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.
Credits Guest: Sophie Lewis
Moderation: Nanna Heidenreich
A cooperation
between the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Transcultural Studies), and Vienna University (Department
of Theatre, Film and Media Studies) and brut Vienna
Free entranceRegistration at
brut-wien.at
