Evelina Johansson Wilén

It helps to start with the context in which family abolition has reemerged. We’re living through a strong anti-gender backlash. Conservative and far-right movements across Europe, the United States, and South America have made feminism, women’s emancipation, and queer life into explicit targets, and there’s serious money behind that project. In a lot of countries, we’re watching rights that women and queer people won get rolled back explicitly in the name of protecting the family.

At the same time, we have a global crisis of care. In the Nordic countries in particular, we had an active welfare state that funded childcare and health care directly. But now we’re seeing that support withdrawn and the burden of care pushed back onto individual families.

So on one hand, you have a political climate that elevates the family rhetorically in order to attack feminists and other groups, and on the other hand, you have real material pressure being placed on families — which falls disproportionately on women — making family life harder and more precarious. Family abolitionist thought has reemerged partly as a reaction to both of those forces.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

As family abolitionists themselves will say, nobody’s coming to take your grandmother away. It’s better understood as an attempt to reimagine how we structure care, to find more collective ways of giving and receiving it.

So it’s not literal in the sense of a concrete policy proposal for tomorrow. But I’d argue you do need to take it seriously as a real position: the idea that in a genuinely fair, more collective society, the family would not occupy the central place it currently does — that the family form itself is a problem.

The underlying claim is that the nuclear family, as currently constituted, produces a particular kind of political subjectivity organized around ownership of certain people and a sharp division between those who matter to you and those who don’t — an isolating tendency built into the family form. There’s also the claim, made by people like Nancy Fraser, that capitalism depends on the unpaid reproductive labor the family performs — what Fraser calls capitalism’s “hidden abode.” In that sense, family abolition would mean withdrawing that labor, which would pose a genuine threat to capitalism. Sophie Lewis, whose work is probably the most prominent in this vein, argues we can’t really imagine the end of capitalism without imagining the end of the family.

Of the people writing in this tradition, I find M. E. O’Brien’s work the most interesting, because she tries to concretely sketch more communal, collective forms of living and organizing reproduction. One central move in this literature is a critique of biological bonds themselves as a basis for care, the idea of parents “owning” their children. Family abolitionists treat that bond as inherently conservative.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

First, you can become too fixated on the family as the site of social reproduction. Alyssa Battistoni makes this point well in Free Gifts: reproductive labor happens in a lot of places, not just families.

The feminist-Marxist tradition, because it’s so tied to gender and women’s position, has tended to code it as happening specifically within the household. But while women have carried a disproportionate share of this work, it’s not exclusive to women. Simply living inside a capitalist society means you’re constantly reproducing yourself and others in some fashion — through friendship, recreation, all kinds of activity that isn’t housed inside a family unit.

The second thing is that, yes, the family does a lot of unpaid work — but precisely because it does, it’s also a potential site of resistance. My critique of the family abolitionist literature is that it treats the family as a pure function of capitalism, when I think you need to understand all social spheres — the state, the family, schools — as sites of ongoing negotiation with capitalism’s demands. They get pulled into capitalism’s logic but retain another logic of their own.

In fact, it’s precisely because these spheres operate by a different logic and are not identical to the market that capitalism can use them at all, and that same othering is what opens space for resistance. Family abolitionists don’t acknowledge that enough; they tend toward an overly neat, overly functionalist account of how capitalism works.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

Think about what reproductive work actually consists of: feeding someone, teaching a child to read or tie their shoes. Susan Ferguson has a wonderful piece in Spectre on capitalist clock time versus what she calls “body time.” You never know how long it will take to get a child to sleep. That work runs on a completely different time logic than capitalist clock time, and the two are constantly colliding.

Anyone embedded in a family and caring for people experiences that collision directly. And as families get squeezed harder, the friction intensifies. Because you want the people you love to be okay, that tension can produce something like a longing for a society organized so that caregiving doesn’t have to fight capitalist time at every turn — a longing to be able to be, say, a good mother without the constant war against the clock.

There’s a related point to make about the family abolitionist argument. Writers like Mary McIntosh and Michèle Barrett describe the family’s close bonding as “antisocial” — a depoliticizing mechanism, because it teaches you to care intensely about a small circle and less about everyone else. I’d argue the opposite is often true.

I have a colleague whose daughter has Down syndrome, who’s now sixteen or seventeen and has grown up through years of real austerity in Sweden. Wanting the best possible life for her daughter has politicized my colleague, precisely because it’s so obvious to her that love alone isn’t enough; her daughter needs things in place that only collective provision can supply.

That kind of intense, selective love — we’re not Jesus, we don’t love everyone equally — is very often exactly what motivates people to organize. In Sweden, we’ve seen this repeatedly with mothers organizing around health care access in underserved areas. Therefore, I find it hard to buy the “antisocial family” thesis.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

That’s a really good formulation, yes.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

It comes down to how capitalism works at a very general level. You can have formal democracy alongside enormous material inequality; Ellen Meiksins Wood writes well about this in The Retreat From Class. Capitalism requires a relationship between capitalists and workers, and it also requires a relationship between direct economic extraction and expropriation, where certain groups perform unpaid labor while others occupy the comparatively privileged position of being “merely” exploited.

