What it means to commit to fights that won’t be won in our generation

“It’s important not to feel completely defeated when you lose a particular battle because there are going to be many battles,” said Kathi Weeks of politics earlier this year in an interview with Sarah Jaffe published in Dissent Magazine. “It’s important to put politics on a longer timeframe and still take pleasure in being part of it.”

Taking pleasure in politics these days of division and rancor may sound like an impossibility, but Weeks is quick to explain how activists might amend that: by narrating what it means to commit to fights that won’t be won in our generation. “We don’t [yet] have the vocabulary to explain what that means.”

A professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, Weeks is a featured speaker at the University of Utah Thursday, September 24th. The event begins at 2:00 pm in the Tanner Irish Humanities Building’s Jewel Box (Room 143).   

Feminist political agenda

Titled after her recently released book, “Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures” (Duke University Press, 2026) the talk, co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science; the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies (EGD Studies); and the Tanner Humanities Center, Weeks will present a feminist political agenda focused on prison abolition, family abolition, and anti/post-work refusal. She will also offer a methodological defense of the kind of scaled-up feminist theories that can address those systemic, structural phenomena.

Socialist feminism is usually remembered through a narrow "dual systems" framing—capitalism governing the waged economy, patriarchy governing the household—which linked the two through productive and unwaged reproductive labor. That model was never fully developed, according to Weeks, and the account typically ends by dismissing it as a dead end.

Weeks’ book is characterized by interviewer Sarah Jaffe in Dissent as a “rigorous and generous meditation on how to think about politics now.” In response, Weeks says “What I’m trying to do with this book is broaden the archive,” a term she uses as an alternative to “canon” defined as a sanctioned group of works traditionally accepted as the most important or influential in a field. “If you go back to 1970s feminism—the heyday of Marxist and socialist feminism in the United States—the borders between different kinds of feminisms, particularly radical and Marxist feminisms, were more blurry than we remember. There was much more interchange and a broader investment in anti-capitalism.”

The politics in question, for Weeks, thread through institutions including work, family and prison. Weeks appeals to feminists to think structurally about all of them . . . and more. “It’s shocking how unschooled we are in thinking at the level of social structures,” Weeks claims in the interview. “We’re trained to think at the level of individuals. If we’re going to think about work, we’ll think about this job or that job—is it a good boss or a bad boss?—rather than thinking about waged work as a system of income distribution.”

Thinking in terms of the latter, Weeks says the observer is “going to ask different kinds of questions about how well it [the system] functions to distribute income, and what kinds of hierarchies it creates.” She invokes in her reader/listener to think structurally (societally) rather than strictly on the level of the individual. “[I]t’s hard for people to think about the family structurally rather than to think, ‘I love my family,’ or ‘that family over there seems dysfunctional.’”

Expanding the timeline of activism

The same is true of systemic or institutional racism extending beyond individual discriminatory attitudes. In many cases racism “gets embedded in these routines that are non-intentional. I’m trying to make a case for thinking on this scale of structures, because individuals or groups of individuals are not the authors of them.” Just as these embedded frameworks were built over time, “they’re going to be dismantled over time,” she says. The timeline of collective political activity leading to change has to be expanded.”

Often provocative, always thoughtful and articulate, Weeks’ visit is highly anticipated. Department Chair of EGD Studies Ella Myers often uses “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries” in the classroom. She finds that students especially appreciate how Weeks really “draws on ideas from forgotten social movements—such as 1970s struggles for wages for housework—to affirm contemporary political struggles, like those that advocate for Universal Basic Income.”

Myers collaborated with Maria Laura Martinelli in World Languages and Cultures to plan Weeks’ visit, following the publication of Weeks’ most recent book which, Myers points out, engages with key feminist thinkers, Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway and Angela Davis “to explore how radical aims like prison abolition, family abolition and work abolition might animate feminist praxis now.” 

By design, feminist praxis impacts political activism more broadly, not only in terms of content and issues but geographically as well. “While her latest book focuses primarily on feminist thinkers in the United States,” Martinelli says, “[Weeks’] scholarship has also influenced and informed feminist debates beyond the U.S., including in Latin American and Spanish feminisms, opening up new ways of thinking about social reproduction, particularly work and family.”

Like the storied Angela Davis, Weeks believes that certain kinds of reforms—labeled paradoxically as “non-reformist reforms”—can serve a radical, transformative political project. At the end of the Dissent interview Weeks says she’s interested in “reforms that don’t become just reformist, and little fights that always keep on the horizon a larger goal.” She confesses that keeping up those “little fights” is “hard… and I don’t mean that you can fight at that intensity every day.”