Home / Books / Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures

Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures

Book

Pages: 288

Published: March 2026

Author: Kathi Weeks

Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers—Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway—to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s ability to structurally analyze social problems. Kathi Weeks examines the archive of this unexpected collection of Marxist feminists whose works are united by their abolitionist approaches, arguing that feminism can gain a broader constituency by taking up anti-capitalist critique and praxis. Across the book’s chapters, Weeks recontextualizes well-known feminist texts in a new and original light, bringing their insight from the past into the present and future of abolitionist politics.

Praise

“Teeming with lumpenproletarians, communist cyborgs, child-liberationists, and sex workers against work, Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures braids together the living strands of revolutionary feminist thought and struggle of many decades—abolishing gender, prison, the family, police, and work—into a lasso of the imagination, big enough to overcome the present state of things. For my money, Kathi Weeks is quite simply the most important theorist of our age.” - Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms

Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures is an urgent invitation to feminists to scale up our critiques of the present and be bolder in our visions for the future. Centering on the work of Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, and Angela Davis, Weeks considers what the scaled-up thinking they did reveals about work, the family, and the carceral state. She argues that a structural account of these objects is key for liberatory politics, and that contemporary feminist theory’s reticence to make big claims dulls its critical edge.” - Heather Berg, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Labor Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Buy

Availability: In stock

Price: $28.95

Request a desk or exam copy Spring 2026 Web Sale

Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top
Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work, published by Duke University Press, and Constituting Feminist Subjects.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Introduction. Periodizing the Archive  1
1. Structural Pedagogies  29
2. The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s  69
3. Systems and Standpoints in and Beyond Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs”  93
4. Archiving the Future  121
5. Angela Y. Davis and Prison Abolitionism as Politics and Method  143
6. The Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal  171
7. Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the Ideologies of Work  191
8. The Lumpenproletariat and Marxist Feminist Political Theory  215
Acknowledgments  235
Notes  237
References  247
Index  269

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Related Links Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3328-8 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2984-7 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6203-5 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478062035