Family, Kinship, Social Reproduction, and the Private/Domestic Sphere

The nuclear family, this chapter highlights, is disappearing under the onslaught of techno-capitalism. This chapter asks why the symbolic of the family has become even more entrenched as the family itself has become increasingly less viable under the reduction of the wage, the weakening of the social safety net, environmental collapse, political turmoil, and the needs of capital to avoid investing in social reproduction in order to increase the speed of financial circulation. Understanding the nuclear family as an ideology that subordinates women under patriarchal domination, feminist theory has always been wary of the family as it naturalizes women&s;s roles as “natural” caregivers. Suggesting that the nuclear family has been a ruse for dispossessing the commons since the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, this chapter addresses the importance of the nuclear family for the governing structure of neoliberalism, which seeks to offload costs onto individuals who must, under neoliberal ideology, self-organize and take personal responsibility for self-care. Rather than the nuclear family, feminist theory develops ideas about kinship and social responsibility that would reject the norms of the family that naturalize social hierarchies and exclude so many. This chapter incorporates such ideas from the writings of Melinda Cooper, Fredrick Engels, Jodi Dean, Rosa Luxemburg, Christine Delphy, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Sylvia Federici, and Sophie Lewis.