Red Emma’s

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 and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. Her books include Solidarity with Children, Comedy Against Work, and Fag/Hag, and her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Boston Review, Protean Magazine, and Cultural Politics. She is also an editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a contributor to the Museum of Capitalism.

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary American literature, aesthetic and cultural theory, and poetry. Her first book of criticism, Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public, about the transformation of the welfare state in the United States after 1960, is out now from Columbia University Press. Her next will be about changing state surveillance culture, poetic forms, and myths and ideas about the family. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook called The Thought of Preservation (2019) about gentrification in a Nashville neighborhood.