Dr. Sophie Lewis Marxist feminist proves the worthlessness of social science academia.

Feminist ‘scholar’ calls to ‘abolish’ the family amid pandemic: ‘Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers’

Katie Everett, Campus Reform
• A university speaker argued in favor of “abolishing” the family.
• She argued that the pandemic reinforces the need to do so.
• Religious scholars and social conservatives made the case as to why she’s wrong.
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.
Glenn Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, disagrees.
“Academic and government research over the last couple of decades consistently show that married women and children living with their married biological fathers are the least likely to suffer sexual, physical, or verbal abuse compared with other domestic configurations,” Stanton told Campus Reform.
“The author talks about the unfortunate homeless. Ask most of these people if living in a home with a nuclear family was attractive to them. Few would take the author’s dim view of that opportunity,” Stanton added.
Lewis concludes the piece by writing, “we do not know yet if we will be able to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression. I would only posit with some certainty that, in 2020, the dialectic of families against the family, of real homes against the home, shall intensify.”
However, Daniel Darling, vice president of communications for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Campus Reform that the opposite is true.


“The coronavirus pandemic is actually reinforcing to us the vital importance of family as an essential ingredient for a society’s flourishing. We are sheltering in place with our loved ones so that the most vulnerable among us–the aging, the sick–can avoid catching COVID 19,” he said.
“Throughout human history, movements have sought to squash the nuclear family, but yet it endures because, as Christians, we believe it is a creational idea, something designed by a Creator for the flourishing of humankind. So as we stay inside and slow the spread of the virus, let’s double down on the relationships closest to us, that help us nurture and grow, not attack the nuclear family at a time when it is most important for social cohesion,” Darling added.


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Sophie Lewis
Dr. Sophie Lewis is an Anglo-German, Philadelphia-based scholar, writer, theorist, translator and the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). Her work focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care. A graduate of the University of Oxford (BA English Literature; MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Policy) and the New School for Social Research (MA Politics), she earned her PhD (2016) in human geography at the University of Manchester. The thesis was situated within the antiwork communist tradition as well as historical materialist geographies concerned with the production of nature, supervised by Professors Noel Castree and Erik Swyngedouw and examined by Professors Maria Kaika and Cindi Katz. It was entitled ‘Cyborg Labor’ and examined the semiotic and political economy of the contract pregnancy industry.
Since 2014, academic publications by Dr. Lewis have appeared in journals such as Signs, Frontiers, Gender Place & Culture, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Feminist Review, Science as Culture, and Dialogues in Human Geography(in which her paper ‘Cyborg Uterine Geography’ acts as the anchor for a response forum). Her non-academic writing, including an op-ed on “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”; a critical tribute to Donna Haraway (“Cthulhu Plays No Role For Me”); and a contribution to hydrofeminist theory (“Amniotechnics”) can be found in newspapers and magazines including Viewpoint, Salvage Quarterly, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, Red Pepper, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, The New Socialist, Logic, and The New York Times.
Dr. Lewis’s German-English translations for MIT Press include A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak). Her translation of Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa’s account of femo-nationalist Islamophobia in Germany, Other and Rule, is forthcoming from Verso. She is a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, which publishes in forums such as The New Inquiry and Commune, and an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, whose collection End/And: Feminization in Unending Times came out in 2017. In addition to speaking on Full Surrogacy Now, she is working on two subsequent book manuscripts, Feminism of Fools and Amniotechnics.