Evelina Johansson Wilén is an associate professor of gender studies at Örebro University in Sweden. She serves on the editorial board of the Marxist theoretical journal Röda Rummet and is the author of a forthcoming book on family abolition.
Capitalism is only too happy to accommodate and absorb cultural challenges that don’t alter its foundations. Without economic transformations, the gains of identity-based politics are narrow — and reversible.
In Sweden today, maternal activism is uniting around a politics of collective care, turning private burdens into claims about public obligation and democratic rights.
Global fertility decline has made reproduction a site of reactionary family policies and moralized childlessness. But a healthy society would let people choose to have children or not without turning that choice into a moral adjudication.
Dating apps have transformed intimacy into a marketplace of frustration. They fuel gender conflict while ruthlessly extracting value from our most intimate desires.
Confusing marginality with insight leaves movements vulnerable to reactionary mimicry. A renewed engagement with Karl Marx’s structural account of exploitation can give feminism a path out of standpoint theory’s dead end.
New research on love and intimacy shows that love remains one of the few forces capable of remaking us.
Some argue that the nuclear family is the principal obstacle to a freer, more loving society. In reality, it’s economic insecurity that traps people and universal care is what makes relationships voluntary and free.
Family abolitionists see the family as the beating heart of capitalist social reproduction. But this view of the family misunderstands both the structure of capitalist reproduction and the complexity of how people survive within it.