New Visions Prologue
What Is The New Visions Project and Who Is It For?
The year was 2005: George W. Bush was rounding out the end of his first term in office. The country had entered a fiercely ignited state of increased xenophobia and an increase in immigrant enforcement and criminalization post-9/11 attacks, the bird flu pandemic, and an ensuing invasion of Iraq. The world was embracing a social conservatism that deeply impacted at-risk and marginalized communities, leading to increased funding cuts and state restrictions—a major wave of global neoliberal shifts entrenching welfare restriction, privatization of health services, and the rollback of social safety nets. Rights and access were starting to be chipped away bit by bit, including a renewed movement against abortion and an undermining of the “choice” rhetoric. Structural inequality was becoming clearer with disparities in POC maternal mortality, health outcomes and access, and environmental justice issues becoming more and more visible.
Forward Together (then Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice or ACRJ) took a scan of the movement landscape and noticed fatigue and fragmentation amidst this exhaustive backdrop. There was a need to reanimate our movement and ensure that we were no longer letting invisibilized communities slip under the cracks. No longer could we address these deeply structural issues with a singular “choice” rhetoric. A rights-only framing was weak and often only worked at the expense of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, and trans people. There was a need to consolidate a reproductive justice (RJ) frame that pushed beyond rights and individuality to power and structural change. Thus, A New Vision for advancing our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, and Reproductive Justice was born in October of that year.
Forward Together offered a clear definition for reproductive justice as separate from reproductive rights and reproductive health: “The complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls…when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions…for ourselves, our families, our communities.” We offered a root cause analysis of reproductive oppression, being intentional about developing race/class/ability lens, and prescribed a strategic direction that was predicated on a movement away from fragmented legal or service reform efforts (abortion rights or providing contraceptives) to a widespread multi-racial/multi-class coalition-building strategy that would build social, political, and economic power of marginalized people through a recognition that reproductive autonomy is embedded in all areas of life—housing, immigration, food insecurity, environmental issues, and all other forms of violence (including state-sanctioned).
It’s been 20 years since that vision was released into the world, and much has changed within our movements, our organization, and in the sociopolitical atmosphere. Under the current regime, we have witnessed a concerted attack on the validity and integration of queer, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people as a political laboratory for stripping care and support for all. As a result of another major ultra-conservative wave, Roe vs. Wade has been repealed, evangelical Christian nationalism has taken hold of the social zeitgeist and political reigns, and our people are more at risk than ever before. Our old vision had a queer lens, but lacked engagement with trans and gender nonconforming communities and issues. Additionally, anti-Blackness as a grammar of the world undergirds almost all foundational logics. Many, if not most, of the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement had not established systems to address anti-Blackness, transphobia, and xenophobia within and outside of our organizations. Cultural strategy had not been held as foundational to any other tactic and was not embedded in all of our organizing, coalition-building and policy work. The organization was unable to forecast how critical this intersectional lens would be for our collective survival and therefore failed to develop an analysis that honored being in all forms.
Political attacks on the QTBIPOC community are fundamentally about denying control over our own bodies and identity. These attacks are about bodily autonomy, the fundamental belief of the pro-abortion movement. Yet, in states like Missouri and Arizona where pro-abortion ballot measures won, gender-affirming care is simultaneously being denied for QTBIPOC youth. Queer and trans people are calling on the reproductive justice movements to center bodily autonomy for all forms of being, not just those legible to the state or deemed viable, productive, or worth saving. Forward Together is committed to research that supports what we know: our liberation is tied together and individualism is a trap. We see cultural strategy as a powerful lever towards narrative shift and social change.
Cultural strategy is an integral part of shifting the ways we see and think about the world, seeding the belief that liberation is possible, and helping our communities see, hear, feel, and co-create a liberated future, grounded in QTBIPOC liberation. This New Visions Project is an invitation and call to action to ground in our communities of care and meaning-making and to challenge ourselves to interrogate our connections with each other and how we demand the freedom to love and be loved in communities and families of our own design.
Since the original New Visions was published, Forward Together has developed our analysis to foreground the reproductive oppression, power, and possibilities of QTBIPOC people. We’ve also spent time separating the concept of care away from the capitalist limitations of a nuclear family. This shift enables us to expand the meaning of kinship and belonging to include the ways people already organically form connection beyond biology. It also recenters the “childless” QTBIPOC young adult into the intergenerational, interdependent web of relationships with children and elders. We’re leaning into a reproductive justice that isn’t just about sustaining life, but is also about valuing all forms of embodiment, choice, and becoming. A politic that refuses to engage in the language of state-defined body categories. Where we render oppression irrelevant through a radical imagination of interdependence, relation, care, and value. This anthology speaks to what Forward Together believes NOW.
