Are "Family Values" The Problem? (w/ Sophie Lewis)

Current Affairs

Sophie Lewis is a radical critic of the family. In Lewis's books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family and Abolish The Family, she argues that families are expected to take on functions that should be the responsibility of society as a whole, and that the results are disastrous. Families "privatize care." People have to depend on their families to fund their schooling or to take care of them in old age, which means that those who don't having loving and supportive families will simply end up not being cared for.

Lewis argues that seemingly neutral pro-family rhetoric is actually pernicious, because we should be trying to create ways to care for people that do not depend on everyone being supported by family. At the core of Lewis' work is the idea that care is a basic right, that we all deserve to be cared for. In this conversation, we talk about how organizing society around the unit of the family reproduces inequality. We discuss why people should be able to live fulfilled and happy lives without having to depend on family, and why we'll be better off when we have a society in which family matters less rather than more. Lewis' work is challenging and openly utopian, but forces us to interrogate some of our most seemingly uncontroversial ideas (in this case, "families are good").

Sophie's Patreon is here. Some of Yasmin Nair's critiques of gay marriage can be found here and here. An article about "family abolition" by Current Affairs managing editor Lily Sánchez, who cites Lewis' work, can be found here. Lily also cites the quote Nathan reads from the 1976 Republican platform, which reads as follows:

“Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation. Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved. … [I]t is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials, and social welfare institutions must never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.”