#102 What Covid-19 reveals about the family w/ Sophie Lewis
Added 2020-11-18 15:56:33 +0000 UTCSophie Lewis joins PTO to talk about her article in The Nation, Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It. We chatted about how the Covid19 pandemic has underscored how dependent the nuclear family is upon the labour of others, and why the family is being called into question by mainstream political commentators. We also talked whether the call for family abolitionism is strategically the right call to be making, and whether instead the left ought to demand the extension of the beneficial aspects - of at least some families - to everyone.
Comments
thanks Jane! :)
Politics Theory Other
2020-11-19 10:47:24 +0000 UTCWonderful! Thank you, Alex. I shall do a particularly powerful Stan when it goes public💜xxx
Jane Pickering
2020-11-19 01:59:51 +0000 UTCThanks Tessa! Glad you enjoyed it.
Politics Theory Other
2020-11-18 21:33:07 +0000 UTCGreat show - thanks Alex and Sophie. I had a thought about the continuing attachment to the nuclear family that you describe. From a psychoanalytic point of view, a major factor behind the drive to have one's 'own' family is the desire to work through trauma and psychic conflict from one's own childhood (by restaging the 'scene' of one's own childhood, as it were). This might explain why the evident deficiencies of the nuclear family don't seem to undermine attachment to it; in fantasy at least, the nuclear family itself becomes the site where the trauma of the nuclear family can be worked out.
Tessa Peres
2020-11-18 21:19:59 +0000 UTC
