Xenofeminism

Xenofeminism is a techno-materialist, anti-naturalist, and gender abolitionist feminism that longs to automate and code itself, becoming an engine by which women no longer exhaust themselves to reproduce feminism. This frustration is manifest in an adamant alliance with the synthetic and dissatisfaction with insufficient forms of feminism. Laboria Cuboniks ( a working xenofeminist collective whose members include Diann Bauer, Katrina Burch, Lucca Fraser, Helen Hester, Amy Ireland, and Patricia Reed) relays Helen Hester’s written word in XENOFEMINISM: A Politics for Alienation,

“The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality crosshatched with fiber-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond…”

Above all, Xenofeminism can be seen as a tool, a program, a protocol of action, which acknowledges that we are wired into a giant technological accelerator and we need to keep adjusting accordingly. XF does not only want to exist inside the matrix, it wants to be the architect. In “a world that swarms with technological mediation”, jacked into a planetary machine that continually speeds up; the question is, which sockets do we plug into? XF hopes to serve as a monograph for united strands of feminism, updating feminist propositions of bodily autonomy, through adaptability, vehement anti-naturalism, and alienation (the three concepts, which we will explore in further depth), creating “collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization”.

It is important to distinguish the type of alienation XF sees as a tool for its goals. The idea is that as long as we have been sapient, we have been alienated. This is distinct from the sentient in the sense that being sapient enables one to use reason to reflect, consciously act on the world, and, and by extension, construct it, where a sentient being has awareness of their surrounding but not necessarily the capacity to reflect and act. As soon as we were aware and could reflect on our finitude, we were alienated. Through, and not despite, this alienation the species is driven to transform the natural world, avoiding extinction while making remarkable advancements in tech (this is not to make a moral prescription on human domination). As the Manifesto states:

“XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated — but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labor of freedom’s construction”

On a species scale, alienation from biology is a productive force. The ability to self-reflect to make and remake what we are, what is human, is how XF wishes to utilize this force. Amy Ireland, in Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come, notes that it is incumbent on us “to throw off the alienated state that capitalism has bequeathed to us and return to more authentic processes, often marked as an original human symbiosis with nature.”

What are the unique digital obstacles a new techno-feminism faces? Xenofeminism, like cyborg theory, and 90’s cyber-feminism, is a politics particular to space and time. Gendered challenges have translated from the physical realm to that of technology, with new forms of abuse and exploitation continuing to characterize that plane of production in which electronics are constructed, assembled, and legislated for, while females continue to “perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labor. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction”. From sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images — the situation requires feminism, “at ease with computation”. The Xenofeminist project is techno-materialist, in the sense that it seeks to develop a critical approach to these technologies and to account for the variety of effects technologies can have upon women, queers, and gender non-conformists. XF does not reject technology, science, or rationalism, ideas more usually understood as patriarchal constructs, but instead takes a genuine interest in how we might redesign or appropriate technological devices and processes for gender political ends. Examples provided in the manifesto include pharmaceuticals, 3D printing, and open-source software. These phenomena have the potential to represent remarkable opportunities for the queer feminist left. XF is interested in exploring and leveraging these affordances. Fraser, who has been involved in a variety of theoretical and practical projects, sees in xenofeminism a rejuvenation of cyberfeminism, but this time able to both respond to and design artificial intelligence or emancipatory online spaces. In engaging the works of Firestone, Sarah Kember, Alison Adam, and Nick Land, Fraser understands Xenofeminism as a project continuous with the Enlightenment, where the mastery of ‘nature’ would lead not only to the abolition of sex but to “the emancipation of intelligence.” At the same time, the program swerves away from technological determinism, recognizing technologies are not inherently beneficial, or even inherently neutral but constrained by specific patriarchal design histories, infrastructure in which they emerge, and the imbalance of accessibility. Technology only opens an area of opportunity based on understanding the mutually constitutive relationship between devices and the wider social world. Any emancipatory techno-feminism must be first and foremost a form of political struggle, attentive to the interlocking oppressive structures of race, gender, and class that make up the material world.

With this differentiation, comes critical navigation of less adapted feminism, due to its problematic attachment to nature, (placing it at odds with XF) particularly ecofeminist in that womanhood is defined by its proximity to nature and is therefore predisposed as separate from technology. Alternatively, there is nothing to XF “that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.” The embrace of ‘artifice’ is a way of invalidating the claims of trans exclusionary radical feminism in which the correlation between ‘nature,’ ‘women’ and ‘goodness’ is particularly visible. Looking to technology to reproduce something alien on a mass scale, its hands and soul are not pure but synthetic, its body not made in the Garden of Eden but continually engineered under available tools XF sees in the theatre of technocracy a potential, “superior forms of corruption.”

