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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution? These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the 'Laboria Cuboniks' collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto 'Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation'. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction. Challenging and iconoclastic, this visionary book is the essential guide to one of the most exciting intellectual trends in contemporary feminism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Notes
1 What is Xenofeminism?
Technomaterialism
Anti-Naturalism
Gender Abolitionism
Notes
2 Xenofeminist Futurities
Pro-Nat(ur)al Politics
Somebody Think of the Children
No Future for You
Biopolitical Border Control
Xenofeminist Kin
Notes
3 Xenofeminist Technologies
Specula(tions): Feminism, Technology, Trouble
Removing Barriers
(Re)purposeful Activity
The Scale of the Problem
Technologies That Travel: Intersectional Applications
From Self-Help to Transfeminism
Notes
Conclusion: Xeno-Reproduction
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Theory Redux
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Graham Harman, Immaterialism:Objects and Social Theory
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction:Paying Attention to Social Media
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Xenofeminism
Helen Hester
polity
Copyright © Helen Hester 2018
The right of Helen Hester to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2066-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Introduction
Xenofeminism, or XF, can to some extent be viewed as a labour of bricolage, synthesizing cyberfeminism, posthumanism, accelerationism, neorationalism, materialist feminism, and so on, in an attempt to forge a project suited to contemporary political conditions. From this litany of influences xenofeminism assembles, not a hybrid politics – which would suggest the prior existence of some impossible, un-hybridized state – but a politics without ‘the infection of purity’.1 In collecting, discarding, and revising existing perspectives – in stripping its myriad influences for parts – xenofeminism positions itself as a project for which the future remains open as a site of radical recomposition. This book is a first attempt at teasing out the underpinnings, arguments, and implications of 2015’s xenofeminist manifesto in an extended form. However, it is important to note that this is just one interpretation of a polysemic project – a project riven with the unresolved tensions that come from collaboration across difference.
Each of the six members of Laboria Cuboniks – the xenofeminist working group of which I am a part – would likely emphasize different aspects of the manifesto, foregrounding some tendencies over others on account of our varied backgrounds, interests, and politics. The process of negotiating between our various feminist commitments has been one of the most satisfying and illuminating elements of our collective labour over the past three years. The manifesto remains a document that we are all happy to stand behind, and which we continue to incorporate into our individual practice – be that as musicians, artists, archaeologists, theorists, activists, coders, or poets. I would like to use this book to advance myown variation of XF, whilst continuing to acknowledge the divergent strands shaping the project as a whole. This is not the book on xenofeminism, then, but rather a book on xenofeminism.
I would like to start by briefly acknowledging some of the limits of this text, along with what I hope to achieve over the coming pages. Xenofeminism is not a thoroughgoing review of existing academic literature, and nor is it a lengthy monograph on feminist theories of science and technology. Rather, it is a polemic or a provocation – one grounded in a self-consciously idiosyncratic selection of critical material.2 The references underpinning this text have been chosen not for their comprehensive articulation of the simultaneity of gender, technology, race, and sexualities, but for their suggestiveness and utility in terms of developing one particular strand of the XF project. The red thread uniting the chapters that follow represents what I consider to be one of the most compelling territories for any emerging xenofeminist position: reproduction, both biological and social. It is around this theme that the arguments of Xenofeminism converge.
Chapter 1 offers a partial definition of XF, sketching out some of the broad concepts that will ground subsequent chapters. In particular, the manifesto’s treatment of three key ideas – technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism – will be explored, in order to indicate where they might contribute to a xenofeminist politics of reproduction. In Chapter 2, I turn to XF futurities – and, more precisely, to the need to develop visions of the future that are based upon neither the prescription nor the proscription of human biological reproduction. Using contemporary environmental activism as a springboard, I point both to the mobilization of the Child as the privileged icon of a world to come, and to the anti-natalist tendencies implicit within recent accounts of a more sustainable future. Ultimately, I argue, we should look to foster a form of mutational politics – one that can be oriented towards practices of xeno-hospitality.
