Abolishing the family - intellectual exercise or necessity of survival?

Last Friday I went to a talk by Nuria Alabao on Abolishing the family at Lanónima in Seville. What really interested me was this part: "to think together starting from the abolition of the family as we know it: the destruction of its role in the economic and political order, as a potential starting point for other forms of organisation of social reproduction that are fairer, that make more flexible the ways in which people can establish bonds - chosen and not genetic - that extend mutual support and care outside the narrow margins of the kinship that everyone has fallen into". Unfortunately, in this the talk and debate fell short.

I am a non-binary trans survivor of sexual abuse in my family - by my father. I am a survivor of complex trauma through abandonment and emotional neglect by both my father and my mother. When I think of family, the first words that come to mind are violence, (sexual) abuse, abandonment, mistreatment, emotional blackmail, ... While I very much agree with the diagnosis of the role of the family in the economic and political order as put forward by Nuria Alabao (e.g. also in this article - Spanish), in a way this diagnosis is beyond me. I only have to look at my surroundings, my friendships (especially trans and non-binary, but not only), and what I see is violence, mistreatment, abuse, emotional neglect, ... with all the resulting traumas.

As Hil Malatino says in Trans Care: "Many of us don't have families, full stop. We lost them somewhere along the way. They rejected us. We had to run away from them to survive."

This is not only the case for many trans and non-binary people, but perhaps even more marked in our lives. According to a research on the realities of non-binary people in Spain, 12% had no contact with a single person of their family.

As our lives are like this, for us the question of how to build "other forms of organisation of social reproduction that are fairer, (...) that extend mutual support and care" is not an intellectual exercise, but a necessity of survival. We simply do not have the luxury of having a family.

I would not be here now writing this without my support networks. Over the past seven years I have experienced several mental health crises as a result of the mistreatment and sexual abuse I suffered by my family. It has been my networks that have sustained me emotionally, and more. Especially the last crisis, from November 2021, was so severe that I am convinced I would not have survived without my networks. A friend from Berlin invited me to visit her at Christmas 2021, knowing about my crisis and that I was struggling with strong emotional flashbacks. On my return, when I was starting to talk openly about suicide, another friend called me and offered me her house as my safe space to go to when I was feeling suicidal. At this point she wasn't even a close friend (she is now). Another friend paid for my therapy for six months. And I can't even mention all the care and emotional support.

I follow Hil Malatino in thinking about "(...) what care really looks like in trans lives. This means de-centring the family and instead starting from the multi-gendered, radically inventive and highly exhausted people who weave our care networks. (...) Care in transition also means grappling with the fact that the forms of family and kinship that are invoked in much of the feminist literature on care work and care ethics are affected by forms of domesticity and intimacy that are both white and Eurocentric, based on the modern/colonial gender system."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the talk came out mainly with the classic proposals of class feminism: 24-hour childcare and communal kitchens. Very good. But completely insufficient.

From the talk, I am left with many thoughts. Nuria Alabao talked about building relationships with a reciprocal obligatory nature (in order to be able to assume care), and that this type of relationship needs time to be built, and this causes me a lot of doubts and even rejection. Obligatory nature? Why the idea that with obligatory nature care could work?

Personally, I think more about making commitments, i.e. voluntarily making a commitment in a relationship (of any kind), which does not require reciprocity. It's more about trusting the network, that when I need care or support, there will be a person in the network (or several) who can take it on, and it doesn't have to be the same people who have previously received support from me.

And I don't know if this really needs such long-term relationships. Hil Malatino offers this minimal definition of community: people who are reweaving. And when I look back over my experience of the last seven years, it has been a permanent reweaving of my networks. And I consciously speak of networks, in the plural, as they are several networks, with many people who don't even know about each other. Some people left my networks, others joined them. A permanent reweaving. And perhaps we should leave behind the idea of a lifelong mutual support network that should assume the care and support - emotional, economic, childcare, when we are ill - that today is assumed (often badly) by the family, and instead rely on our networks, always fragile, always being reconfigured, but capable of sustaining us when we need them? I don't know. I myself am still afraid, but, at the same time, my networks have sustained me over the last few years, and continue to sustain me.

After the talk we talked among friends. We talked about how support networks are often built by marginalised communities. During the AIDS crisis in the United States, the LGBT community (and especially the gay part) built impressive support networks, from free HIV testing to home care for sick people, food at home, emotional support, ... All this on an impressive scale. In many African countries among women there are economic support systems - the tontines - based on trust and mutual support. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially at the beginning, mutual support networks were built up in many cities, for example in Seville la Ramuca. How do we bring these experiences of marginalised communities (with the exception of the mutual support networks during COVID) to the centre of society? How do we change our imaginations so that we see ourselves as being able to trust these networks? How do we strengthen them?

At the same time, I come back to my idea from before: I don't think it makes sense to think of a network that assumes all the care and support. Each of us has to weave and reweave our networks all the time, and rely on our networks, on each other's commitments to support each other.

This is just a start. But, for me, building alternatives to the family, new structures of mutual support and care, is a question of survival. I have come this far thanks to my networks.