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2020-

2020-04-18 a
I thought I'd seen and read the most extreme corona-craziness the web has to offer; not so. A correspondent alerted me to this feminist insanity:

The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the family

by Sophie Lewis, “scholar” at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In short, the pandemic is no time to forget about family abolition. In the words of feminist theorist and mother Madeline Lane-McKinley; “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more.” Far from a time to acquiesce to ‘family values’ ideology, then, the pandemic is an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of – and refugees from – the nuclear household.

And thirdly, even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’ It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings’ life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out – absurdly – with its own kitchen, micro-crèche and laundry). It blackmails us into mistaking the only sources of love and care we have for the extent of what is possible.

We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it. In the always lucent words of Anne Boyer: “We must learn to do good for the good of the stranger now. We now have to live as daily evidence that we believe there is value in the lives of the cancer patient, the elderly person, the disabled one, the ones in unthinkable living conditions, crowded and at risk.”

We do not know yet if we will be able to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression.

Unlike the stark raving insanity of that author, those who posted comments exhibit sanity. Here are the first four:

1, Abolish family?
    YOU ARE SICK.
    You'll fall.

2. Anything to rationalize your bullshit...

3. In place of the family, the State!
    Under the progressive facade, the inner fascist wants to control everyone.
    Go to Hell.

4, Needed a good laugh. Thanks.

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