through nurturing children, or replenishing the labor of their partners through the maintenance of the home and the bare necessities, housewives conduct the work that is often invisible, but necessary for the continued and intensive looting of labor by the capitalist.
The emphasis and dogged maintenance of the heterosexual nuclear family is a product of capitalism. All who violate it are criminalized. To the extent that women and queers challenge the eternity of this heteronormative institution, we are not wanted.
Queer Families
The heterosexual nuclear family ensures that the responsibility for reproductive labor can be contained within the household, stripping the state, or the capitalist bosses of any responsibility for maintaining their workers’ health, sanity, desires. Besides being an institution that replaces society in meeting the material needs of workers, the heterosexual nuclear family also serves other emotive purposes.
As John d’Emilio describes, the nuclear family under capitalism is supposed to function as an affective site, a “personal space” that is an escape from the stresses of public work life, that helps workers to deal with the alienation they experience on a day to day basis. We are taught to believe that even though works sucks during the day, at least you have your cozy family to return to. The fact that many blood families are actually dysfunctional, patriarchal, homophobic, or damaging to our self esteems, in large part also a product of the stresses of daily living under capitalism, is besides the point. We are often told that it is something to be tolerated since it is the only imagined site of reliability and comfort that we can count on in a dog eat dog world. We are taught from young that aside from blood, other relations are tested and many don’t survive. The reality is, every relationship is tested and stressed under capitalism and we cannot escape the alienation in a definitive manner, nuclear family or not, without struggle.
Queer liberation is deeply tied to the existence of non-heteronormative families as legitimate families with access to social services, jobs, education, shelter and support. These families go beyond gay marriage even though the latter could arguably serve as a useful reform. Our need to encompass struggles for different families has to do with the fact that the possibility of total rejection and abandonment by our blood families and communities, a loss of financial and emotional support from them, has been a real fear for many of us. Some of us are pleasantly surprised by families that have accepted and loved us nonetheless, and yet more others have been brutally disappointed. Regardless, in light of theories that will continue to see our trangressions of heterosexual norms as a sign of individual mental instability, a community that affirms our desires and needs is all the more necessary. Chosen families, non-heteronormative families, are not merely luxuries, they are needed for our very real, daily survival.
Yet under capitalism, these families are illegitimate. Single mother households, or households with people with disabilities, or extended families with elderly and young