That’s a very simplified starting picture. The real question is: What kinds of struggles are compatible with capitalism as a system, and which ones threaten it? Struggles that are compatible with capitalism tend to be what we’d call recognition or status struggles. My own view — not universally shared — is that capitalism’s core requirement is simply the ability to exploit and expropriate; it’s largely indifferent to which populations occupy those roles. As long as the ratio between exploiters and exploited holds, it doesn’t fundamentally matter who fills which slot.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

At a very abstract level, yes. But capitalism developed historically in a specific context where gender and race were deeply important, and capitalism has absolutely made use of that — the gender pay gap, racial wage differentials, and so on. So if you look at it historically, gender and race clearly matter enormously; it’s a question of what level of abstraction you’re analyzing at. And because capitalism is constantly changing, its relationship to gender shifts with its needs.

At one point, excluding women from the workforce was profitable; at another, capitalism needed women in the workforce, and certain feminist demands and capitalist development could align. Capitalism’s own dynamism has, at points, genuinely undermined patriarchal arrangements. That’s exactly why certain status struggles can succeed within capitalism — not because they’re worthless but because they happen not to threaten it.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

Right, though it depends on how far you push a given status struggle. If you push certain demands far enough — not just “women should be able to work here too” but genuinely radical demands regarding, for example, who’s expected to do unpaid housework — you can force real change on capitalism.

I wouldn’t want to dismiss status struggles as handmaidens of neoliberalism. But it’s important to understand why certain status struggles have succeeded and others haven’t, and that has to do with how much they challenge capitalism’s functioning. At the same time, capitalism also has real capacity to absorb certain demands and simply operate a bit differently going forward.

Nancy Fraser has a discussion of this where she notes that the historical split between one group facing heavy expropriation (women, people of color) and another group “merely” facing exploitation has become more evenly distributed over time. I could imagine, in principle, a capitalist society organized without reference to race or gender at all. That’s just not the society we currently live in.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

Judith Butler would push back and argue that heterosexuality itself performs a load-bearing function for capitalism — that’s part of her disagreement with Fraser. But I think your instinct is basically right, if you look empirically at how different struggles actually play out rather than purely theoretically. It’s not that gay liberation had some uniquely brilliant strategy compared to race and gender struggles; it’s a question of what structural resistance a given struggle runs into and how easily capitalism can absorb it.

Butler might say there’s a broader “factory” producing heterosexuality as such, at a more abstract level. But I’d also stress: capitalism will tolerate whatever struggles it can currently profit from and abandon them the moment they stop being profitable. If it turned out that gay liberation posed a genuine threat to capitalism’s basic functioning, we’d expect to see much stronger structural resistance emerge than we currently see.

I’d add one more layer. Even where a status struggle wins real legal gains, the ability to actually use those gains is often gated by class. In Sweden, abortion is legal up to roughly week nineteen, and health care is heavily subsidized, so that right is broadly usable. In a lot of other places, the legal right exists on paper while the economic ability to exercise it doesn’t.

Status politics tends to operate at the level of formal, discursive equality, but actually accessing a formal right is usually a question of economic resources. Which means status politics needs to be coupled with class politics, or it will never reach its full potential — the right can exist for everyone in principle while remaining available in practice only to people with the resources to use it.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

I do think capitalism is gender-blind at a very abstract level. I could imagine a gender-equal capitalist society, in principle.

But concretely: Women perform something like 75 percent of unpaid labor worldwide. Women as a group are structurally central to how capitalism currently functions, not because of some abstract logical necessity but because of how the actual distribution of labor has shaken out historically. Given that, most of what gets called “feminist struggle” today — struggles over how we organize care, what role the family plays, the conditions in heavily feminized, heavily exploited sectors of the economy — isn’t really status struggle at all. It’s class struggle.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

We don’t have great hard data on this yet, but I work on a project with two colleagues on involuntary celibacy and involuntary singleness. It involves large-scale survey data, plus interviews with men and women and research specifically on incel communities.

When we wrote about dating apps, the starting point was fairly basic: apps are designed to keep you on the app. You need occasional success stories to keep people believing it’s worth staying, but most people not finding a match is what generates profit. These aren’t communal love projects; they’re profit-generating products, structured to encourage constant comparison, meeting someone and then immediately wanting to meet someone else. That dating pattern is good for the apps’ bottom line. Still, the underlying reason the apps work at all is that people genuinely want to find someone.

From our interviews and other research, there’s a common male narrative that women are “too picky,” holding out for wealth or status, making it impossible for ordinary men to succeed. But the data suggests something different — men swipe right, meaning “yes,” on roughly half of the profiles they see. Every second woman is someone they’d consider sleeping with or dating. That looks like an old pattern: men not especially attentive to whether a given woman is someone they could actually build a life with, just registering general interest.

