The demonic cult at the centre of Ari Aster’s Hereditary had one goal: weaken the spirit of a male host so King Paimon, one of the rulers of hell, could possess his body. They land on 16-year-old Peter Graham, violently killing his family members in the process. Far before these gruesome sacrifices, due to unresolved trauma, the family was held together with little more than scotch tape and a prayer. Watching the film, the question plagued me: Where are the Grahams’ extended families, neighbours or friends?
Sure, this is an occult psychological horror, not necessarily a perfect representation of the modern family, but it is also a family drama, one with a familiar central problem. You could ask a similar question while watching Rue’s mother and sister as they grapple with her addiction in Euphoria. In recent years, TV shows and movies have interrogated the pitfalls of the nuclear family, especially when it comes to dealing with grief. Whereas feel-good sitcoms of the past placed the nuclear family on a pedestal and gave people something to emulate, contemporary shows reveal how attempting to maintain this veneer of perfection leads to shame and isolation, often manifesting in fissured trust and festering dysfunction.
Nuclear families, conceptually, have been around for thousands of years, but the term only rose to prominence in 50s America, as a response to the horrors of the Great Depression and the devastating succession of the World Wars. At this time, the family was understandably a “haven in a heartless world”. Though the ideal familial unit showcased white suburban families, Black families and other families of colour also sought refuge from racism and xenophobia within their own families. Around the 70s, conservative propaganda doubled down on the preservation of what they called “family values”. First mentioned in the 1976 Republican Party Platform, a commitment to protect the nuclear family from government overreach morphed into an exclusionary dog whistle.
For conservatives today, family values are reserved for those who uphold white cis-heteropatriarchy. This is why they have no problem separating families at the Mexico-US border, kidnapping trans kids from their supportive families, and supporting a welfare system that systematically destroys Black families. Not even children within these “acceptable” families are safe. Under the nuclear family structure, parents exact absolute control over their children’s lives. Exile is a real fear for many kids. Since western etiquette frowns upon meddling in the affairs of another person’s household, parents can weaponise alienation, homelessness and foster care to get children to obey them. It is required, legally, for a parental figure to sign off on their kid’s transition until they are 18. So, if a kid has a transphobic parent, they are simply out of luck and probably out of a family.
If this past decade has shown us anything it’s that it’s a sunk-cost fallacy to point out the hypocrisy of conservatives. However, there is irony in conservatives fear-mongering about the loss of family values due to the “queer agenda” while exiling their queer children. With nowhere to go, these homeless children form their own unconventional familial units. “I’ve had kids come to me and latch hold to me like I’m their mother or like I’m their father because they can talk to me” drag queen Pepper LaBeija explains in the seminal 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. Over three decades later, the Emmy award-winning show Pose portrayed these unconventional but highly supportive familial formations.
In 2014, research suggested that the nuclear family just wasn’t enticing many Americans like it used to. People were now living longer, getting married later and often couldn’t afford to buy homes of their own. Then the pandemic came along, separating families even further via social distance and death. In the Wired article “Live Wrong and Prosper: Covid-19 and the Future of Families”, Laurie Penny explores how the pandemic forced us to confront how few safety nets there are, especially for single people and those untethered to a solid familial unit. The typically self-sufficient had to rely on government assistance when their jobs were made redundant. However, with mutual aid programs sponsored by every day citizens, communal bonds outside of the traditional family were formed and strengthened, especially among queer people. Collectives like For The Gworls and The Okra Project continue to provide resources through crowdfunding.
In spite of these recent cultural examples though, it should be noted that critiques of the nuclear family are not new. Around the late 19th and early 20th century, feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman posited that “feminist apartment hotels” would ease the burden that women faced in the domestic sphere. As portrayed in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, housewives were developing neurasthenia as a result of their relegation to household chores and child care. If Charlotte had her way, these utopia homes would function like boarding houses, equipped with communal kitchens, professional childcare and in-home teachers to ease the burden of working-class mothers. Her blueprint looks a lot like the mommune of interdependent single mothers that went viral on TikTok last year. Architectural Record called her plans “the most dangerous enemy American domesticity has yet had to encounter” in 1903, but today many share her once controversial sentiments.
Amongst them is psychotherapist, educator and intellectual M.E. O’Brien. A multitude of factors drew M.E. to theorise about the merits and history of family abolitionism, but the three and a half years she spent as a coordinator for the New York City Trans Oral History Project — an online archive of about 200 interviews with trans New Yorkers — is most notable. “[The project] revealed all the different ways of caring for each other people found to survive during the very difficult conditions of sex work and poverty,” she says. “Around the United States, people developed systems of chosen family, you know, the ballroom scene amongst working-class Black and Latina trans women in New York.”
To M.E., family abolition entails us to “take seriously that there are so many different ways that people care for each other and begin to think about what kind of changes could foster and enable that support, especially for the freedom and wellbeing for trans people.” In her upcoming book Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, she makes a case for a restructured society devoid of racial capitalism while also detailing the rich history of anti-colonial movements that laid the foundation for her theories.
Decentering the nuclear family mindset is important now more than ever. A 2021 study found that “the more individualistic (vs. collectivistic) a country was, the more COVID-19 cases and mortalities it had”. Researchers reasoned that in collectivist societies, inhabitants thought about the needs and safety beyond their immediate families. The word collectivism triggers an association with communism for many wary of its history, but we’re already seeing the shared principles of communes emerge in the proliferation of co-ops, WeWork’s WeLive co-living apartments and luxury high-rise shared spaces.
These options shouldn’t just be reserved for the wealthy. While state-funded community centres and libraries provide gathering places, they are often underfunded and are not enticing for teens and young adults who want spontaneous and unmonitored interactions. At one point in a person’s life, whether it be due to illness, loss of familial members, disability, old age, poverty or youth, they will be a vulnerable member of society. Callous bureaucracies and toxic individualism won’t be there as durable safety nets; sometimes, your immediate family won’t either. Previous strangers you’ve built meaningful relationships with will.