Feminist theorist and author Sophie Lewis was the subject of an article on Friday in the UK’s The New Statesman website publication following her new book “Abolish the Family.”
Historian Erin Magalaque discussed Lewis’ book which described the family unit as “a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment” and was highly critical of suggestions otherwise.
“The family isn’t actually any good at creating intimacy, Lewis argues; the family creates, in fact, a dearth of care, with shreds and scraps of intimacy fought out between overworked parents and totally dependent kids, hidden behind the locked doors of private property,” Magalaque wrote.
Magalaque complimented Lewis’ efforts to mock what she called “inevitable knee-jerk” reactions to calls to abolish the family unit.
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“Lewis is clear-eyed and witty about the inevitable knee-jerk reaction to calls for family abolition. (‘So! The left is trying to take grandma away, now, and confiscate the kids, and this is supposed to be progressive? What the f**k?’) And it’s true that family abolition, like other abolitionist movements, presents certain discomforts. Maybe you love your family! Or maybe you just like cooking in your own kitchen. Lewis acknowledges these discomforts, and asks us to imagine beyond them,” Magalaque wrote.
Magalaque noted the feminists like Lewis also frame the family unit through a communistic lens, referring to families as the “narrowly bourgeois love of biological parenthood” and communal relationships as a red love, a social love.
“The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers,” she said.
Although the article had some criticisms against Lewis’ arguments, Magalaque suggested that the “revolutionary” ideas she posed could be necessary following the economic issues today.
“Burned out from pandemic parenting, facing immense childcare shortages and costs, women are leaving the workforce in record numbers, and in the U.S., forced birth and baby formula shortages are making crisis-parenting the rule, not the exception. The call for a revolutionary way of reconfiguring how we care for each other is more essential than ever, and Lewis’s manifesto is an irrepressible spark to our very tired imaginations,” Magalaque described.
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The New Statesman promoted this article on its Twitter account on Saturday, leading to backlash from social media users.
Conservative columnist Chad Felix Greene tweeted, “They tell you exactly what they believe.”
“If only this sort of unsurpassable foolishness wasn’t taken inexplicably seriously by such a significant number of people in a position to bother the rest of us with it,” author Helen Joyce wrote.
“Almost by definition, you have to be extremely damaged and abnormal to write something like this. It’s like arguing that people should murder their pets for fun or force their children to eat feces. It’s just bizarre,” Right Wing News Founder John Hawkins tweeted.
Club for Growth senior analyst Andrew Follett wrote, “Restart the ‘Lib Academic Demands Something Deranged Because They’re Human Disasters’ clock!”
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Lewis previously published an article on The Nation following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade that women should embrace the fact that abortion is the justified killing of an unborn life.
