Collective Reconnection: An Interview with Sophie Lewis
Sophie Lewis came to speak at the BCRW Feminist Freedom School in June. She brought an extraordinarily calm and humble demeanor as she entered the classroom. Her arrival was eagerly awaited by participants of the freedom school as many were familiar with her book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Press, 2022), having read it in a popular introductory course for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies majors. Abolish the Family has left many students grappling with the meaning of family, motherhood, and care. As far as I understand it, the title is deliberately provocative. It grabs your attention and provokes many questions, while the manifesto itself draws you into a dialogue as it develops its articulate, beautiful case for a world where the nuclear household is abolished. If abolished, Lewis argues, the nuclear household would lose the power to entrap us into gender scripts, patriarchy, and capitalist reproduction.
At the Freedom School, Lewis spoke on familial bonds, trauma, and the way care is privatized in modern society, as well as her dreams of a world where relation can exist without obligation and where exclusive relationships can turn into a collective. About a month later, I got on the phone with Lewis to continue the conversation.
Sophie Lewis: There’s a bunch of protests in Philadelphia right now because Trump is in town. So later I’m gonna head into town to be part of that. There’s like four days of protests here in Philly. Lots of different counter demonstrations and mobilizations. It is so stressful with them in town, but it’s also good vibes when there’s a lot of anti-fascist queer joy in the streets.
Ana Sofia Harrison: That energy is good for the spirit and the mind.
SL: Exactly.
ASH: So I wanted to jump right into your book. How did you come to write it?
SL: So, my first book was on the politics of gestating, interrogating the capitalist framing of what is for sale in gestational surrogacy, and how a communist feminist politics might respond to that. I published that in 2019. And it helped, I believe, bring back the topic of family abolition into the leftist debate. It certainly raised the anger of social democrats and I think it also captured the imagination of trans communists. It was a familiar topic to people of a slightly older generation, but it was a new topic for the younger generations. I had not entirely grasped or anticipated the extent to which the active process of forgetting and erasing the horizons of the long sixties (or: “the red decade”) had been successful — to the point that people haven’t even heard of the phrase “family abolition.” So, in the aftermath of “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” I did hundreds of podcasts and public appearances and talks and interviews, and I realized I needed to write some clarification of the family-abolition component of this first book about pregnancy. Luckily I was asked to do just that – to write a clarifying pamphlet about the idea of family abolitionism. Now, some people had been asking, how can you say this in a context where the state is destroying some families? And that’s what I spend the best time in my pamphlet addressing. It’s an important critique and I am happy to say I feel I do it sufficient justice (at least within the frame of a very short book).
ASH: With the pamphlet and the book, you must have gotten some reactions, both positive and negative, to the statement, “abolish the family.” It’s a statement that most definitely catches people’s attention. Can you talk about how you define family abolition? Do you think that when people first hear this statement, they have misconceptions?
SL: The family-abolitionist discourse, for two hundred years, has commonly envisioned a proliferation of relations. So it is very much the opposite of what some people fear when they hear about abolishing the family. Some people think it means a removal of structures of nurturance and infrastructures of care provision when, in fact, it’s the opposite, right? It’s the provision of nurturance and care to all, which would enable a space of relative freedom for encountering the people currently in our family. Our current experience of kinship is partially an experience of economic coercion, right? The vision of the abolitionists here is that we might be able to find out what loving one another in a way free from state and economic coercions would feel like.
Above all, it’s an infrastructural question. How can we de-privatize things like the provision of food via, for instance, massive common or public kitchens and canteens? How can we de-privatize the provision of health care? How can you de-privatize things like therapy, things like leisure, things like rest, public baths, even, all within what one might call a “communal luxury” framework.
ASH: Have you seen examples of this communal luxury framework?
SL: There’s a beautiful book about the Paris Commune, which is about that vision of communal luxury. And I think that’s the title actually, “Communal Luxury,” which is not the same as a sort of “automation techno luxury space communism.” It’s about recognizing that “luxury,” in the sense of real wealth, is always communal. For everyone to feel immersed in care is an aspiration that requires us to rethink the architecture and infrastructure of everyday life. I have in mind things like: beautiful, gigantic public water-parks that are ecologically calibrated and democratically designed for optimal pleasure and joy.
I wrote a little bit about this in a piece called Collective Turn Off, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with, but it has a little meditation at the end that is about the vision of collective reconnection to the erotic. It’s not necessarily sexually erotic, the version of eros I’m talking about. It’s more that deep diffused sense of the erotic that Audre Lorde famously theorized. I wrote: “As we abolish the capitalist logic of work and of obligatory enjoyment, we can instantiate conditions of possibility for the collective turn-on. And as survivors of the old regimes of sexual violence, we can design whole cities full of erotic biotic infrastructure, whole continents, from coast to coast, adorned with spaces of thrilling safety and mushroom glades and therapy marquees and grottos and patient-led free clinics and swimming holes and mapping palaces and so on.” Anyway, I’m working with this critical utopian tradition and method of reeducating our desire. I think there is real value in learning to name what we actually want. Because the most unreasonable and unrealistic proposition is not family abolition, but rather the proposition that things can simply go on as they are.
I will say: I don’t want a revolution where I come out, the other side of it, completely unchanged. I don’t think that’s possible. And so the scary part of family abolition is the recognition that, if we are serious about it, we will have to abolish something about ourselves. We’ve been manufactured through the family. The family is literally the building blocks, the base code, of our sense of subjectivity, our sense of self. But if we truly follow the argument that so many people have made, including Marx and Engels, we have to come to the conclusion that the private household must be abolished if a “new human”, beyond capitalism, is to emerge. M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi have a beautiful book that they wrote together, called Everything For Everyone (Common Notions Press, 2022). It imagines how the proletarians of New York City start to overcome capitalism in the very near future, start to abolish the family, and start to enact mass projects of ecological restoration.
