The current authoritarian shift is accompanied by the far-right mobilization of the nuclear family and the establishment of a ‘natural gender order’ in the home. They manifest in the reorganization and fascisation of social reproduction, the propagation of ‘traditional’ divisions of labor (#tradwives), and in the alleged protection of the family from sex education, gender affirmative health care, or queerness, which contribute to the moral trans panic. Queer feminist research on this phenomenon highlights how such moral panic is driven by social psychological dimensions, such as the fear of gender, and how right-wing forces are instrumentalizing the family to reproduce the nation. We base our theoretical considerations instead on queer-feminist materialist state theory and ask what role the family has for the authoritarian state, how it is mobilized by it, and what this means for feminist counter-strategies between the abolition and expansion of the family. We specifically draw our theoretical paper on a queer-feminist rereading of Louis Althusser’s concept of the family as the ideological state apparatus and on Nicos Poulantzas’ work on authoritarian statism. We suggest that the mobilization of the family is key to understanding the authoritarian restructurings of society and gender. The paper finally draws on Poulantzas’s reflection on democratic socialism to develop feminist-democratic strategies beyond the state that foster resilience and hope.
