Feminist Scholar Argues Coronavirus Shows ‘It’s Time to Abolish the Family’

Are you starting to get the sense that some people are exploiting this crisis for ideological reasons?

Campus Reform reports:

Feminist says coronavirus shows ‘it’s time to abolish the family’Sophie Lewis, a scholar at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a frequent speaker at American universities, wrote an article suggesting that the coronavirus pandemic should push Americans to abolish the family.In an opinion editorial published by Open Democracy in late March, Lewis argues that “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’…””We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it,” she adds.“As feminists for decades have excavated, the nuclear family functions as a kind of technology for producing and reproducing human beings along the lines of binary sex, national identity, racial loyalty, and heterosexual subjecthood,” Lewis told Campus Reform.She goes on to say in the opinion piece that “social distancing” and “sheltering in place” orders are “an abuser’s dream,” pointing to the spike in domestic violence reports since the mass quarantine began. She suggested this is one more reason to “abolish” the family.”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,” she adds.

Tags: College Insurrection, Feminism, Wuhan Coronavirus

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