Kathi Weeks’ New Book “Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures” Rethinks Feminism at the Root

What if feminism aimed not just to reform broken systems, but to abolish them?  In her new book, “Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures,”  Kathi Weeks invites readers to think about the future by looking into three feminist texts from the past. 

The professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers — Angela Y. Davis, Shulamith Firestone and Donna Haraway — to ask how their visions of work, the family and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s capacity for structural analysis and political imagination.

Though rarely read together, Weeks argues that these Marxist feminist writers are united by a shared abolitionist orientation: a refusal to accept capitalist social institutions as inevitable and a willingness to imagine their transformation at the root. 

An American Marxist feminist scholar and anti-work theorist, Weeks is widely known for authoring “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries” (2011), a landmark text that challenged the assumption that work is inherently a social good and argued for post-work imaginaries and universal basic income. In “Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures,” Weeks extends her argument, offering a powerful case for abolition as both a method of critique and a horizon for feminist politics. 

“Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures,” is set to release on March 24 from Duke University Press. We caught up with Weeks to learn more about it. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Your book “Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures” returns to feminist writing from the 1970s but insists it speaks to the future. How do these texts help us imagine a future that we struggle to envision today? 

At one level, “Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures” contributes to a broader feminist project of revisiting and rethinking writings from the 1970s, when U.S. feminist theory first took shape alongside the women’s liberation movements. For a long time, that period was remembered primarily for its overgeneralizations about gender and its failures to attend to race, class, sexuality and nation — rather than as a rich archive for contemporary feminist thought. 

I have always been drawn to radical and Marxist feminist texts from that era and have often returned to them for insight. As in my previous books, I take a specific strand of 1970s Marxist feminism and refashion it to speak to the present and possible futures. Here, I focus on Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex,” Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” and Angela Y. Davis’s prison abolitionist writing from 1971 to 2024. From this small archive, I develop an abolitionist method and a feminist political agenda aimed at critically rethinking three institutions: work, the family, and the prison. 

Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone and Donna Haraway are three feminist thinkers often taught in separate traditions. Why bring them together, and what does that pairing reveal? 

I have long admired these texts, and, because I’m invested in the past, present, and future of Marxist feminist theory, I wanted to think about what they offer when read as part of that tradition. Seeing them together helps highlight their shared concerns and clarifies what each text makes possible for feminist theory today. 

All three can also be read as manifestos — one of my favorite genres — which makes their juxtaposition especially productive. Read together, they amplify key themes and refract one another in illuminating ways. Most importantly, they share a commitment to analyzing feminism at the level of political economy, insisting that we cannot understand or challenge gender hierarchy without confronting capitalism itself. 

The word “abolition” can provoke strong reactions. What does abolition mean in this book, and how does it differ from reform?

I take the concept of abolition primarily from prison abolitionism, especially the work of Angela Y. Davis. Prison abolitionists argue that reforming prisons — tinkering around the edges —cannot address the fundamental violence of the system or the social conditions that sustain it. To call for abolition, whether of prisons or families, is to argue that the problem lies in the structure itself, not in its mismanagement. 

Abolition also names a distinctive method of critique. It is structural, in that it situates institutions like prisons within broader complexes of social relations, and utopian, in that it imagines change over a long temporal horizon. An abolitionist politics is willing to “play the long game,” seeking to transform the society that produces and relies on these institutions in the first place. 

Much contemporary politics emphasizes individual choice and personal responsibility. Why do you argue that feminism needs to focus more on structures? 

A central claim of the book is that feminist politics must scale up to the level of social structures. If we want to challenge the organization of waged and unwaged work, the privatized family, or the prison system, we need to understand them as interconnected systems of institutions and ideologies, not as the result of individual failures or bad actors. 

Structures are transindividual — no single person creates or controls them. Politics, as I understand it, is therefore a collective effort to change the rules of the game. Yet we are often more comfortable thinking at the level of individuals than systems. It’s easier to critique a particular job than the wage system as a mechanism of income distribution, or to discuss a specific family than the family as a privatized system of care. Part of the book’s polemic is to identify these limits and to argue for the importance — and possibility — of structural thinking in feminist politics.