Sophie Lewis > Quotes

“La familia es un escudo que los seres humanos han tomado, con razón, para sobrevivir a la guerra. Si nunca nos podemos permitir abandonar ese escudo, tal vez hayamos olvidado que la guerra no tiene por qué durar eternamente.”
― Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation

“...I submit that kinship, at least right now, is always a reference to something that is imagined to be inerasable; to "nature." Perhaps one day it will be fit for purpose again, who knows? Perhaps because the concept of nature has itself been turned inside out. But right now, even when it is conceptualized as practice-based, kinship functions as a linguistic appeal to something non-contingent that can ground a relation. And I am asking: can we suspend that fantasy of something non-contingent? Can we let go of it?”
― Sophie Lewis, Die Familie abschaffen: Wie wir Care-Arbeit und Verwandtschaft neu erfinden

“For all purposes except capital accumulation, the promise of family falls abjectly short of itself. Often, this is nobody's "fault" per se: simply, too much is being asked of too few. On the other hand, the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family.”
― Sophie Lewis

“The gendered injunction to care "for love, not money" obscures the grinding, repetitive, invisible, energy-sapping, confining aspects of the work involved in making homes of any kind.”
― Sophie Lewis, Die Familie abschaffen: Wie wir Care-Arbeit und Verwandtschaft neu erfinden

“I will hazard a definition of love: to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.”
― Sophie Lewis

“For many of us, feminism denotes the task of abolishing all organized scarcities, from the private nuclear household to the nation. It’s the deprivatization of love, via the insurgency of mothers of every gender against the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the decoupling of survival from the wage, the destruction of markets, the ecological insistence on interspecies responsibility, the decarbonization of every mégapole, and the communization of continent-wide architecture: waterways, seed banks, and libraries. It’s a local proletarian strike against work (that always already gendered and stolen substance otherwise called alienated labor) and a planetary revolution in values that prioritizes care over accumulation. It’s a perfectly good name, too, for the horizon wherein work’s myriad precarious, abject, wageless, mad, incarcerated, and otherwise remaindered victims are avenged. As a revolutionary movement, feminism abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.”
― Sophie Lewis, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation

“But ultimately, I don't want to deny that there is something "scary" (psychologically challenging) about this politics. This same scariness is present in ll real revolutionary politics, in my view. Our trepidation is our reflexive response to the premonition of an abolition of the self.”
― Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation

“Together, we can establish consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation, and large-scale methods for distributing and minimizing the burdens of life’s work.”
― Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation

“The family-- predicated on the privatization of that which should be common, and on proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed-- is a state institution, not a popular organism.”
― Sophie Lewis