Family Policing: Welfare, Surveillance, and Abolition
Nowhere—as the women’s liberation movement used to relentlessly point out—is more dangerous for a child than the family. In the ’70s, a wave of feminist, child-liberationist consciousness-raising blew the lid off the everyday phenomena of incest sexual abuse and domestic violence. This movement hoped to transform the power dynamics of the American family wholesale, such that family members could no longer perpetrate abuse with such impunity. But despite their efforts, nothing changed fundamentally about the organization of the private nuclear household, whose central function within capitalism only expanded under neoliberalism. Instead, a carceral family-surveillance matrix sprang up. It remains the case that 5 kids in the U.S. die every single day from abuse and neglect. And “child removal” remains in many cases a cure worse than the disease, with foster homes often perversely recreating the very abuses that were initially the cause for separating a child from kin. With these miserable outcomes in mind, scholars and activists have begun to ask: What would it mean to abolish the American child welfare system? In what ways has “child welfare” come to mean what sociologist Dorothy Roberts calls “family policing”—i.e., the state’s disciplining of poor communities’ everyday lives via Child Protective Service investigations, mandated reporting, and termination of parental rights? How has “child welfare” served to punish poverty and Blackness by defining both as morally culpable and unworthy of parenthood status? What does it look like to abolish family policing, and how does it intersect with complimentary calls to abolish the family itself?
In this course, we study the relationship between the feminist utopianism that abets the liberation of children by communizing care—family abolition—and the feminist utopianism that defends working-class mothers from brutalization by the state—abolition of family policing. Is the apparent tension between these two abolitionisms real, or are the two horizons inextricable from one another? Together, we will read radicals who focus their critique predominantly on the family, alongside radicals who focus their critique predominantly on family policing. Especially, though, we will search for existing syntheses of both strands of abolition, reading carefully for texts that braid them together. Authors likely to be assigned or discussed include: Dorothy Roberts, Shira Hassan, M.E. O’Brien, Ignacio Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Sophie Lewis, Will Holub-Moorman, Quinn Lester, Kristen Martin, Katie Gibson, Ida Danewid, Siobhan Pokorney, and Katherine S. Davies.
Course Schedule
Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ETNovember 22 — December 20, 2026
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Sunday, November 29th.
$355.00
Registration Open