Introduction

The Redefining Family project started when KRJC’s founder Khye Blue had the thought that “community is the opposite of capitalism.” One question they wanted to find answers to was “how has community contributed to multiply-marginalized people’s survival?” As Khye dove further into birthwork and began studying the system of Gender, they realized that all of our socialization begins in our families of origin. It’s the family unit that teaches us our first lessons about gender and reproductive labor, as well as care, connection, and isolation. Recognizing the power of the Family,* Khye wanted to study the nuclear family norm and the cultural and political landscape that reinforces it. In 2023, KRJC received a grant from SisterSong which enabled them to hire two research fellows, Marin Hart and Alanah Armstead, to write a literature review on the system of Family. 

The Redefining Family literature review, as well as two summaries, a reading list, and an accompanying zine, were released on February 3, 2025. The literature review gives a broad overview of the relationship between family structure and the development of capitalism from the pre-colonial era to the present in the so-called United States. It also looks at some non-nuclear ways to conceptualize kinship, as well as the creation of the nuclear family norm. In the lit review, we focus in particular on the ways Black and Indigenous families have been subjugated by family separation and surveillance from the beginning of colonization to the present. Finally, we consider what our society could look like without the private nuclear family as our primary vehicle for care, which can be encompassed in a concept called family abolition, among other terms. Family abolition describes a world in which everyone’s needs are met, regardless of the material realities of your family. Family abolition critiques the private nuclear Family as a product of a system based in property ownership, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In order to truly abolish the Family as the site of social reproduction, we would have to dramatically alter our economic system and create one in which care is universally accessible. 

After releasing the lit review, we spent several months sharing our work with our peers, presenting at conferences, and soliciting feedback from people who engaged with our work. We encountered confusion, resistance, and enthusiasm around the term ‘family abolition,’ which we’ve been wrestling with ourselves as an imperfect term to evoke the future of abundant, universal care we imagine. Although the term ‘family abolition’ places itself within a legacy of abolitionist thought, which we consider generative, the term often requires a lot of explanation to get folks on the same page. As scholar M.E. O’Brien speaks to in this collection, family abolition is a bit of a misnomer; in reality, we seek to abolish capitalism and the ways it impacts our households, relationships, and domestic lives. Other thinkers use terms like “radical care”* or “communal care”* to speak to the same vision—one where people’s loving relationships are intact, but people’s daily needs are not fulfilled by one or two people forced to exchange their labor for money to survive. Disability Justice practitioners coined the term “care webs” to describe one form of enacting this kind of communal care. A care web is a group of (often disabled) people who come together to help meet each other’s needs. We’ll use all of these terms—family abolition, radical care, communal/community care, and care webs in this anthology.

Another response we received after publishing the lit review was ‘ok, family abolition sounds great and all, but how do we actually do it?’ Although we can’t answer the question of how we will abolish capitalism, we did want to find and share some stories of how people are practicing communal care in the here and now. That is the goal of this anthology, to document some ways people are expanding care outside the Family as a way to practice new worlds. In the spirit of fractal theory,* we are interested in the relationship between people’s intimate care structures (who they live with or care for on a daily basis) and their wider community organizing work to answer some of our own questions about the role of our lifestyles and care practices in creating broader social change. We hope that witnessing stories of other people’s experiments with non-nuclear care and mutual aid opens up possibilities for readers of this anthology. Changing the world is, in part, a project of building our imaginations.

To gather these stories, we took a two-pronged approach: we asked for submissions of art and writing from our communities, and we interviewed interested folks with relevant lived experiences. From August 2025 through May 2026, we performed interviews with folks who are redefining family in some way. Our first interview was with M.E. O'Brien, scholar of gender freedom and communist theory and author of Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. O’Brien’s interview is an important grounding for this project, helping frame the concept of family abolition and how folks who are eager to enact it are perhaps misunderstanding its intentions. O’Brien also challenged our thinking on this topic and expanded our perspective. For that reason, we begin the collection with her interview and discuss the major points she made here.

The other interviews we held were with folks in our communities who are expanding care beyond the nuclear family in many different ways, from organizing a childcare collective to starting a mutual aid project to feed their neighbors. Scholar Premilla Nadasen’s “radical care” framework helped guide our thinking as we chose people to interview. In her book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism she defines radical care as: 

1) nonhierarchical, anti-capitalist, and collective
2) not performed to enable us to work (but because we deserve it)
3) acknowledges our interdependency (i.e. values mutuality)
4) and prefigures the world we want to live in. 