Women, by contrast, describe doing real cognitive work — is this someone I could talk to, live with, who sees me as a subject rather than an object? Partly that’s the old, familiar problem of objectification. And partly it’s because women doing this sorting are frequently exposed to aggressive and violent language, so being “picky” is also risk assessment.

In one sense, none of this is new. It’s catcalling with a digital interface, the same old pattern of unwanted male attention curdling into hostility when it’s not reciprocated. But because these apps are structurally built around a huge volume of interactions that mostly don’t resolve into an actual meeting, the underlying gender polarization gets amplified. Capitalist actors are, in effect, profiting from failed connection.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

What we’re seeing is a kind of critique of heterosexuality from within, which some people are calling “heteropessimism.” Men resenting women; women increasingly expressing disgust with men; and a sense that heterosexual relationships simply “will never work.” The interesting question is why that polarization is actually a problem.

There’s a real debate here about how to think about romantic love itself. Is it just an alibi for women’s oppression? If you think of romantic love purely as a vehicle through which patriarchal power reproduces itself, then it’s not obviously a problem if men and women stop finding each other; you could go the 1970s political-lesbian route or simply conclude the couple form is corrupt and shouldn’t be mourned. But there’s a substantial body of sociological work — and I’ve written some of this myself — treating romantic love not just as a site where power gets reproduced but as a site where it gets challenged.

In our survey of both single and partnered people, we asked what people had learned from being in a relationship, and a common answer was some version of: I came to understand how she experiences the world in a way that genuinely made me angry on her behalf. There’s a dismissive Swedish joke about “daddy feminists” — men who weren’t interested in feminism until they had daughters and could suddenly see, up close, how the world was structured against women and became politically active as a result.

The same dynamic exists in romantic love generally: if you truly love someone, you become frustrated on their behalf when you see they’re not able to live the life they could live. There’s real transformative potential in the couple form, heterosexual or otherwise.

There’s an article by Alice Evans on which relationships people orient their core identity around — the community, one’s male friends, or a spouse. In the romantic-love ideal, the partner becomes the core unit, and other affiliations become secondary, sometimes even things you’ll defend the partnership against.

Within feminism, radical feminists and some queer theory converge, oddly, on a fairly critical view of heterosexuality as inherently suspect. But there’s another tradition — bell hooks, French feminist thought — much more interested in relationality itself, in developing an ethics of love, in what it means to really try to understand another person, including across difference. That process can be transformative, not simply oppressive.

There’s a 1970s text by Virginia Held that poses the question: Can feminists afford to love, given everything? And it answers that we can’t afford not to. That centers love as something crucial that can’t just be flattened into “I love all my friends equally.” She describes the couple as a kind of laboratory for personal evolution.

It can sound naive, but I think there’s something real there — and it’s borne out in our data. People who had been involuntarily single for a very long time, disproportionately men, held substantially more negative views on gender equality and were significantly more accepting of relationship violence than people currently partnered. And when we look at research on men who leave incel and manosphere communities, it’s almost always because they formed a real, direct relationship — not necessarily romantic — with an actual woman, not an abstraction. The polarization is sustained by abstraction; contact with an actual person tends to crack it.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

I think it reflects a similarly oversimplified theory of gender in the other direction. When incels describe women in this very schematic, degraded way, and then you look at how some liberal feminists respond — often reducing it to “men just won’t share power” — there’s a similar failure to look at who’s on these forums concretely.

A lot of incel-forum participants are dealing with serious mental illness. I did months of ethnographic reading in these spaces, and it was genuinely grim material. But if you’re talking about violence, these men talk far more about suicide, about eliminating themselves, than about harming women.

That’s an important, underdiscussed fact. A purely liberal-feminist frame that treats gender as the only explanatory variable tends to produce a fairly harsh, unempathetic response to incels as a population, because it screens out everything else going on with them.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

That performative disgust — even when it comes from a real place of feminist frustration — is a strategy, and I think it’s a genuinely dysfunctional one. It resembles something you see across a lot of movements — trans politics, feminist politics — where there’s an appeal of resistance-as-distance: I shouldn’t have to explain this to you; Why would I engage with someone racist or transphobic at all?

There’s a kind of purity to resistance conducted entirely from a distance, refusing confrontation altogether. It’s a politics of disgust that people genuinely believe is radical, which I find quite sad, because politically it produces nothing — just deepening estrangement.

Evelina Johansson Wilén

There’s research bearing this out. Even fairly minimal profile signals of age and gender shape what content gets surfaced. And it maps onto how younger people socialize more broadly.

When I was fifteen, I had close friends of both genders. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in Sweden today are far more sex-segregated — they simply don’t spend time together the way we did. Arlie Hochschild, writing about the Tea Party movement, talks about a “wall of empathy” — if you never actually encounter someone, you lose the ability to see what you share with them, and you only register the differences, until the other group starts to feel like a completely different species of person.

We’ve long seen that dynamic around political polarization. Now that dynamic is increasingly organized around gender as well, and the consequences for society will perhaps be no less devastating.