Their climate impacts are dependent on a conception of the nuclear family that necessitates anti queer violence and turns their impacts

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

In Melinda Cooper’s (2017) description of the economic histories that led to the current (over)reliance on familial solidarities and inherited status, she outlines how economists justified shifts from the welfare state to the family as the ultimate guarantor of economic security and care through moral arguments about ‘family values’ deployed to transfer responsibility. As Cooper demonstrates, contrary to the belief that neoliberalism affords individual self-sufficiency and liberation, vital to this economic order of privatized care are structures that marshal everyone, even queer people and people without children towards these “family style care relations” (Cooper, 2017, p. 213). Subjects are folded into this neoliberal rationality via abandonment of public good and interdependence. As Margaret Thatcher (1987) said, “there is no society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Subjects are folded into this rationality, which can be easily seen in the capture of numerous activists’ movements that fight for the right to be included in these narrow care relations rather than extend care relations outward. This economic structure blocks redistributive justice using the normative nuclear family as an incontestable tactic to naturalize the hoarding of energy and resources within ‘private’ spaces. Concomitantly, the expansion of consumer credit and cuts to public spending in health and education have forced many into precarious family-reliant forms of care, and sites of intergenerational debt accumulation. Thus, as Sasser asserts (2019), a complete unraveling of the family as a unit of welfare is essential to actualize Haraway’s slogan as a vision of multi-species justice. The 21st century is a time of expanding wastelands. Contaminated waters carrying PFAS into our bodies, deforestation leading to pandemics, and agricultural impacts from the decline of honeybees are clear illustrations of interconnectedness and the porousness of boundaries. Unfortunately, as more people shift into the “category of the discarded and destined for death” (HoSang & Lowndes, 2019), there are increased attempts to hold onto mythical ideals aimed at “keeping out the riffraff”— often unsubtly framed as borders from surrounding “color, chaos, and communism” (Ebron & Tsing, 2017, p. 667). Threats are perceived as outside the domestic while the truth is fit for a horror movie: ‘the calls are coming from inside the house.’ Even crusaders against racism too often frame it as a problem of someone else’s bias or an issue relegated to the past. Likewise, climate change is often framed as a technical/scientific issue of future threats. These modes that externalize threats place the problems outside the here and now, which enables people and institutions to deny complicity and avoid addressing the very problems they purport to solve. Nowhere is this displacement more evident than in ‘family values’ discourse. Positioned towards an enormous range of political projects, concerns that the family is falling apart are harnessed via a view of the family-in-perpetual-crisis, which gives energy to policies aiming “to inject new life into that unit, always at the expense of others” (Lewis, 2019; Meiners, 2016; Renfro, 2020). Perceptible in the plight to save the children, contemporary moral panics centered on family values and imagined child safety have led to guiding legislation on topics as far ranging as victims’ rights, adoption, abortion, gestational surrogacy, genetic testing, human trafficking, and pedophilia (Cohen, 1973; Jenkins, 1998; Lepore, 2018). Meanwhile, in the shadow of the family, actual threats to children’s health and safety fall behind as mothers are blamed and children abandoned. As Lee Edelman’s (2004) polemic against the politics of reproductive futurism argues, the imaged child, symbolic of futurity, can organize and administer an “apparently self-regulating economy of sentimentality” (p. 134). In this arrangement, protecting the child (that binds the nuclear family) symbolically stands-in for preserving the nation, the status quo, and a gendered and racial hierarchy tied to present social structures, including those that merge sexual alliance to decent to create a given order of genealogy (Balibar and Wallerstein, 2011). As a political project, multispecies kin making can get disregarded in the face of these future-oriented goals centered on this vision of “the child.” Looking for issues over there, it is easy to get caught up in the spectacle of disaster elsewhere, and to ignore the urgent need to turn our attention to the here and now. It’s hard to avoid the dynamism of spectacle that holds our attention away from the ongoing and the ordinary. The biogenetic family, reliant on the procreative child as the most legitimate form of kin making, and contemporary environmental crises are mutually constitutive. As Marilyn Strathern (2019) posits, while kinship is widely viewed as the inescapable outcome of “procreating couples having babies,” a primary strength in Haraway’s slogan lies in the possibility that new conceptions of kin might “dislodge babies from the center for reproduction” (p. 160). Population and family frameworks both mystify present conditions and reproductive orders, providing rationale for political projects to “secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same” (Edelman, 2004, p. 151). In response, Make Kin Not Babies solicits alternative kinships and alternative demographies that require halting the reproductive orders that legitimize and maintain the divisions of labor and regimes of accumulation that undergird the climate crisis.