Thought for the Week – Queers against family

Family is inescapable at Pride. We have the homophobes ranting about the rainbow flag’s threat to “traditional family values”. Queer people remembering coming out to their families, or imagining what it would be like to do so. The coming together of found families that queer people have fostered for themselves.

And why shouldn’t family be central? Queers have fought laboriously for rights that enable them to form their own nuclear family units, such as the rights to marry and adopt. These successes have been unevenly distributed across the community, but Pride is a designated time to celebrate the wins thus far and call for more.

Thinking more symbolically, some of the family’s promises include safety and belonging. What better imagery to steep oneself in during a month where queer people openly express a desire for safety, readily rejoice in the belonging they have found against all odds.

Yet it’s worth asking whether the nuclear family – or any family for that matter – is a meaningful site of queer liberation.

This was a question asked and answered by the gay liberation movement that kicked off in the United States in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, a group of Gay Liberation Front (GLF) militants (including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson) opened a trans commune in New York that rescued dozens of trans youth escaping from their families. In San Francisco, organisers lauded the growth of “gay liberation communes” while gay activists across the pond in France also took aim at the “patriarchal family”. As the gay liberation movement flourished, the idea that the family should be abolished gained traction.

The goal was not simply to recreate new queer families but, according to the GLF London manifesto, to transform people’s attitudes to “personal property, to our lovers, to our day-to-day priorities in work and leisure, even to our need for privacy”. This transformation extended to ideas around privatised childcare; in 1979, a lesbian caucus at the National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference (where Audre Lorde gave the keynote speech) agreed on the following statement: “All children of lesbians are ours.”

These efforts were a response to the reality that even though there are families that are broadly functional and happy, the family as a structure is not set up to provide the safety and belonging that it promises. The purpose of the family at its simplest level is to privatise care; to assign the housing, feeding, and provision of other crucial needs of human beings to small, disparate units.

For queer people even today (queer children in particular), this places them in a precarious position where they are reliant for their most basic needs on people that might reject them for who they are. It leaves the healthcare of trans children in the hands of parents who – out of a belief inherent in the logics of the nuclear family that they effectively own their children – might decide they are entitled to prevent them from accessing it.

More generally, the family structure facilitates violence, particularly against women and children, with most sexual violence and homicides taking place within familial contexts. Unsurprisingly, the women’s lib movement which was also flourishing in the 70s similarly took aim at the family, with feminists calling for its abolition in an effort to reduce violence against women and end gendered divisions of labour.

As with all forms of abolition (e.g., prison abolition), the process involves taking apart not just the specific institution we’re targeting but the conditions that make it necessary despite its shortcomings. To quote famed prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.”

Moreover, the ultimate end-goal of abolition isn’t destruction, but creation. Thus, every demand to destroy the conditions that make the family necessary is simultaneously a prompt to create something new in their place.

To practise family abolition is to make food, housing, healthcare, and education free for absolutely everyone without condition so that no one is reliant on a family unit to meet basic needs. To organise provision of these essentials within large groups of people so that care is de-privatised and shared.

To dismantle the idea that parents own their children and make child-rearing a collective responsibility so that children can exercise their autonomy as human beings right alongside us.

We should get rid of borders so that family ties are no longer a vital means for migrants to receive support or be reconnected with those they love. Abolish wage labour and with it the concept of breadwinners.

None of the above would prevent people who wanted to maintain special ties with those who birthed them, with siblings, etc. from doing so. All it would do is decouple those relationships from access to care all humans need.

This is an extremely brief history and exposition of family abolitionism but it’s worth thinking about over Pride and it’s worth thinking about in church.

Within Matthew’s gospel alone there are multiple references to Christian kinship extending beyond the nuclear family. From Jesus stating that families would be torn apart as a result of his followers being faithful to him, to him explicitly stating that his family is not just his mother and brothers but also his followers. Other examples abound throughout Scripture.

Despite this, institutional churches have been instrumental in manufacturing consent for the nuclear family structure by claiming it’s divinely ordained. On that basis alone, it makes sense to make them central to conversations about whether the family is better off abolished.

And we already theologise about this a little at St James’s. Lucy’s Mothering Sunday sermons in particular gesture towards a poly-maternalism that could ultimately undo the need for family – we could simply mother each other.

It may well be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the family. If so, let’s concede that family abolition is apocalyptic and, in the process, remember that all apocalypse means is revelation. What queer models of solidarity might be revealed if we release our attachment to the family and begin to conceive of a world where we truly meet each other’s needs collectively? Who better to lead the charge into the uncertainty and chaos of such an endeavour than Christians committed to a kingdom of God that promises to bring about just that?