Feelings

• Put off, at the beginning a lot of concept words and clout words - then got into it and starting to appreciate it
• Got me thinking
• Excited to read something that is different to read something that is different from I usually read
• Easy read, entertaining
• Lost me sometimes
• Overwhelmed, grateful
• If you do not want to be my sister then you can just say it
• You can have principled views, even if you would want to abolish your family
• Reassuring
  • to have this idea
  • difficult relationship
  • nice to hear to word in different contexts -> the safe haven is not the reality for a lot of people
  • it feels very taboo to criticize the family
• Diminishing the guilt
• Similar to Christmas
  • worst time of the year
  • comparing to the normal families
  • the contrast is so hard - the most felt
• The perspective
• Didn't feel academic

Style

• The structure was different from what I am used to
• Non-academic, although she called upon some academic sources
• She herself is a lecturer, did a PhD and still teaches -> human geography -> social scientist, full-bright scholar
• What kind of discipline allows you to think like this and write like this
• Not that much time since she finished her PhD
  • already her first book sounded very similar
  • about surrogacy
  • very opinionated
• She wants to reach the masses
• Very accessible the way she writes
  • happy to have this type of stuff to start with
  • she writes in her voice, like someone talking to her
• Provocative style
• Down to earth, benevolent in a way, witty
• If you are fine with your family, you will never pick up this book
• It got so politicized
• Challenging vocabulary -> leftist academics talking to each other
  • would be hard to give to someone else
  • they would be put off by the language
  • even left-leaning people would be put off
• The language is a bit crazy, since the second paragraph
• Comparisons are sometimes very...
• "Without the family, who or what would take responsibility for the lives of non-workers, including the ill, the young, and the elderly? This question is a bad one. We don't hesitate to say that nonhuman animals are better off outside of zoos, even if alternative habitats for them are growing scarcer and scarcer and, moreover, they have become used to the abusive care of zoos. Similarly: transition out of the family will be tricky, yes, but the family is doing a bad job at care, and we all deserve better. The family is getting in the way of alternatives."
• It is a weird thing to put us on the same level

Content

• Link between capitalism and family
• Very good comparison, maybe we can survive outside of capitalism (zoo) -> is the realization?
  • lack of responsibility
  • we pretend to be animals, by watching netflix all night but we are not
• Can we control our own species or not
  • if I feel that we have not fully grasped -> then I have to have kids
  • How do you maintain the species???
• One more soldier to get out of the zoo
  • lot of expectations for a kid
• Why do people want to have kids?
  • to control their minds
• Children and Women often the first one's to experience the violence of family
• Kids don't have the agency
  • they do, they cry a lot
  • we are just trying to fit them into some box
• Even children can participate in the decisions that concern them
• If a kid is born outside of the family structure, it can be the first one to have liberation
• Where does family come from? Why do we have families?
  • Purpose changed a lot throughout history
  • Before we were in communities -> we lost that
  • that is what she want to bring back
• Family becoming an argument for remaining in the status quo
  • Family is the reason why you work -> it is the reason why you stay at work
• Many women calculate
  • What can I do until I have a family
• Reproducing the working class
  • this would not be necessarily true if you had a broader care system
• Parenage
  • having godmothers, godfathers
  • you would have someone very wealthy -> they would take a lot of responsibility
  • contacts the wealthy person has
  • you build a community
  • the godperson would also be happy to have this connection
• Catholicism
  • often time friend of your parents now -> change
  • used to have be more cross-class
  • institutional or rational-choice? -> it develops into an institution, because everyone does it
• It is also the law, not just the family
• That's not how the world works
• Everything is rented
• Scarcity mindset
  • because everybody has to accumulate for their family
  • competition
• Parents as the security net
• There is always another family
• I don't give a fuck whether your parents worked hard for it
• It also legitimized abuse
• At least you have a family........
• Happens especially in close relationships
  • we are so close that is okay to treat you poorly
  • sometimes it is yourself
  • no matter
• Relationship how
• Tavaryš

Notes from the Reading

Abolish the Family:

• If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also
  • If this is true, then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the "real" mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name
• Austerity policies purposively render proletarian baby-making crushingly unaffordable, even for two or three or four adults working together, let alone one. Housework is sexed, racialized, and (except in the houses of the rich) unwaged. It is unsurprising, in these global conditions, that large numbers of humans do not or cannot love their families
• The economic assumption that behind every "breadwinner" there is a private someone (or someones) worth being exploited for, notably some kind of wife—that is, a person who is likely a breadwinner too—"freely" making sandwiches with the hard-won bread, or hiring someone else to do so, vacuuming up the crumbs, and refrigerating leftovers, such that more bread can be won tomorrow: this feels to many of us like a description of "human nature."

