Death to the Family!
The road to resisting Ashkenormativity is paved with radical yassnass
It’s Passover and I am holding space for the freedom fighters at Columbia University as they maintain a zone safe from Zionist pigs, which definitely isn’t an antisemitic trope inspired by the Soviets. Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and other folx joined the vulnerably gathered to rally around the blesséd cause of jihad and let the night skies sing with synonyms for Death to Israel and Death to America. A diversity of poetic intentionalities included “We are all Hamas, bitches,” “Go back to Poland,” as well as the promise that 10/7 will happen 10,000 more times and a repeat-after-me scenario in which the crowd pushed a Zionist in their midst “out of the camp”. A solitary person might seem insignificant against a crowd of 200 but one can’t be too cautious where safety is concerned. Somewhere nearby a mystery blonde boldly covered her face in a keffiyah as she pointed her “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets” sign at a group of maskless cowards holding Israeli and American flags.
Eyes were already on Columbia with last week’s Congressional hearing on antisemitism. Because America is Satan, they let yet another Republican subject the latest Ivy League president to hate speech when he asked Minouche Shafik why the word “Ashkenormativity” appears in the School for Social Work’s orientation packet. He then aggressed her with the “definition” listed in its glossary, as if he’d never heard NPR CEO Katherine Maher proclaim how truth is relative since feelings are in fact facts. Even though everyone knows Ashkenormativity is as insidiously omnipresent as white supremacy, the Indiana Congressman read how it’s “a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe.”
I hate how Ashkenormativists do this, especially during Pesach, oppressing us with their narratives of oppression. And I was disappointed that Minouche failed to direct the committee’s attention to the last four letters in Ashkenazi. So although that orientation packet sounds promising, the whole hearing was a lot of disinformation. And what’s the point if no one lights themselves on fire?
One overlooked aspect of Ashkenormativity is the Zionist emphasis on family. In the Passover Seder, for instance, cis parents force kids to sing and ask questions, a power dynamic that entrenches their authority over them and indoctrinates them into believing it was a good thing that Pharaoh finally let the people go. Aside from Exodus being the story of Africa’s oldest encounter with whiteness, the Q&A for kids contains systemic violence that marginalizes queer children: God commands them to follow laws, his mighty hand brings them out of Egypt, and a so-called joke about the “wicked” child being irredeemable enacts literal psychological genocide on them. This is all because ancient Zionist parents wanted their kids to succeed and not starve or ever be slaves again. In other words, they were too hard-hearted to participate in the collective socialist construction of the pyramids, so they invented capitalism. To this day these parents venerate a prophet who was as bad as Columbus while demanding that their kids perpetuate wage-based labor and the acquisition of private property.
Globalizing the Intifada is the only way to end Islamophobia and dismantle Ashkenormativity, but we mustn’t miss the opportunity some of our most esteemed colleagues have prioritized for us. I’m talking about Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022). I haven’t read it but became an authority on the subject after viewing a TikTok breakdown of its themes. This radical learning practice can be more nuanced than infographics or memes. A specialist in ableism and so much more, Adjunct Instructor Mich/elle Ciurria uploaded “’Tis the Season to Abolish the Family” nine radical days after Christmas. She/they (previously also he) self-identifies as a queer disabled ecofeminist and immigrant precariat killjoy, which hopefully cancels out the white woman they was assigned at birth.
Abolish the family is a sentiment they’s sure a lot of people can relate to due to its long history in feminist philosophy, queer theory, and decolonial thought. “No one else is more likely to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate… or inflict unwanted touch than family,” nkay? They’re the main source of inequality because they “create the infrastructure for capitalism”, exploit people of color, disown queer children, and are, like, the worst caretakers. This last flaw is cuz they don’t always have the time or desire to give a shit. The family should therefore not be the central organizing principle for society. The labor of making humans should instead be shared by all of us, but only if we get paid for it.
Mother, in Lewis’s view, should no longer be “a natural category, but instead something we choose.” Looking after the people who raised you when they’re old should be a choice, not an obligation. Mich may hate choice feminism but knows children should be groomed to be fierce-assed change-agents, not productive, happy members of a free society. Parents only get in way and, if you ask me, should be unalived whenever possible.
No one knew this better than the master of yassnass, Chairman Mao. I dream of the day our drag sisters can read a storybook version of the Great Leap Forward so kids can see how empowering it was to inform on their parents and go to work in the countryside. O, that they could form a new Red Rainbow Guard to murder their teachers who don’t stick to the correct curriculum. Fail to liberate them from the bondage of the elders who spawned them and they’ll just end up slaves to tradition. If history has taught us anything it’s that thirty million dead would be a small price to pay if they can choose queer sexual nirvana over oppressive “civilized” work.
I can hear the Ashkenormativists screaming from the alt-right podcasts, quoting conservatives like the late Roger Scruton:
[But] children are thirty-three times more likely to suffer serious abuse and seventy-three more times to suffer fatal abuse in the home of a mother with a live-in boyfriend or stepfather than in an intact family. Fathers instinctively protect their children. Boyfriends, for whom another man’s child is a rival, instinctively attack them.[1]
This is precisely the kind of content that needs to be removed from Wikipedia and dangerous physical libraries because it’s what experts call a nothing-burger. Note that they are still talking about stepparents and colluding in the facilitation of the erasure of polyamorous relationships by employing exclusionary terms like boyfriend.
I mean, sometimes family can be useful, like when your dad covers your legal fees so you don’t get sentenced for killing an elderly couple in a car crash. Without this kind of assistance, those lovely “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets” signs might have been but a dream. Also, Ilhan Omar’s daughter ended up homeless after being evicted from the Columbia encampment, but having a mom like that is what got her interviews with MSNBC and Teen Vogue. And if that hadn’t happened, we would never have learned that Liquid Ass counts as a chemical weapon.
But aside from such isolated instances, we need to center the lived experiences of folx who went no-contact and never looked back. Thankfully my own immediate family self-abolished by all dying when I was 23 and 33, and the global queer siblinghood gives me so much more choice. Dependable AF and elevating their subjectivity over anyone else’s, they are a total rock of trauma-based yassnass.
We the folx community stand in solidarity with all those who seek to liberate themselves through any forms of resistance necessary from Ashkenormativity, able-bodied white feminists, cis Zionists, any blood relations who are not people of color, and all uneducated specimens of white rural rage. We demand what we demand. We will never compromise or let you into our encampments. Our parents paid for them when they radically paid our tuition and we renounce them! I haven’t been in college or graduate school for well over a decade but the young martyr’s struggle is my struggle. And perpetual adolescents’ rights are human rights.
[1] Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope (London, 2010), p. 173; Roger Whelan, Broken Homes & Battered Children: A study of the relationships between child abuse and family type (Oxford, 1994).
As a 100% Ashkie, I thank you for your fury, sarcasm, and sorrow. That's all I can think of to say.
"And what’s the point if no one lights themselves on fire?" Molotovs and matches for everyone!