Kinships Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

Interviews

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

A conversation with author Dominic Pettman on how the phenomenon of ghosting is experienced in the modern age

March 26, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Dominic Pettman

Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence ...

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Kinships

Family Values or Family Exclusion?

How right-wing policies fail working mothers

January 22, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

Parental entitlement policies represent a complex interplay of cultural, social, and economic priorities for far-right leaders in both Italy and the United States. On the one hand, many religiously minded conservatives uphold traditional family values, which would seem to support policies that promote marriage and the growth of families. At ...

Interviews

Generations of Women in The Witches of El Paso

“The rules are going to be broken”

December 11, 2024 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa and Luis Jaramillo

In his debut novel, The Witches of El Paso (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024), Luis Jaramillo provides readers a sweeping multi-generational story about Nena, a woman living in World War II–era El Paso who begs for a new life and finds herself transported to colonial Mexico, where she ...

Kinships

The Witches of El Paso

An excerpt from a new novel on the supernatural power of family

December 11, 2024 • by Luis Jaramillo

On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso. Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, ...

Body & Mind

Driven Mad by a Marxist Daughter

Two billionaire fathers undergo a peculiar, public psychosis

March 25, 2024 • by Justin Joque

What defines Musk and Ackman’s psychosis is no longer their relation to their symbolic fathers, but their relation to that of their daughters’....

Kinships

Traumatized Heroes

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Kinships

Inheritance

Pregnant Girl: A story of teen motherhood, college, and creating a better future for young families

May 4, 2021 • by Nicole Lynn Lewis

_____ Honey. For a long time, that’s the only name I had for her, and it fit. Her voice, soothing like honey drizzling over a piece of warm buttered toast, came through the phone every few months. as if she was reading a book or singing a hymn, she chose each word carefully ...

Capitalism

The PMC Has Children

Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

April 8, 2021 • by Catherine Liu

_____ From the very moment of conception, which for professional managerial class (PMC) parents is always a “choice,” the future child and infant possesses “potential” that has to be both optimized and maximized. PMC mothers have to do prenatal yoga while setting up intrauterine Mozart streams on pregnant bellies. Preparing for ...

Kinships

Hilaria Baldwin’s Newest Baby Should Make Us All Happy

A fresh baby makes us understand how little we understand of other families

March 15, 2021 • by Amanda Katz

_____ In its infinite generative power, Twitter recently churned up an oddly enchanting term: the fresh baby. What is a fresh baby, you may ask? Well, a fresh baby is the baby you get when you already have a newish baby, say less than six months old, and then all of ...

Hilaria Baldwin’s Newest Baby Should Make Us All Happy

Disability

Who Is Disfigured by a Cleft Lip?

When happiness hinges on having a “normal” face, the many possibilities for human life are narrowed

November 10, 2020 • by Ella Hillström

When my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, she went to consult a cleft jaw and lip expert in London. She lay down on the examining table, lifted her legs up and peered at the doctor as he glared at the black and white image. She had done these ...