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6 - It Runs in the Family

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Ida Danewid
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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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.

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Chapter
Information
Resisting Racial Capitalism
An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal
, pp. 125 - 146
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • It Runs in the Family
  • Ida Danewid, University of Sussex
  • Book: Resisting Racial Capitalism
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127707.007
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  • It Runs in the Family
  • Ida Danewid, University of Sussex
  • Book: Resisting Racial Capitalism
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127707.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • It Runs in the Family
  • Ida Danewid, University of Sussex
  • Book: Resisting Racial Capitalism
  • Online publication: 16 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127707.007
Available formats
×