Possessive Familialism: Roots of a Neoliberal Figure

Despite radical polarization in democracies of the U.S. and Europe, we seem to agree on one thing: the importance of family. “Family” animates everything from immigration debates (“chain migration” and “family separation”) to health insurance, to tax policy. But what counts as family, who gets to form families, the roles inside families, and how, if at all, government should support families are all major points of disagreement. Even so, consensus on the primacy of family and the importance of the family to public policy remain as undeniable as it is remarkable. This celebration of the family would seem to conflict with the core ethos of the neoliberal political rationality that has dominated Western democracies for the last fifty years. Unified by a logic that privileges global markets and market values and casts the world populated by self-investing individuals whose fortunes are determined by choice rather than by structures of class, race, gender, or national history, neoliberal politics operates on the fuel of a grand ruse: that such a world is possible and desirable. This logic – that underlies and, in surprising ways, unifies the partisan divides of contemporary politics – proclaims freedom and equality, its basic commitments, and yet fuels conditions of precarity, structural inequality, and democratic crisis. Such a philosophy denies the responsibilities of care and relationships of love associated with “family.” Our answer to this paradox is what we call “possessive familialism,” a conception of the family defined by property ownership and isolated care relationships. Policy responses to the COVID 19 pandemic and its impact on those upon whose shoulders social reproductive labor actually fell, as well as right-wing family policies that emerged out of it, ranging from book banning to economic incentives for stay-at-home-mothers to further reproduce. We consider both the history of the family to see how its current incarnation develops logically out of a long trajectory of capitalist and colonialist appropriation and exploitation, and what kinds of policy choices are needed to address this imbalance.