Sophie Lewis: Abolish the Family to realize its promise?
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('MMM') }}
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('YYYY') }}
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Belongs to: Care or Chaos? |
This public lecture offers an honest confrontation with a topic that affects us all: the family. Author Sophie Lewis shows that while the family can be a place of love and care, it is also often shaped by overwhelm, inequality, and pain. That’s why, throughout history, many different models of living and reproducing together have emerged.
Lewis asks – particularly in the context of care work: why do we assume that only the family should be responsible for caregiving? And what if we imagined other ways of living together – more just, more solidaristic, more open to all?
“The family is a limited and limiting technology,” says Lewis. With examples from history, philosophy, and queer and feminist movements, the lecture explores how people have long sought alternatives to the traditional family. The aim is not so much to “abolish” the family, but to rethink how we live together. To do so, Lewis introduces the concept of “familying” – beyond fixed roles and constraints.
In her essay Doing, not Being, Family, published in the exhibition catalogue Beziehungsweise Familie (Family Relations), she advocates for an active understanding of kinship.
A lecture for anyone interested in social issues, justice, and new ideas for how we live together. Open to all – no prior knowledge required.
Schedule
Introduction and moderation: Laura Goldenbaum, curator of Family Matters
Poetic intervention by Logan February, poet in residence at the Humboldt Forum, with a text which they wrote for the event.
brief talk between Sophie Lewis and Logan February
Participants
Dr Sophie Lewis is an independent scholar and writer based in Philadelphia. For the last five years, she has held a visiting affiliation at the University of Pennsylvania; before that, she studied English Literature, followed by a Masters in Environmental Policy, at Oxford University, and she received her PhD from the the University of Manchester following a Fulbright scholarship at the New School. Lewis is currently working on a book for Penguin: The Liberation of Children (forthcoming 2027) as well as an essay collection for Haymarket: Femmephilia (forthcoming 2026). She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019), Abolish the Family (Verso, 2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket, 2025). Lewis teaches short courses online for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and publishes essays everywhere from the London Review of Books to Hanser Verlag’s “Selber Schuld” anthology.
Logan February, born in 1999 in Anambra, Nigeria, is a non-binary poet, essayist, singer, songwriter, and LGBTQ activist. In addition to publications in literary journals, Logan has released three poetry collections—How to Cook a Ghost (2017), Painted Blue with Saltwater (2018), Garlands (2019)—and the poetry book In the Nude (2019), which have been partially translated into Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. In 2020, Logan February was awarded the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. In the spring of 2024, the anthology Mental Voodo was published in German, English, and Yoruba by Engler Verlag. In 2024, Logan February has been a fellow in the DAAD Berlin Artists Program and has performed in Berlin at the Afrolution Festival, the African Book Festival, the ILB, the Poetry Festival, and at the Literarisches Colloquium. 2025 he is poet in residence in the Humboldt Forum, funded by the Programm “Weltoffenes Berlin”.
Logan February is funded by the programme “Weltoffenes Berlin”.
