Solidarity With Children : An Essay Against Adult Supremacy

For readers of Sophie Lewis's Abolish the Family and Jacqueline Rose's Mothers, a provocative series of essays on child liberation as a utopian project, one that helps us imagine a better future for us all.

We live in a world that is profoundly against children, from the genocide in Palestine to the fascist targeting of trans children to the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children's futures are by no means assured.

What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future and recognizes what children have to teach us. Through probing essays, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood, showing how the the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire; disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving and traces the tradition of revolutionary mothering; critiques the parents' rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools; and considers how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family. Along the way, Lane-McKinley offers a revolutionary feminist case for child liberation.

Elegantly written and provocative, Solidarity with Children is a book for anyone who cares about children and the necessity of building insurgent, collective forms of care.