Chapter 3 addresses the topic of XF technologies via an engagement with the feminist health movement of the 1970s. This section – the longest of the book – looks to the sometimes problematic activism of the second wave, not to hold it up as an aspirational model, but in order to identify some of the possibilities contained within its partially pursued trajectories. What, I ask, might the DIY technologies of seventies self-help have to teach us about bodily autonomy and reproductive sovereignty from an XF perspective? The conclusion extends this analysis to encompass contemporary practices of biohacking. In deliberately eschewing the politically tone-deaf imaginaries of some forms of transhumanism, and by bringing biohacking into conversation with both trans* health activism and discourses of reproductive justice, I hope to emphasize some of the more materialist dimensions of twenty-first-century approaches to emancipatory, self-directed bodily transformation.
Whilst reproduction, in an expanded sense, remains at the forefront of my articulation of xenofeminism, other related themes will inevitably arise over the course of the book – themes such as scalability, labour, intersectionality, nature, and repurposing. Let us begin, however, by asking a seemingly simple question: what is xenofeminism?
Notes
1
.
Laboria Cuboniks, ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’, 2015 (
http://www.laboriacuboniks.net
).
2
.
Academic influences include Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sarah Kember, Lisa Nakamura, and Judy Wajcman. These thinkers deserve a prominent place in the genealogies of XF and contemporary technofeminism, as I have tried to stress elsewhere: see A. Avanessian and H. Hester (eds),
Dea ex Machina
, trans. Jennifer Sophia Theodor (Berlin: Merve, 2015). Perhaps the most obvious voices omitted from the current discussion are those of pre-millennial cyberfeminists – people who are not only some of Laboria Cuboniks’ most significant predecessors but also, in several cases, our ongoing collaborators and peers. This includes members of the 90s cyber-collectives VNS Matrix, the Old Boys Network, subRosa, and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (most notably, Sadie Plant). In side-lining explicit engagement with such figures, I am in no way seeking to downplay their influence upon the manifesto. Indeed, I have directly addressed the connection between 90s cyberfeminism and contemporary xenofeminist tendencies in other publications: see H. Hester, ‘After the Future:
n
Hypotheses of Post-Cyber Feminism’,
Res Gallery: The Kathy Rae Huffman Archive Catalogue
(
http://beingres.org/2017/06/30/afterthefuture-helen-hester/
). I would urge readers to look beyond this little book to develop a more representative understanding of XF.
1What is Xenofeminism?
XF is a technomaterialist, anti-naturalist, and gender abolitionist form of feminism. In this chapter, I will offer a brief outline of each of these three terms, using Shulamith Firestone’s contentious manifesto The Dialectic of Sex as a recurring reference point. First published in 1970, Firestone’s text claims that humanity’s ‘accumulation of skills for controlling the environment’1 – extending, crucially, to gendered embodiment and biological reproduction – is a means of realizing ‘the conceivable in the actual’.2 It therefore looks to technology (including, most famously, assistive reproductive technologies, but also forms of domestic automation and industrial cybernation) as a point of leverage in efforts to transform oppressive socio-biological conditions. Her work adopts an ambitious, constructive, and wide-ranging approach to conceiving of a more emancipatory future. In this, it has profoundly shaped the xenofeminist imaginary.
Technomaterialism
Xenofeminism is an attempt to articulate a radical gender politics fit for an era of globality, complexity, and technology – one which thinks about technology as an activist tool, whilst attempting to confront a contemporary reality ‘crosshatched with fibre-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’.3 It seeks to foreground the more obviously material elements of (inter)action in contemporary mediated cultures, and draws upon recent engagements with the digital that foreground its brute physicality over its supposedly more ethereal qualities – that is, over ‘the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important, and more fundamental than materiality’.4 In other words, XF seeks to anchor that which has been frequently mischaracterized as free-floating and disembodied within its infrastructural requirements and within the obstinate physicality of its users and producers (including those workers engaged in repetitive and poorly paid labour on electronics assembly lines around the world).
The project does not reject technology (or science, or rationalism – ideas often understood as patriarchal constructs), but positions it both as part of the warp and weft of our everyday lives and as one potential sphere of activist intervention. Laboria Cuboniks takes a critical interest in technologies that might seem mundane, such as domestic labour-saving devices, as well as higherprofile innovations capable of acting as vectors for new utopias – things like pharmaceuticals, additivist manufacturing, open source software, systems of cybersecurity, and post-industrial automation. Just as these phenomena may be turned towards furthering the control and domination of labouring bodies, so too might they represent sites of fertile possibility for the feminist left. Xenofeminism is interested in exploring and leveraging these affordances – it ‘seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world’.5 At the same time, however, it recognizes that technologies are not inherently beneficial – indeed, they are not even inherently neutral – but are in fact constrained and constituted by social relations. This includes specific design histories, the existing (technical, political, cultural) infrastructures into which they emerge, and imbalances in terms of who can access them – a factor largely dependent upon the character of the specific technologies in question.