These characteristics were helpful guardrails, though not strictly defined requirements, as we moved through the interview process. 

We sought to present a diversity of voices in the project, though the limited number of interviews we performed means there are many identities not represented here. The anthology is a living document, meaning we will continue to update the anthology with additional interviews from people whose stories we believe could add beneficial nuance to this work. We hope to continue to expand the voices we platform to include more lived experiences from Indigenous organizers, elders, youth, and people in rural areas.

We interviewed people from the Pacific Northwest, South, and Northeast regions of the so-called United States. Most of our interviewees were city-dwellers, which means there is room to expand this collection with the stories of folks in rural areas and in the Midwest and Southwest. Two of our interviewees were white and everyone else we interviewed identified as Black. The people we interviewed came from a variety of backgrounds—Caribbean, Jamaican, Haitian, European, multiracial, and from across the African diaspora. Everyone we interviewed was queer and many identified as trans and/or gender-nonconforming. Some folks’ projects were super grassroots and some were more formal/institutionalized. We wanted to present a whole range of different communal care practices because there’s no one size fits all—every community needs something different, and we can learn something from every care project.

We have changed the names of anyone who wished to stay anonymous. For the interviewees who consented, the full transcript of their interviews will be available for you to read, because we believe that these folks’ stories are worth absorbing in their entirety. However, we also wanted to pull out some major themes from across the interviews to show the resonances between people’s stories, that way you can read about what’s interesting to you! So let’s go!

*We use the capital F Family to describe the institution of the family rather than people’s personal family forms.
*from Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023) by Premilla Nadasen
*from After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (2023) by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek
*from the “Fractals” chapter in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) by adrienne maree brown


The M.E. O’Brien interview

“People want family abolition to be about how to form a better polycule, but what it's actually about is communism.” - O’Brien

In this quote, O’Brien speaks to one of the core issues she’s seen with how the public engages with the concept of family abolition. From her perspective, reforming our individual families away from the nuclear model to more “alternative” forms, like polycules, chosen families, blended families, etc. may improve our lives or support the survival of queer, BIPOC, and migrant people in particular, but it isn’t enough to undo capitalism. In her view, we must go beyond forming alternative families to build “robust communities” where we have “collective practices of reproduction” and we build power towards both “autonomy and insurrection.” In other words, our efforts must move outward, beyond our intimate care structures, and into wider communities in order to affect broader societal change.

We agree with O’Brien that creating alternative families alone will not overturn our systems, but we believe that forming non-nuclear care structures sometimes allows us to prefigure the world we want to live in. Many folks we interviewed described a relationship between their intimate care structures and the collective care work they do. Folks’ personal care structures often served as laboratories or practice grounds for the relational skills needed for bigger community projects to succeed. Yes, our chosen/queer/alternative families still have to survive within a capitalist system and will always be limited by that structure as long as it exists, but as we learn from Black feminists, the personal is political. There is no easy way to separate people’s alternative, intimate care structures from their “political” work. However, in line with O’Brien, we affirm that the work we do to build alternative care structures must stretch beyond our households. Radical possibilities grow when our care encompasses more people, when we build structures that sustain more of us. It’s those collective care structures that hold us in moments of mass protest, occupations, and strikes, which are essential for revolutionary change.

O’Brien also emphasized that the nuclear family model was formed in response to commercial capitalism, not the other way around. Following that logic, O’Brien asserts that it isn’t deconstructing the Family that will cause the fall of capitalism—it’s the end of capitalism that will end the Family. Family abolition, therefore, is a post-capitalist theory, a vision of a world not structured around market relations which will allow our relationships to be truly free. The point of her book Family Abolition, she clarified, is not to lay out a step-by-step guide to overturn capitalism and abolish the Family, but to answer the question “in the revolutionary overcoming of racial capitalism, how are our intimate personal domestic lives transformed?” Her book presents a theory that ignites people’s imagination rather than answering the persistent question of how we will realize those visions.

We deeply value the ways that O’Brien’s work has expanded our perspective and sharpened our politic. Theory is essential for showing us what is possible and challenging us to think bigger. We also highly value real-world stories to show us how people are acting toward their visions. This anthology sits somewhere between theory and action, hoping to marry them together. We encourage you to read the full O’Brien interview to go deeper into her thoughts on family abolition and to read the other interviews to see collective care in action.