6 - It Runs in the Family

Summary

Political theory has traditionally started from the assumption that the public and the private belong to separate spheres, with the implication that the domestic household is beyond the reach of the state. This chapter challenges these assumptions. Drawing on indigenous, black, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminisms, it explores the history of heteropatriarchy as a racial and colonial history of reproductive extraction and control. I argue that racial capitalism operates as a bourgeois sexual order which shores up the white propertied family by extracting reproductive labour from those it deems racially perverse, degenerate, and bereft. Racialised ideas around what counts as family ‘proper’ have thus functioned as a central tool of capital accumulation. By re-visiting The Communist Manifesto’s famous demand – ‘Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!’ – through a racial capitalist lens, this chapter reconfigures ‘family abolition’ as the antipolitical undoing of state-sponsored white bourgeois domesticity.