A radical feminist politics of kinship asks us to interrogate the roots of how we live together: how we form families, share resources, and imagine belonging. At stake, says Víctor Hugo Ramírez García is not only gender equality, but the future of democracy itself

Across the globe, we face intertwined crises: climate breakdown, housing precarity, and authoritarian resurgence. These crises expose a fundamental tension at the heart of liberal democracies: we celebrate individual autonomy while relying on deeply unequal systems of care. Far-right actors often target these systems to strengthen the patriarchy.

A feminist rethinking of kinship invites us to confront this contradiction — legally, economically, and politically. 

Rethinking the legal order: expanding kinship beyond family 

Over recent decades, feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTIQ+ struggles have achieved major legal victories, such as marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws. These gains demonstrate that law is a powerful instrument of transformation. But recognition alone does not dismantle structural inequalities. If feminism is to remain radical, it must push further by questioning the family model itself. 

Western liberal societies are built around a narrow legal definition of kinship centred on biological ties, conjugal couples, and inheritance. This model is historically contingent. Colonial expansion suppressed many communal and non-monogamous kinship systems across Africa, Asia and the Americas in favour of the bourgeois, property-based family. Yet the ecological crisis forces us to rethink relationships not only among ourselves, but with the more-than-human world.  

If feminism is to remain radical, it must push further by questioning the family model itself, recognising forms of chosen kinship beyond blood or marriage

Feminist thinkers have long emphasised interdependence among bodies and species. Expanding legal imagination could mean recognising forms of chosen kinship beyond blood or marriage, facilitating lateral adoption practices, and even granting rights to ecosystems or non-human beings. If democracy widens the circle of recognition, a radical feminist legal project asks: who counts as kin? Who counts as worthy of care? And why is property — rather than shared responsibility — the organising principle of family law? 

The economic order: family, property, and the crisis of care

Kinship is not only emotional or symbolic, but material. Housing crises now affect virtually every major city, particularly in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. The crisis affects students and low-income workers, while empty properties coexist with overcrowded apartments. The contradiction is stark. The family sits at the centre of this paradox. On the one hand, neoliberal ideology celebrates self-sufficient individuals. On the other, families function as small collectivities: pooling resources, sharing risks, and providing care without formal contracts. Within the family, solidarity is expected; outside it, competition reigns. 

This dual logic produces profound inequalities. Family membership determines access to care, emotional support and inheritance. These benefits are distributed not according to need, but according to belonging. Feminists have long exposed how this system binds women and marginalised people to compulsory love and unpaid care. At the same time, neoliberalism pressures individuals to become entrepreneurial selves, responsible only for their own survival. The result is the consolidation of societies relying on intense, privatised solidarity within families, alongside the gradual eroding of public infrastructures of care — exemplified by the neoliberal imperative to defund public health and education systems. We are told to be autonomous, yet we survive through dependency. 

Radical feminism suggests democratic corrections to an economic order that privatises care and socialises risk, such as shared housing among friends and extending social and health rights to non-romantic relations

A radical feminist response denaturalises this arrangement: love and care should not be coercive obligations attached to blood ties. Nor should solidarity be confined to the private sphere. Policies could encourage shared housing among friends, extend social and health rights to chosen, non-romantic relations, create intergenerational childcare structures, and design fiscal mechanisms that reward collective living rather than marital status or procreation. Such measures are not utopian fantasies; they are democratic corrections to an economic order that privatises care and socialises risk. They acknowledge a simple truth: humans and all species are interdependent.

The political order: from identity to democratic solidarity 

Authoritarian populisms call for retreat: into the nation, the 'traditional' family, fixed identities. These movements promise security through exclusion. Yet the crises we face are largely transnational. No nation-state, no isolated family can shield itself from systemic instability. Survival in the coming decades will depend not on closing ranks, but on building forms of cooperation across differences. 

Here, friendship becomes politically significant. Unlike family ties, friendships are elective. They do not assume automatic inheritance, compulsory loyalty, or reproduction of social origin. And yet, at their best, they generate care, shared resources, and commitment. Democratic life already relies on such non-biological ties. Schools, workplaces, civic associations, and social movements are spaces where we practice solidarity beyond bloodlines. Feminist thought has highlighted the transformative potential of these chosen bonds. Friendship disrupts hierarchies of gender and generation embedded in traditional kinship. It allows diversity, convergence and sisterhood. 

A radical democratic politics of kinship takes friendship seriously as a model: not replacing families, but decentring them. It would foster solidarities that are not based on sameness — of nation, race, or lineage — but on shared vulnerability and collective responsibility. In this sense, feminism and democracy converge. Both insist that democratic freedom is negotiated interdependence.

Democratic interdependence will be feminist 

The liberal myth of the fully autonomous individual obscures the infrastructures of care that sustain life. Our current model — centred on the privatised, property-based nuclear family — is neither natural nor sustainable. Future generations’ material conditions will demand deeper forms of sharing, not narrower forms of belonging.

A radical feminist theory of kinship prepares us for that reality. Its radicality lies in a powerful everyday transformation: recognising chosen families; redistributing care beyond women’s unpaid labour; extending rights to those we elect as kin; challenging property as the core of social organisation; reimagining fiscal and welfare systems to support collective living. It also lies in questioning anthropocentric hierarchies and embracing relationality with the living world.

If we continue to confine solidarity within the walls of the nuclear family while celebrating competitive individualism outside it, democracy will erode

Democracy is about how we organise life together. If we continue to confine solidarity within the walls of the nuclear family while celebrating competitive individualism outside it, democracy will erode. A feminist reconfiguration of kinship offers another path: conscious interdependence, reciprocal care, and solidaristic sharing. It embraces the construction of relational forms that make equality liveable.

No.37 in a Loop series on 🌈 Gendering Democracy