Sophie Lewis

All of us—even those of us who own no property, who receive no guaranteed care, and who subsist at the blunt end of empire, whiteness, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and class— will have to let go of something as the process of our collective liberation unfolds. If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also

I will hazard a definition of love: to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital. If this is true, then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the “real” mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name.

She may, for instance, sense in her gut that she and the members of her family simply aren’t good for each other, while also loving them, wishing them joy, and knowing full well that there are few or no available alternatives in this world when it comes to providing much-needed care for everybody in question. Frankly, loving one’s family can be a problem for anyone

The family is the reason we are supposed to want to go to work, the reason we have to go to work, and the reason we can go to work. It is, at root, the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society.

Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufactures “individuals” with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness. Like an infinitely renewable energy source, it performs free labor for the market. Like an “organic element of historical progress,” writes Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather, it worked for imperialism as an image of hierarchy-within-unity that grew “indispensable for legitimating exclusion and hierarchy” in general.3 For all these reasons, the family functions as capitalism’s base unit—in Mario Mieli’s phrase, “the cell of the social tissue.”

As Melinda Cooper demonstrates, under the sign of the family, starting in the late seventies, neoliberals and neoconservatives both essentially reinvented welfare along Elizabethan “poor law” principles: rendering kin, instead of society, responsible for the poor.

Think about how (on TV, or in your own life) a reminder of family ties and obligations is often a cruelly repressive move. Think about how, in mafia movies, loyalty to and love for “the family” is enforced among members via penalties worse than death—and this only feels like a mobster exaggeration of the general, civilian logic of the family. Think about the British royal family and the deadly logics of eugenicism, lovelessness, and property-worship that govern its internal affairs, even as it is held up as a prototype for the family around the world and exoticized (albeit criticized) for an international audience on the ongoing 2016 Netflix series The Crown. Think about honor killings, femicides, and the deaths of children like English six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, whose murderers, in the words of Richard Seymour, “thought they were his victims.”7

In fact, Le Guin suggests, the reverse of Tolstoy’s apothegm is ultimately closer to the truth. She knows of what she speaks, having herself grown up “in a family that on the whole seems to have been happier than most.” She finds it “false—an intolerable cheapening of reality— simply to describe it as happy.” To her, the very phrase “happy families” bespeaks a fundamental incuriosity about the nature of happiness, which—under capitalism especially—comes with enormous costs. Those who breezily deploy it forget that there is a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils,” at the foundation of familial happiness. They ignore “the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties.” Yes, families can be happy, Le Guin maintains, poker-faced and only possibly joking, “for quite a long time—a week, a month, even longer.” The happy families Tolstoy “speaks of so confidently in order to dismiss them as all alike,” though?—“where are they?” What if unhappy families are all alike, in a structural sense, because the family is a miserable way to organize care—whereas happy ones are miraculous anomalies?

it seems to me that capitalist societies, once they’d invented family values (that is, work values), on the whole failed to advance them with a consistently straight face. Everybody knows that not everybody (to put it mildly) experiences the family as a blissful state; that not everybody (to put it mildly) loves their work

Realist and gothic traditions alike view family as a field of howling boredom, aching lack, unhealed trauma, unspeakable secrets, buried hurts, wronged ghosts, “knives out,” torture attics, and peeling wallpaper. Yet in “cli fi” and related representations of national emergencies and the apocalypse, authors insist on family as the core relationship we will need to rely on, when all else is stripped away.13