcoming 2022).
Dr. Sophie Lewis is a visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.