Reviews
“Lewis builds a harsh yet well-grounded portrait of familial dysfunction. This provocation stings.”
Publisher’s Weekly
“Why we should abolish the family”
Lily Sánchez, Current Affairs
Erin Maglaque, The New Statesman
“I am consistently dazzled by Sophie Lewis’s work, which is both intellectually capacious and heart-expanding. Abolish the Family is a liberatory demand and a world-making project proposed here with revolutionary love and inimitable style. Without fail, Lewis clarifies, disrupts and inspires.”
Natasha Lennard, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
“The idea of family abolition tends to provoke skeptical reactions: Can’t families be a source of solidarity? Without families, who would we count on when things get tough? Shouldn’t we protect vulnerable families, ostracized families, separated families? Sophie Lewis faces up to the hard questions without flinching, while ultimately steering us towards different ones: How else could we live, and who else could we be? Abolish the Family is a rigorously utopian, radically compassionate, unapologetically revolutionary manifesto, by equal parts thrilling and sobering. We all deserve better than the family, Lewis argues, and it’s up to all of us to build new forms of solidarity and care that reach beyond biology or even kin, even if we don’t know quite what they’ll look like. Abolish the Family will make you want to find out.”
Alyssa Battistoni
“Sharp, engaging, and bursting with intellectual energy, Abolish the Family is a triumph. Whether you come to this book as a critic of The Family or as its most ardent supporter, you’re sure to find something within its pages to move, challenge, or provoke you. It’s a joy to read, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.’”
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
“Sophie Lewis once again shines forth as one of the boldest thinkers of our current moment with this highly anticipated sequel to her groundbreaking Full Surrogacy Now. How might we understand caring, sharing, and loving outside the concept of kinship? In this energizing little book – part history and critical analysis, part manifesto — Lewis helps us understand family abolition as world-making rather than as a subtraction of infrastructure, and she does so with remarkable clarity, precision, and wit.”
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick