LAWE 782

Catalog description

This seminar takes up the question of what legal role the family does and should play in structuring relationships and allocating resources. Looking to the historical lineage of the family, we will explore the family's use, development, and value as a basic building block of capitalism. Following a line of feminist and liberationist thought, we will also explore what work the legal family does, how it drives complex forms of inequality, and what a world without the legal framework of the family might look like. Some of the questions we will address are: how would relationships receive legal recognition and why do they need it? What does the elimination of the legal family mean for the division between public and private? How does care happen and what new collectives might we form? What does family abolition mean in a political era of regressive gender politics, tradwives, and patriarchs?