“Abolish the family? You might as well abolish gravity,” Sophie Lewis writes in her new book “Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation.” She will discuss her work in a lecture titled “Abolish Which Family? Black Familiality, Patriarchal Motherhood, and the Communization of Care” on Wed., March 1 at 5 p.m. in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House. Her talk will be followed by a reception and is free and open to the public.
Lewis will offer a deep dive into the history of radical movements and explore family abolition, which she characterizes as a turning away from the privatization of care, toward a future in which love, care, and belonging are a communal effort.
The talk is hosted by the Society for the Humanities and is co-sponsored by the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Departments of Literatures in English and Africana Studies.
“Lewis helps us see family abolition as a world-making rather than as a subtraction of infrastructure,” writes cultural theorist Sianne Ngai.
Lewis is a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” explores the surrogacy industry (its conditions and wages). Lewis’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books, and she frequently teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
In addition to the lecture, Lewis will host a casual lunch discussion for humanities graduate and undergraduate students at the A.D. White House on Thursday, March 2 from 12-1 p.m. To RSVP for the lunch, please contact Alex McNeil at ahm53@cornell.edu.
Kina Viola is Program Coordinator for the Society for the Humanities.
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