Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy

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.

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.