A review by garberdog
The Anti-Social Family by Mary McIntosh, Michele Barrett
4.0
Very dated, but still contains many interesting insights.
What I find particularly valuable is the emphasis on how “the family” meets real needs for which there remain few to no viable alternatives and how the emphasis should be on collective, communal, and democratic solutions and not just “diverse households.” This strand of socialist feminist critique, that focuses on the collective meeting of human needs, seems to have gotten almost completely lost in contemporary queer critiques of marriage. These latter are typically more concerned with “domesticity” and “heteronormativity,” where these are primarily critiqued for their implied sexual conservatism and on aesthetic grounds rather than for the material race, class, and gender inequalities they entrenched and the distorted forms of social life they undergird.
What I find particularly valuable is the emphasis on how “the family” meets real needs for which there remain few to no viable alternatives and how the emphasis should be on collective, communal, and democratic solutions and not just “diverse households.” This strand of socialist feminist critique, that focuses on the collective meeting of human needs, seems to have gotten almost completely lost in contemporary queer critiques of marriage. These latter are typically more concerned with “domesticity” and “heteronormativity,” where these are primarily critiqued for their implied sexual conservatism and on aesthetic grounds rather than for the material race, class, and gender inequalities they entrenched and the distorted forms of social life they undergird.