【Description】What if the visceral intimacy of human pregnancy is no reason to confine the labour of care (for the resultant baby) to a private nuclear household for the best part of twenty years? Sophie Lewis will showcase how critical utopians, radical artists and transfeminists have imagined the future of maternal care.◆《Children's Liberation: Autonomy and Control》
“This course is an exploration of theory and politics of children’s liberation. What, we will ask, is the difference between children’s rights and children’s liberation? What might children today want to liberate themselves from? And when and why, historically, did feminists and queer people want to “liberate children”? We will begin with a study of the material histories of transgender childhood since the nineteenth century, denaturalizing the modern ideal of the fertile, cissexual Child.”
“【Caption】Koru Kids is one of many digital platforms positioning themselves as ‘technofixes’ to costly and oversubscribed providers”◇Casey, Cherry, 2022, "The UK Has a Forced Adoption Problem", Prospect, October 22, 2022, (https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society-and-culture/the-uk-has-a-forced-adoption-problem).
“【Caption】Parents should be supported to keep their kids, to free thousands from the trauma of separation”◇France, Miranda, 2022, "When Does the Guilt Start?: Rethinking the Institution of Motherhood", TLS, September 16, 2022, (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/marianne-levy-eliane-glaser-ingrid-wassenaar-julie-phillips-guadalupe-nettel-sophie-lewis-motherhood-book-review-miranda-france/).
“【Exordium】“The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty”, wrote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976). For many women guilt is so much a part of mothering that, even if there is no immediate reason for it, one can quickly be found without looking further than the laundry basket or our children’s smartphones.”◇Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 2022, "How Can We Organize in Ways That Challenge Boundaries and Defy Exclusion?", Truthout, May 31, 2022, (https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-we-organize-in-ways-that-challenge-boundaries-and-defy-exclusion/).
“How do social movements convince people to identify with and take part in political struggle beyond a particular group or narrow economic interest? In this excerpt from Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, author Ruth Wilson Gilmore looks at how movements produced innovative answers to this question by taking their efforts across the boundaries of labor and community organizing, paid and unwaged labor, and the private and public spheres. Gilmore also theorizes the organizing practices of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), a Los Angeles-based grassroots organization started in 1992 by mothers who fought against the intensified criminalization of their children under the regime of mass incarceration.”◇Rosenberg, Alyssa, 2022, "Breastfeeding Isn't 'Free.' Here's What It Cost Me", Washington Post, May 31, 2022, (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2022/breastfeeding-cost-time-money/).
“【Exordium】What’s the least helpful advice for a parent desperate to find scarce baby formula? “TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.” “God literally designed mothers to feed their babies.” This is cruel to any parent who can’t make the milk their child needs. And it’s not true.”◇Cope, Suzanne, 2022, "Breakfast with the Panthers", Aeon Essays, May 10, 2022, (https://aeon.co/essays/the-black-panthers-fed-more-hungry-kids-than-the-state-of-california).
“【Caption】It wasn’t all young men and guns: the Black Panther Party’s programs fed more hungry kids than the state of California”/“The historian Françoise N Hamlin of Brown University has used the term ‘activist mothering’ to help understand both the work that the women Panthers were doing ― and as a reason why their leadership and accomplishments have escaped due recognition.”/“The Panther women took on leadership roles in realms where they exert authority and expertise, and continued to expand the scope and influence of their work and voice within their community and beyond. But women doing ‘women’s work’ was often taken for granted, and its legacies went uncelebrated.”◇Butler, Patrick, 2022, "Two-child policy hasn’t made UK families smaller, only poorer, finds report", Guardian, April 6, 2022, (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/06/two-child-policy-hasnt-made-families-smaller-only-poorer-finds-report).
“【Caption】Exclusive: research shows benefits cut has barely changed fertility rates and pushed thousands of British families deeper into poverty”◇Lewis, Sophie, 2021, "The Family Lottery", Dissent Magazine, Summer 2021, (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-family-lottery).
“Family abolitionism puts children’s freedom at the heart of society.”◇Lane-McKinley, Madeline, 2018, "The Idea of Children", Blind Field, August 2, 2018, (https://blindfieldjournal.com/2018/08/02/the-idea-of-children/).
“【Exordium】So frequently we have seen the figure of the child deployed to moralize what should be political. Family values campaigns. Pro-life propaganda. Today, this moralization is what distinguishes the rhetoric of families belong together from the insistence that no human should be caged.|In extracting “the family” as the ideological backbone of mass resistance to ICE, however, many questions are in danger of evaporating into moralistic rhetorics. For liberals and conservatives alike, the idea of children is a political instrument to which various radical traditions have developed a healthy aversion. Yet as a result, there is a scarcity of anti-capitalist thought about children.”
“感染症への確かな基礎知識、社会変化に対してパニックにならないメンタルケア、科学技術への反省、暮らしや教育や豊かさへの価値観の見直し……
昭和から平成時代の子育てや教育、医療現場で、発言を続けてきた筆者らが緊急提言。
ウイルスや細菌との共生、競争や孤立からの連帯を学ぶことに、未来は開かれていく。”