Hugmyndir um fjölskylduna út frá kenningum Marxisma og hinsegin fræða

Málþing á vegum Norræna sumarháskólans og Sagnfræðistofnunar HÍ í samstarfi við Heimspekistofnun HÍ og námsgrein í kynjafræði dagana 13.-14. febrúar í stofu 103 í Lögbergi frá 10-17. Sjá dagskrá neðar á síðunni. Ráðstefnan er öllum opin.

Um ráðstefnuna

NSU Circle 8 Queer Materialism Winter Symposium Historical Institute. The symposium is organised in partnership with the Philosophical Institute and subject of Gender Studies at the University of Iceland

“Aufhebung der Familie!”: Theorising the Family Between Queer and Marxist Thought.

‘Aufhebung der Familie!’ [‘Abolition of the family!’] demand Marx and Engels in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party. The family, they argue, is both the product and means of bourgeois capital accumulation; all communist practice thus necessitates that we move beyond the nuclear family form. But communism in practice has always had difficulty integrating family abolition into its revolutionary programmes. Historically, it has been theorists from feminist and queer traditions who have emphasised the centrality of the family to capitalist production, and thus communist revolution. Alexandra Kollontai, for example, wrote extensively on the relationship between labour and the family, and was responsible for taking steps to collectivise domestic labour and restructure familial relations in the early Soviet Union. In 1970, Shulamith Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex, in which she appropriates the Marxist dialectic in order to demonstrate the centrality of the family to historical change, and thus eventual liberation. And today, feminist and queer theory continues to develop modes of understanding the complex relations between sexuality, production, reproduction, and desire, with recent texts by M.E. O’Brien, Nat Raha, Sophie Lewis, Susan Ferguson, and many others, offering decolonial, anti-essentialist, and trans-affirmative revisions to this tradition. Yet, in spite of this long and rich history of theorisation, family abolition remains a controversial issue, framed by those on both the Right and the Left as variously dangerous, wildly utopian, unnatural, or impossible. This was as true in 1848 as it is today; Marx and Engels wrote that even the most radical thinkers are horrified at what they describe as a ‘schändliche Absicht’ [‘shameful intention’] of communism. But what is it about abolishing the family that scares us so much?

Dagskrá:

DAY 1

• 10:00–10:20 Coffee
• 10:20–10:30 Openings remarks
• 10:30–11:30 Panel 1: Abolition in Context
  - Kuba Malec: ‘Family Abolition, Marriage Equality, and Contradictions of Semi-peripheral Capitalism’
  - Janet Boddy and Rachel Thomson: ‘Changing the room? Making space for epistemic justice into policy-near research with families’
• 11:30–12:30 Panel 2: Divisions of Labour
  - Nadia Janiczak: ‘Gendered division of labor, polyamory, and the rewiring of the affective: towards a collective abolitionist affect’
  - Ruth Thrush: ‘On Care’
• 12:30–13:30 Lunch
• 13:30–15:00 Reading Group
  - Patrick J. L. Cockburn (2024), ‘Paths to a world without families: reasons, means, and ends in family abolitionism’ (read here)
• 15:00–15:30 Coffee break
• 15:30–16:30 Panel 3: Social Reproduction Amidst Crisis
  - Barbara Dynda: ‘De-romanticising Biological Family: Queer and Trans Chosen Communities in the Face of Exile and War’
  - Anna Celska: ‘Sleepwalking the family abolition’
• 16:30 Wine reception  kindly provided by the Department of Gender Studies

DAY 2

• 9:30–10:00 Coffee
• 10:00–11:30 Workshop 
  - Rachel Thomson: ‘Revisiting working mothers: feeling backwards in order to think again’
• 11:30–12:00 Coffee break
• 12:00–13:00 Panel 5: Familial Geographies
  - Stéphanie Barillé: ‘Transnational Parenthood as Everyday Resistance? Rethinking Family and Care in Iceland’
  - Delaney Mitchell: Permafrost Degradation and the Ecological Dimensions of Family Abolition in Interior and Southcentral Alaska
• 13:00–14:00 Lunch
• 14:00–15:30 Reading Group Alexandra Kollontai (1920), ‘Communism and the Family’
• 15:30–16:00 Coffee break
• 16:00-17:00 Panel 6: Post Family Imaginaries 
  - Thomas Chesworth: ‘The Dialectics of Sex: An Existential Premise’
  - Jules Bistane: ‘Angela Davis against racial capitalism and toward reproduction beyond the family’
• 17:00-17:30 Plenay Discussion and Closing Remarks