ASH: In New York, really?
SL: Yes! Its subtitle is An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052 to 2072. Basically, the authors imagine themselves as women thirty years in the future, older versions of themselves who are conducting interviews with all of these “real people” who have been part of different sites of struggle in New York. So, prison abolition, ecological restoration, the liberation of Palestine, armed uprisings against the fascist outposts of counterrevolution on Staten Island, and also exploratory elements of family abolition and communization all appear in the interviews.
ASH: I love this imagining of a collective reconnection. What is the power of new collective identity and why is it necessary? Particularly knowing that losing the family structure would be a fundamental loss to a lot of people and this causes fear, because family can be for many people a main source of identity, support, and strength.
SL: I write a lot in Abolish the Family about the real present necessity of family in people’s lives. And I hope it’s super clear that I don’t think you could just abolish the family without at the same time abolishing capitalism. Otherwise, attempting to do without family somehow would simply wreak devastation in people’s lives, it would lead to starving children. But let’s think about what really matters to us, in terms of what the family purports to offer: love. The definition of love that I propose is that to love someone is to struggle for their immersion in care insofar as that is possible within conditions of capitalism and austerity, and, at the same time, to struggle for their autonomy, again, within the same constraints. Autonomy and cared-for-ness are the dialectically intertwined foundations, for me, of the experience of love.
Where could we begin in terms of creating the conditions for this authentic, anti-proprietary, non-scarcity-based love? The first step in abolishing the family, in this sense, I think, is abolishing family policing. Getting the boot of the state off the neck of the people whose kinship is currently criminalized and brutalized systematically. Cathy Cohen’s vision of queer identity as not an identity but an affinity, is crucial here. Cohen’s famous theorizations of “punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens” hints at a vision of anti-property forms of life. It recognizes the history of “queer” as something that has devolved and been captured, cooped, turned into a mere identity, into something that goes together with marriage and bourgeois reproduction. Think of contemporary gay politics, versus the threat to capitalist patriarchy that the politics of queerness once represented. I mean, that earlier history of gay power, gay reproduction as a threat to private property, is really similar to, and indeed overlaps hugely with, what the theorists who talk about Black survival as queer are talking about. Not as always already queer, but as structurally and for historical reasons queer.
ASH: Throughout your research and experiences, have there been structures of nurturing communities that follow your philosophy of unselfish care, kinship, and mothering?
SL: There’s such a rich history. In 1970, the Young Lords and the Black Panthers seized a section of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. That was part of a process of insisting that the medicine and hospital infrastructure belongs to the people. An insistence that no one is disposable. You could link this as well to the structures of anti-Black fatphobia and neoliberalism that makes people responsible for their own health. You probably know about Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Penguin, 2021) by Da’Shaun L. Harrison. Perhaps you know about “health communism.” I’m thinking of the really ambitious occupations of care infrastructures that these historians of organized abandonment, institutionalization, and disability liberation have written about.
ASH: Wow. Ok, so to bring us back to the present and this micro-world, my last question before we go is, what do you think the impact of something like the Feminist Freedom School at BCRW can be for a community such as Columbia or for broader New York organizing? What do you hope to see?
Sophie: Mm. That’s a bit of a tricky one. I’m in a slightly strange position with no academic job but a lot of invitations from academia to come in to speak. It’s difficult for me to really know what kind of relation these sorts of symposia have to the university as a whole. I did an event recently with the Abolition University Collective in Philadelphia. They’re amazing (if you don’t know them). They were asking me to participate partly because they wanted to fold in together different kinds of abolitionism: prison abolition, police abolition, family abolition, the abolition of the capitalist higher education complex. They spoke of their analysis about what an abolitionist approach to the university might be. The abolition of the family and academia very much go together, they helped me realize. This is for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that hereditary wealth is how universities get funded, how their endowments get sourced and how their admissions process still works, frankly. I had a really amazing time engaging with the Abolition University collective. And I hope that the same kind of thing could be true of the Feminist Freedom School. Where connections between different forms of abolitionism become materially obvious in people’s minds. I think what started to happen was people were making connections between the need to transform the so-called private sphere, which people like to console themselves or imagine as a sort of sanctuary away from the capitalist continuum but in fact, is not, which can feel quite bad when you first encounter this realization. But then you can start to realize that we only get free if we work on these different fronts. That can be a kind of freeing realization. Even as it feels terrifying.
Sophie Lewis is a German-British academic and author. Her works include Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family (2019) and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022). She is known for her radical ideas of family abolition and the use of surrogacy on a societal scale. Lewis studied at the University of Oxford, achieving a Bachelor of Arts in English and a master’s degree in environmental policy. She completed a master’s in politics at The New School in New York City and a PhD at the University of Manchester.
Lewis is based in Philadelphia. She is a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. She also teaches at the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Lewis presently has parted from academia and works as a freelance writer supported by speaking gigs and her Patreon members.
Ana Sofia Harrison is a junior at Barnard College. She is from New York City. She is majoring in Human Rights and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and minoring in art history. She is a research assistant at BCRW and co-leader of direct support at the Reproductive Justice Collective at Barnard. She is a trained abortion doula and leads self-managed abortion workshops on and off campus. Reproductive justice and prison abolition are her two main academic interests as well as visual arts and how it can intersect with activism.