The End of Cultural Capital: Is It Time to Abolish the Family?

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Ten
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Futures: Culture and Literacy (Table 3)

Abstract

In this radical provocation, I trouble the concept of the family by taking seriously the idea that we must abolish the “traditional,” heteronormative, middle-class family rather than continuing to uphold it as the most desirable model of kinship for the “disadvantaged” to aspire to in society. While abolishing the family could have different meanings, I use the term here in the sense of expanding kinship and human care in ways that go beyond the normalized nuclear White middle-class family. The purpose of abolishing the family, or discussing this as an option, centers on the idea that current discussions of “diversity” fail to address how the middle class “family” as currently manifested actually reproduces the privatization of social misery (Lewis, 2021).

Author

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author