What are the roots of XF anti-naturalism, this embrace of the imagined feminist alien? From Cyberfeminism to Xenofeminism, there is a certain infrastructure to be found. Cyberfeminism was spawned in the posthumanism of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, in which Harway imagined an “an ironic dream for women in the integrated circuit”. Her hybrid, the Cyborg myth, is both physical and non-physical, a mutant, a being of fusions and expressionism, the body just a tool. The Cyborg is a material-semiotic metaphor, a vessel of critique, representing “the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” Haraway projected that the Twentieth-century machines would blur the boundaries of natural and artificial, and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs would confuse the lines of physicality. XF follows the cyborg, favoring bio-synthetic technologically-assembled bodies that escape ‘natural’ identities, “a world without gender, which is perhaps a world with no genesis”, no origin to be recovered. In agreement with Judith Butler, the manifesto is opposed to gender binaries and all possible gender formations. Haraway calls feminists, through the image of the cyborg, to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics. It is not dehumanization, but a technological reclamation, a re-humanization of body and emotion. As the XF Manifesto states “If nature is unjust, change nature!”. This is not a rejection of nature as reality but a recognition, that “nothing should be accepted as fixed and permanent — neither material conditions and social forms nor the technological horizon”. The general tendency of an anti-naturalist position is not against nature but knowing how to separate between norms and facts, variant and invariant. It is recognizing when certain norms are so overperformed, so concretize that they become quasi-fact when they are subject to mutation. As the Manifesto follows:

“Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of the natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us — the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better”

Being anti-naturalist is not being against the natural world, nor denying the shaping influence of the biological. XF acknowledges that there is a biological stratum to a bodied reality, that certain bodies have different susceptibilities or capacities, most notably the capacity to carry a fetus. What is disputed is the idea that this stratum is immutable or fixed simply because it is biological. This involves recognizing many of our conceptions of natural bodies are ideological and more radically, XF involves framing the field of the biological itself as rightfully subject to change. As Hester says “biology is not destiny”, it is not static but should transform in pursuit of reproductive justice, and progressive transformation of gender. XF looks to be that “architect” of liberating synthetic identities, “no-body is sacred and the future might demand bio-engineering ourselves beyond current species limitations’’. It is this attempt to locate an alien vector within humanism that pushes it beyond itself. It is akin to Reza Negarestani’s notion of inhumanism in The Labor of the Inhuman:

“A universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in the sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposedly self-evident characteristics while preserving certain invariances”

A key element of this perspective is an agitation for the abolition of the binary gender system, emphasizing not only the dismantling of gender but any structures that come to act as a naturalized and thus rigidified base of oppression. Xenofeminism acknowledges the political value of mobilizing around these identities, but believes in the long term the full range of these traits should be stripped of their social significance and therefore their ability to act as vectors of discrimination. This is not a demand that differences themselves be abolished, but the restrictions placed on gendered identity, the tenacious binary thinking that continuously funnels identity into the feminine and masculine. XF aims to create new diversified gendered assemblages to resist oppression. As Deleuze and Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus, “An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections”. It is the abolition of gender via a proliferation of gendered differences.

Hester and Ireland in an unofficial capacity function as historians of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU). Ireland, investing the CCRU sorcerous cybernetics of the time spiral, acceleration, and nonhuman poetics through the focus on the continuity between femininity and alienated, inhuman virtuality. She prefers to throw her lot in with the bots, her methodology akin to that of Tetsuo, the Iron Man, the extreme Japanese horror film in which the union between man and machine is literal: “I feed myself to machines.” Following Sadie Plant’s reading of Luce Irigaray, Ireland affirms women’s occultist formless, commodified, inhuman bodies. Future intelligence will arrive as a thing, she says, and only things can understand things — by turning women into things, patriarchy makes women’s alliance with machines easy, against its interest. Helen Hester’s book simply titled Xenofeminism, is informed by her history in trans, queer and feminist studies as well as Marxism, and converges on one issue in particular, social and biological reproduction. Women to a degree were never separate from technology, and are in fact, frequently used as sexual and/or reproductive technologies. That womanhood is already a spectacle or an ‘unnatural’ simulation without origin is the woman’s gain, not her curse, “Because she is continuous with [the spectacle], she is imperceptible within it.” This weaponization of imperceptibility is what aligns women to demons, and demons to machines, all excluded from the economy of the Phallus on the shiny side of the screen. A vision of an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map does not mark a destination, but the topological keyframe for a new logic, embracing alienation and artifice, proclaiming that “the real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized,” opening up to speculative design, as delivered poetically by Katrina Burch in Xenolistening:

“We would like to recode machinic blasts from the future, decaying someplace else. Could be — a science fiction — leaking of sound into the skin, cannibalized hard, core soaked, bled from pixel-seasoned flesh. Navigational schemes are hitched by the xenotype… The coming techno-sapiens’ living body never listens alone. It traverses cosmically low. And wide enough, to pulse in flowering nonhuman drones, and to array purple-shifting antibodies for transcendental immanence”