Sophie Lewis

ISRAEL MUST END

Four sessions, with contributions by @city.bsky.social @reproutopia.bsky.social @vickyacab.bsky.social Marques Vestal @melissagiragrant.com @deanspade.bsky.social as well as @reallandsend.bsky.social & @avierkant.bsky.social

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Philly dykes hit me up if you wanna come to a movie night / cozy summer rewatch of Love Lies Bleeding, in order to gain sustenance in these fascist times, from the spectacle of a very large lady basically stomping your abusive dad, looking at August 4-5-6

A gray and yellow bird in a tree

A gray and yellow bird in a tree

A gray and yellow bird in a tree

A gray and yellow bird in a tree

🪶 #birders is this ...possibly... an (immature female) mourning warbler? Or is it a common yellowthroat. Spotted in northern Vermont a few days ago

We deserve a world where health isn’t rationed, care isn’t contingent, survival isn’t means-tested & life is not valued statistically. We deserve infrastructures built around life, not abandonment. And, we won’t get there by politely debating actuarial projections with capitalist parasites…

It's been said a thousand times, but it is we, more so than the extraordinary steadfast Palestinians, who are showing up dead on every street. We the onlookers are those whose lives are becoming meaningless, because our societies are so fundamentally uncommitted to life.

Last year I said that the Palestinian liberation movement learned the most crucial lesson of the Nazi holocaust, which is you must not let collective punishment deter armed resistance because you will face extermination in either case.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

?? That's what I'm saying

Palestine is starving in prison, and the powers that be are crystal clear why this is: it's because a free Palestine means the end of the(ir) world.

It seems too many of us are uncommitted to death, too: to the death of this world that we must bring about together, in order to birth the world that would be worthy of the name "life."

It's been said a thousand times, but it is we, more so than the extraordinary steadfast Palestinians, who are showing up dead on every street. We the onlookers are those whose lives are becoming meaningless, because our societies are so fundamentally uncommitted to life.

All the while, we are contributing our money to the generals of the holocaust, the death camp administrators, the sadistic torturers and annihilators of the starved and captive people -- women, men, and children, dehumanized beyond all imagining by the newest iteration of Lebensraum ideology

We're looking at the work of civilization. Yet how many of us here in the West, when we first learned about genocide as children, imagined that in the future we would be capable of living some kind of happy life while complicit in such atrocities, capable of looking away, even?

The evil we're witnessing is unfathomable and it is ours, it's our inhumanity, too. It is banal, almost, in the sense that it is the logical outgrowth of settler colonialism; the logic of South Africa and Australia, and of America, which the Führer so admired. We're looking at ourselves over there..

Are we willing to talk about that? In the meantime, every syllable of equivocation & concerntrolling about antisemitism, every word of support for the "iron dome," every cowardly silence by any of us in the face of colonial common sense, commits the so called human being to the destruction of life.

No doubt about it: the only possible full redemption for our species, the only remotely serious ethical response to the Nakba, would be a revolution. A permanent revolution for life, ending whiteness, value, property, and the state and instantiating a commune of everything for everyone.

It will not be enough to memorialize, repent, lament. It won't even be enough to disarm, force open borders, unmake apartheid, give the land back, share the sky, pour forth reparations. I scream in my heart for those things every day, watching Gaza suffer torments so unthinkable it defies language.

When everyone will finally always have been against this, the real question will be: how are we going to decolonize, in other words, how are we going to do dezionization for real, at the root, for the whole earth (i.e., not like we did denazification)?

For the love of god please donate

we can all do one more thing in solidarity with a people seeking liberation. this of course includes building you own small infrastructures of people committed to doing this work together.

There's a great bit at the start of Full Surrogacy Now by @reproutopia.bsky.social where she details how many anti-trans second wave feminists pivoted into anti-porn/anti-sex work activism after they lost the struggle over trans acceptance!

A quote from Sophie Lewis's book abolish the family on page 21 in the section but I love my family. Sophie writes I consider what a movement of real families against the family might look like and then make an argument for going beyond that metaphor letting go of kinship all together and pushing forward the relations. we might call comradeship or kith or words that have not been invented yet.

the distinction between kin (biokin or chosen) and everyone else is one which becomes more diffuse as the family is denaturalized and abolished, and commitments/formalization of relationships are optional creative expressions rather than shackles of dependence/coercion. Sophie explains:

During mass uprisings, people overcome the family as a necessary condition of continuing the struggle. Family abolition is an actual process that unfolds over the course of struggle, and it is not the same as family expansion. This is worth noticing

There are some uses of calling it family abolition in the present, and @reproutopia.bsky.social has spoken articulately about that. But ultimately overcoming class society isn't going to make sense to many people until a revolutionary rupture.

I don't write theory for purposes of building a majoritarian political campaign. I want to actually understand, map and name what would be required to build a free society and what I think we will need to do to get there. Sticking to the concept of family I think prevents us from grasping that

This is a great thread in general—the particular framing of abolitionist negativity reminds me of what I love most about Derrida’s more lucid comments on deconstruction and impossibility.

While ppl object that capitalism is itself “abolishing” familial life (in the colloquial sense of destroying), the resurgent debate around care communization has the potential to clarify why the form of destruction abolitionists seek is one that *makes good on the cheque that the family cannot cash*

It says: a care-communizing process of abolition, alone, could satisfactorily address the fact that families—and indeed cops, in some places—are the only thing that many of us have got by way of nurture and safety. Our attachment isn't foolish or "wrong," it's just the product of organized scarcity.

What the (“unreasonable”) abolitionist critique of the capitalist family insists is that to vest our collective wish for uncoerced togetherness in the family-form (private nuclear households+ biological "property") is no less quixotic than vesting our wish for safety in the armed wing of the state.