Dependence on the Family:

• The near-total dependence of the young person on these guardians is portrayed not as the harsh lottery that it patently is, but rather as "natural," not in need of social mitigation, and, furthermore, beautiful for all concerned
  • Parents, it is supposed, derive nothing so much as joy from the romance of this isolated intensity

Microcosm of the Nation-state:

• Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition.
  • Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufactures "individuals" with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness.
• Family values are bourgeois economics writ small
• rendering kin, instead of society, responsible for the poor.
  • Without family, in short, no bourgeois state. The family's function is to replace welfare and to guarantee debtor
  • The history of the family is one of perpetual crisis

Connection of Family Values and Politics:

• Long time synonyms
  • And indeed, in a landscape laid to waste by Thatcherite anti-solidarity policies, it really can feel as though there are only families, or races (macro-families), at war with one another or, at best, in competition
• Taxes, benefits, wills, deeds, curricula, courts, and pensions are everywhere at work, functioning as technologies of the family.
  • Even at the architectural level, a visiting stranger in such a land faces an endless sea of front doors—each neatly attached to a mortgage and a (real or implied) "Private" sign, each harboring its micro-collection of individual self-managing consumer-entrepreneurs

Family as a lived experience remains a fiction, as a mode of governance a brutal economic fact:

• All of us are seduced, or at least disciplined. We can't escape it, even when we individually reject it. And even when we reject it, we worry that its much-vaunted disintegration presages something worse
• 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.
• Logically, announcing an intention to "treat you like family" (as so many airlines, restaurants, banks, retailers, and workplaces do) ought to register as a horrible threat

We should want what is "unfamilial":

• Namely: acceptance, solidarity, an open promise of help, welcome, and care
• 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
• Idiomatically, to say that someone is "like family" is meant to convey in the strongest possible terms: "I claim you, I love you. I consider our fates bound up together." We have no stronger metaphor! But why use this metaphor?

Are all families happy in the same way?

• Le Guin critique: Tolstoy's aphorism should be reversed
  • Hiding the structural character of unhappiness in families
• To her, the very phrase "happy families" bespeaks a fundamental incuriosity about the nature of happiness, which—under capitalism especially—comes with enormous costs
• What if unhappy families are all alike, in a structural sense, because the family is a miserable way to organize care—whereas happy ones are miraculous anomalies?
• The family is an ideology of work
• Realist and gothic traditions alike view family as a field of howling boredom, aching lack, unhealed trauma, unspeakable secrets, buried hurts, wronged ghosts, "knives out," torture attics, and peeling wallpaper

Representation in Art matters:

• It matters that admitting how disappointing family life is—how irksome, unjust, and exhausting at best, and crushingly traumatic at worst—represents one of the dominant established tones of the classical novel, family cartoon, drama, sitcom, and memoir.
• From gore to so-called "psychological" horror, diverse genres openly implicate the family-form in the tortures it is enduring

It is the Family that is unrealistic and Utopian:

• Rather, I would ask you to flip the script and consider that it is the family that is unrealistic and utopian
• It should be elementary socialism, not some fringe eccentricity of queer ultra-leftists, to be striving toward a regime of cohabitation, collective eating, leisure, eldercare, and childrearing in which no one, to quote M. E. O'Brien, "is bound together violently any longer," like sets in a ghoulish deck of playing-cards
• I'd wager that you, too, can imagine something better than the norm that makes a prison for adults—especially women—out of their own commitment to children they love
• Le Guin treats happiness as the rarer, more interesting, more pressing, challenging collective artform
• Those of us assigned to so-called reproductive labors on this earth know especially well that happiness is a clumsy art, a Sisyphean effort, a messy choreography that, by definition, cannot leave anybody out.
  • Queerly, then, the best caregivers already seek to unmake the kind of possessive love Alexandra Kollontai called "property love" in their relations with children, older relatives, and partners