What if the family is not the only place where one can feel safe, loved, taken care of and accepted? What if we could do better than the family? With Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis offers us a passionate manifesto advocating for collective care work. Lucky are those who find love and care in their “own” families. Yet, most of the time, the family is home of pain, abuse and violence. And even in so-called happy families, living together means hard labor. With this new essay, Sophie Lewis claims that both the care-taker and the care-taken deserve something much better! In this urgent, incisive polemic, Lewis makes the case for family abolition, tracing the history of ideas and movements questioning traditional occidentalist family concepts. Her feminist critique shows: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

Sophie Lewis is an author and independent scholar based in Philadelphia. She is teaching social and critical theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and is a visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published numerous texts in the “Boston Review”, the “New York Times”, “Feminist Theory” and the “London Review of Books”. Abolish the Family as well as her first book Full Surrogacy Now were published by Verso Books; a German translation by Lucy Duggan appeared with S. Fischer.