Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures

Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work, published by Duke University Press, and Constituting Feminist Subjects.

“Teeming with lumpenproletarians, communist cyborgs, child-liberationists, and sex workers against work, Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures braids together the living strands of revolutionary feminist thought and struggle of many decades – abolishing gender, prison, the family, police, and work – into a lasso of the imagination, big enough to overcome the present state of things. For my money, Kathi Weeks is quite simply the most important theorist of our age.”—Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms“Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures is an urgent invitation to feminists to scale up our critiques of the present and be bolder in our visions for the future. Centering on the work of Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, and Angela Davis, Weeks considers what the scaled-up thinking they did reveals about work, the family, and the carceral state. She argues that a structural account of these objects is key for liberatory politics, and that contemporary feminist theory’s reticence to make big claims dulls its critical edge.”—Heather Berg, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Labor Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

• Introduction. Periodizing the Archive 11. Structural Pedagogies 292. The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s 693. Systems and Standpoints in and Beyond Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” 934. Archiving the Future 1215. Angela Y. Davis and Prison Abolitionism as Politics and Method 1436. The Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal 1717. Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the Ideologies of Work 1918. The Lumpenproletariat and Marxist Feminist Political Theory 215Acknowledgments 235Notes 237References 247Index 269