Almost simultaneous with the Indian boarding schools is the history of allotments. The U. S. seized and redistributed reservation land, allocating it to male dominated nuclear families of Indigenous people. This was an active effort at destroying the more collective, expansive governance and relationship to land that characterized indigenous life; to break the political power of the reservations; and to force Indigenous families into a property relation based on individual family ownership of land in order to allow for selling to white people, for the breakdown of the collective life of Indigenous societies.

The Best of 2023 continues! M.E. O’Brien joins us in Hell to discuss her new book Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care published by Pluto Press.

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Guest

M.E. O'Brien

@genderhorizon

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Her writing has been published by Work, Employment and Society, Social Movement Studies, Endnotes, Homintern, Commune, and Invert.

Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements.

Best of 2023: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O'Brien

M.E. O'Brien

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O’Brien