[W]hen we say we want to abolish the family, we’re not talking about taking away the few relationships and infrastructures of love that we have in this world. Of course the private household and the family are where so many of us get the vast majority of nourishment and solace. The question that family abolition is interested in is whether that’s good enough, whether that’s a good thing—that there is such a scarcity involved. We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of abuse can happen. And then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.
The crucial thing to understand is that motherhood is a very powerful ideological edifice. It’s not that there isn’t a massive hormonal kick that comes about after [conception], particularly during postpartum. There are endocrinal factors that make us high from the experience of caring for our neonates. But there is also a hell of a lot of ideology that makes us unable to comprehend that someone might not actually like mothering, and makes us unable to speak in slightly moderate terms about figures like Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny who killed the two babies in her care in Manhattan; that is the same case that inspired Leila Slimani’s book The Perfect Nanny. Even just talking about that excess, that monstrosity at the edge of maternal life, is surprisingly uncomfortable for our culture.
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The immediate-term prescriptions that my book implies are things to support in the here and now, such as the fact that gestational surrogates in India ought to be in charge of their own industry and seize the means of their (re)production. States should immediately meet gestational workers’ demands for more control over their obstetrics, higher pay, and the right to remain involved, if they wish, with client families. But I want to move beyond the state ultimately; to that end, it would be useful to implement a sense that it is normal for us to think about babies as made by many people. I would support policies that expand the number of people who are socially and legally recognized as central, fundamental players in the constitution of a person. Obviously this speaks to things like expanding hospital visitation rights, and so on and so forth.
One of the big political issues right now is one of family separation at the border. I’m curious about what it would change, and what it would take away, to talk about it as people being separated from one another at the border. We don’t necessarily have to reinstate the sanctity of the family as the response to why it’s a problem to put babies in cages. Like, it’s a bad idea to put people in cages! It’s a bad idea to separate young people from older people who are caring for them. When we are trying to extend direct care and solidarity to people who are crossing the border, sometimes it is necessary to articulate their right to be here, and to be together, in a language that is about the inherent worth and deservingness of the family. There are immediate consequences to choices like that, such as throwing under the bus people trying to come on their own. I’m not into these kinds of calculuses particularly, even as I see the need to do them sometimes.
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My new intellectual project has to do with care. I think the term “care” needs quite a bit of refining; I see it used in academia and social production theory as just a thing that will solve everything. I don’t disagree; for example, I think the solution to the climate crisis, in a way, is to reorient the world to privilege care over types of productive industry and consumption. But I also think that we need to stay with the violence, and grapple with the fact that currently existing care is full of abuse. I’d like to talk more about different striations of care—good, less good, bad forms of care.
