{"id":117548,"date":"2022-11-21T00:05:50","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T05:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/?p=117548"},"modified":"2022-11-19T11:30:56","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T16:30:56","slug":"scholars-abolish-the-family-speech-hosted-at-umass-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/scholars-abolish-the-family-speech-hosted-at-umass-boston\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholar&#8217;s \u2018Abolish the Family\u2019 speech hosted at UMass Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>&#8216;Challenging the rhetoric of motherhood&#8217;<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Hillary Clinton once famously wrote a book titled \u201cIt Takes A Village.\u201d One feminist scholar is taking that argument one step further, arguing children should be raised by society rather than just their parents.<\/p>\n<p>An expert on \u201cfeminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy,\u201d scholar Sophie Lewis on Nov. 16 spoke at UMass Boston at an event named after her October 2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.versobooks.com\/books\/4075-abolish-the-family\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">book<\/a>, \u201cAbolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lewis has said in her various writing and interviews that her goal through \u201cabolishing the family\u201d is to reimagine the notion of the family past fatherhood and motherhood into a more universal sense, where children are not \u201cproperty\u201d of parents, but raised by society as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>She spoke at UMass Boston at the invitation of the Center for Humanities, Culture, and Society.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis, in an interview with <em>The College Fix<\/em>, said the center invited her given her \u201cfearless and rigorous work breaking from traditional ways of thinking about institutions such as the family.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/mobile.twitter.com\/theflickering_b\/status\/1590521484090683392\/photo\/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">flier<\/a> for her UMass Boston event touted her August 2021 book: \u201cFull Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet us overthrow, in short, the \u2018family,\u2019\u201d its online description <a href=\"https:\/\/www.versobooks.com\/books\/3756-full-surrogacy-now\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">states<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis has become something of an expert on the \u201cAbolish the Family\u201d concept.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI suppose that I&#8217;m called to the challenge of thinking about these really difficult questions of how those intimate spheres are affected by capitalism and how they are political,\u201d she said in an interview with Ben Smoke of Verso Books.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5FiD2JGrM3s\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>She described the concept as \u201cinfrastructures that would mean that the family was a domain of real choice or real freedom and you weren&#8217;t coerced into needing it so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Book reviews <a href=\"https:\/\/www.versobooks.com\/books\/4075-abolish-the-family\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">spell out<\/a> Lewis&#8217; concept further.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe all deserve better than the family, Lewis argues, and it\u2019s up to all of us to build new forms of solidarity and care that reach beyond biology or even kin, even if we don\u2019t know quite what they\u2019ll look like. Abolish the Family will make you want to find out,\u201d one stated.<\/p>\n<p>In response to a question from <em>The College Fix<\/em> about her theory, Lewis provided links to other interviews she has done.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis, in her interview with Verso, said the \u201cleft needs to get a little bit braver also at challenging the rhetoric of motherhood.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBecause a lot of the people who do mothering, I call them mother-ers to just ram home the point, that we can mother one another after the abolition of the family, this is what will hopefully be lifted up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>In her journal article <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/14647001211059520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">headlined<\/a> \u201cMothering against motherhood: doula work, xenohospitality and the idea of the momrade,\u201d Lewis elaborated on her concept.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial \u2013 that is to say, comradely \u2013 kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies,\u201d she wrote in the article.<\/p>\n<p>In her interview with Verso books, she further described children as being likened to \u201cproperty\u201d in modern culture, which is a facet of her rationale for a utopia-style familial ideal with no sense of individual parental relationships.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>MORE: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/dont-neglect-women-and-mothers-global-health-journal-affirms-linguistic-common-sense\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Don\u2019t neglect \u2018women\u2019 or \u2018mothers\u2019: global health journal<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>IMAGE: <a href=\"https:\/\/mobile.twitter.com\/theflickering_b\/status\/1590521484090683392\/photo\/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n            <div class=\"article-truncate-control\">\n                <button class=\"show-complete-article\">\n                    Read More                <\/button>\n            <\/div>\n\n        ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8216;Challenging the rhetoric of motherhood.&#8217;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1282,"featured_media":117555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1085,1077],"tags":[47075,28755],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Abolishthefamilyflier.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Oh4L-uzW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1282"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117548"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117558,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117548\/revisions\/117558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thecollegefix.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}