Qualifications of this kind are common to many technofeminist theories and approaches. Even the enthusiastic vision of cybernetic communism laid out in The Dialectic of Sex displays some awareness of the limits that social context might place upon a technology’s transformational implications. For example, Firestone appears cognizant of the fact that not only is her utopian project attendant upon the development of suitably sophisticated technoscientific capacities, but that ‘in the hands of our current society and under the direction of current scientists [. . .], any attempted use of technology to “free” anybody is suspect’.6 Even her preferred tools for feminist interventions in embodiment are carefully problematized: reproductive technology, including birth control, is described as ‘a double-edged sword [. . .] to envision it in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare’.7 Although hardly famous for the moderation of her arguments, it is clear that Firestone is attuned to the fact that the uses of both computational and biological technologies will be dependent upon the wider structures in which they are embedded.
In her response to The Dialectic of Sex, Sarah Franklin remarks that Firestone ‘envisaged technology both as an agent of, and a means of salvation from, social and environmental degradation, whilst constantly reminding her readers that science and technology could not achieve these ends in the absence of radical social change, including a wholesale regendering of scientific knowledge’.8 In Firestone’s analysis, technology is presented as both a ‘driver and a symptom, imbricated in a wider process of historical unfolding’;9 technoscientific developments must therefore be seen as a significant influence upon socio-political change. However, this influence is by no means unidirectional. The relationship between technology and social relations is complex, mutually shaping, dynamic, and dependent upon continuous conversation. Shifts in one area will influence the evolution of the other, which in turn feedbacks into further developments, in an ongoing process of co-constitution. Technology is as social as society is technical.
Technologies, then, need to be conceptualized as social phenomena, and therefore as available for transformation through collective struggle (a fact of which Firestone herself is well aware, even as she uses technologies to imagine a radically alien future). Technological change is a ‘process subject to struggles for control by different groups’, the outcomes of which are profoundly shaped by ‘the distribution of power and resources within society’.10 As such, any emancipatory technofeminism must take the form of a concerted political intervention, sensitive to the fused character of the structures of oppression that make up our material worlds. It is in this spirit that xenofeminism seeks to balance an attentiveness to the differential impact technologies can have upon women, queers, and the gender non-conforming, with a critical openness to the (constrained but genuine) transformative potential of technologies. This extends to an interest in how we might design or appropriate devices, knowledges, and processes for gender-political ends.
Anti-Naturalism
Xenofeminism’s technomaterialism is complemented by its commitment to anti-naturalism. Indeed, the project’s investment in and alignment with contemporary technological landscapes is, in part, an elaboration of precisely this commitment. Hence, Laboria Cuboniks declares that:
Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker, and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. ‘Nature’ – understood here, as the unbounded arena of science – is all there is.11
In other words, science and technology enable a particular set of conscious interventions within the so-called ‘natural’ world. Such interventions have the potential to extend human freedom – for example, by furthering reproductive autonomy and allowing us to exert control (however contingent, contested, and constrained) over what happens to our own bodies. Nature is understood here not as an essentializing underpinning for embodiment or ecology, but as a technologized space of conflict that fundamentally shapes lived experiences.
The always precarious distinction between nature and culture has been definitively blown apart by changes within science and technology. Whilst the collapse of such categorical distinctions arguably detracts from the utility of social constructivism as an analytic tool – particularly when it comes to exposing the mutability of identities – it simultaneously works to open up that which might previously have been viewed as untouchable (the ‘natural’) as a site of intercession and agency. This refusal to frame nature as only and always the unyielding limit to emancipatory imaginaries is a key element of the xenofeminist project, and a further point of resonance with The Dialectics of Sex. ‘Pregnancy’, Firestone writes, ‘is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species.’12 She notes that gestation and childbirth are painful, risky, and beset with difficulties for the bodies that perform them. As such, she views the development of new reproductive technologies – including, but not limited to, those facilitating ectogenesis – as an unprecedented opportunity for ending the oppression of the impregnatable.
This is the belief motivating Firestone’s demand that people should be freed ‘from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible’.13
