Solidarity with Children - by Madeline Lane-McKinley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A revolutionary feminist case for child liberation, a utopian project that helps us imagine ways to build insurgent, collective forms of care.

We live in a world that is profoundly against children--evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and 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. Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. She disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And she critiques the parents' rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family.

Elegantly written and provocative, Solidarity with Children is a book for anyone who cares about children and the struggle for a better world.

Review Quotes

Praise for Comedy Against Work

"Comedy can be a weapon, Madeline Lane-McKinley reminds us, in any hands, for good or for fascist purposes. In her hands, it is a scalpel for taking apart the world of work, for teaching us how it got so damn bad. But it is also, she brilliantly reminds us, a tool for dismantling capitalist common sense. Join her as she encourages us to embrace laughter as a refusal of work and to claim the rich pleasures of being a killjoy."
--Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back

"A great addition to the growing corpus of popular manifestos coming from leading thinkers of the Left."
--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

"From working-class sitcoms to podcasts about making podcasts, this whirlwind tour of American comedy brings labor to the front, where Madeline Lane-McKinley reveals it has been all along. You'll never laugh the same!"
--Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto

"Madeline Lane-McKinley is among the brightest fruits in the anglophone critical ecology of utopian thinkers, and this hotly anticipated book does not disappoint. Comedy Against Work not only educates our desire for a world utterly transformed, it provides us with tools that can help us actualize it."
--Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family

About the Author

Madeline Lane-McKinley is a feminist writer, parent, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times and Dear Z, the coauthor of Fag/Hag, and an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Post-45 Contemporaries, and Protean Magazine.