Our pivot from a paper to an anthology reflects our desire to deepen and widen our community. This living anthology is a love letter to those rendered invisible. Those who have felt unheard or unrepresented within RJ spaces. It’s for thinkers in the cosmos, tillers of the mantle, and alchemists of the soul. Those itching for new frameworks that refuse boundaries and definitions and embrace endless possibilities. We hope that New Visions 2.0 will feel like an inoculation against Project 2025 and late stage capitalism where people will see pathways towards resilient belonging and community-creation. We invite people to imagine something else entirely when it comes to the concept of family. To see the overlap between QTBIPOC communities and liberation for us all.
Our Theme: Expanding Care, Questioning Relations
Relations are less like family trees and more like cosmic swirls.
– Cesilia Baeza
Care is not scarce. Don’t hoard it.
– L’lerrét Ailith
Forward Together’s research on the frameworks of family definition and family abolition led us to this year’s theme: Expanding Care, Questioning Relations. At the start of our time together, we agreed to disagree, trusting that there was a throughline that united our values together. Our contributions are deeply influenced by our research team. They created a space to interrogate these terms and our reactions to these concepts. Several of us read Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center’s “Redefining Family” zine to understand what abolition means in the context of family.
Sometimes thought of as an either/or, family definition and abolition actually go hand in hand. Family definition is about allowing people to understand and form close relationships on their own terms. It moves beyond ties of blood, marriage, or adoption to include chosen family, othermothers, polycules, and any mutually supportive relationship. It is to acknowledge how many QTBIPOC folks already exist out of the nuclear family norm. Family definition can anchor into a concept of expansive care, or as some folks say, family abolition.
Being known to someone is still vital to our survival and sense of safety. So what are we abolishing? Abolition is known by other terms. Decolonizing. Reindigenizing. Redefining. Radicalizing. Reimagining. Healing. Expansive care. Abolition is rebuilding or unbuilding or no-building. We invite you to take what resonates, whatever term allows you to experience the possibilities we’re offering in this anthology.
Family abolition does not mean abolishing relationality, we still have to figure that out. Those essential components of kinship that either give a warm feeling of belonging or a disquieting lump in one’s throat remain. Limiting who we care about to our family members, even if we expand our definition of family to include lots of people, isn’t enough to get us free. We can unknowingly have reformist or assimilationist ideals in our chosen families if we aren’t diligent. We get closer to freedom when we show up for each other even if we don’t have a structure telling us who to prioritize and how, even if we aren’t close, even if we don’t know each other. Our work is to rebuild our understanding of relationships in ways that don’t repeat the same patterns of power and harm. We seek to abolish the restrictions on care.
The nuclear family model is used by the government and our oppressors to determine who is and is not deserving of care. We don’t want an in-group or an out-group. When we highlight how people, especially QTBIPOC communities, are already doing care differently, more sustainably, it becomes clear that we don’t need to argue that family is “bad” or close relationships shouldn’t exist. The point of us critiquing the idea of family is to show that its rigid rules don’t actually make sense. Our work is to support and grow the alternatives that are already here.
Black trans women like Raquel Lord, Jasmine Bonet Smith and others were doing ministry before we even understood it was ministry. Many LGBTQ+ folks have experienced exile from their churches and had nowhere to go. Many of these houses were built in the urgency of answering the question ‘who is going to take care of these babies?’
– Nala Simone in conversation with Angelica Ross
A Preview of the Entries This Year
This first iteration of the New Visions living anthology features eight submissions by Forward Together’s brilliant cultural workers exploring the themes of family definition and abolition. In “Survival (Disaster) Makes a Family,” RC offers a deeply personal reflection on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and how the government’s limited definitions of family restricted access to life-saving resources in the wake of disaster. L’lerrét Ailith’s “Kin or ‘To Kin’: On Ungrammaring Family and Freeing Care” highlights the ways in which the “grammaring” of family—that is, enforcing the white, heterosexual nuclear family model and erasing or pathologizing all other relational structures—commodifies care and intimacy, and implores the reader to imagine freer and more expansive modes of kinship. Aen Navidad contributes “Culinary Connection and Care: an interconnected reflection,” a series of visual art pieces that celebrates the connecting ritual of sharing food, depicts a snapshot of queer life and love, and calls for solidarity and Palestinian liberation. Hunter Shackelford’s essay “Bad Abortion: On the War of Extremes, Abortion Neutrality, and Unacknowledged Grief” dives into the author’s complicated experiences with abortion and urges us to make space for the grief of painful abortion stories within the discourse around reproductive justice. In “Queer[ing] Family Rituals,” Leo Seyij Allen examines common family traditions and the ways in which QTBIPOC decolonize and queer them, and invites us to create our own new traditions and rituals. Bianca presents an essay titled “Co-lactation: ” that discusses co-lactation as a practice that queers and challenges narratives around parenting and care. “A Casual RJ Reply to Anti-Natalism” is a roundtable discussion with six Forward Together staff members about anti-natalism that grapples with the question of what it means to bring children into this world. Finally, “How We DO Expansive Care” explores what Forward Together staff do in their lives to increase their interdependence and put the principles of family abolition into practice.