Abolition, Care, and the Family
A conversation with M. E. O'Brien, Sterling Johnson and Sophie Lewis
What does sexual liberation have to do with private property? Why is communizing care a necessary part of gender freedom? How would overcoming racial capitalism transform our intimate lives? How does the prevailing capitalist mode of reproduction - the couple-based family anchored in private households - limit the radical imagination? Join us for a conversation about the long history of utopian visions of queer community, kitchenless cities, crip and mad kinship care networks, liberated spaces for drug users and sex workers, and red love, the function of the family, and the outermost horizons of contemporary struggles for liberated kinship beyond capitalism, white supremacy, and the private family. This conversation marks the publication of Abolish the Family: Manifesto for Care and Liberation by Sophie Lewis (Verso, 2022), and Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M. E. O’Brien (Pluto, 2023).
Speaker bios
M. E. O'Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, June 2023), and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She works as a therapist, and is pursuing training as a psychoanalyst.
Sophie Lewis is a writer and para-academic living in Philadelphia and a teaching faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She has an unpaid visiting affiliation with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of many essays as well as two books so far: Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022).
Sterling Johnson is a Ph.D Student at Temple University, housing lawyer, drug user activist and organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action.