25 Sep XENOFEMINISM – A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks
ZERO
0x00
Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological
mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.
XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of
unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization
of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist
politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race,
ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless
repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery
of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given
masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for
revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination,
dexterity and persistence.
0x01
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 labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted
as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’—neither material conditions nor social
forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s
been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone
who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of 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.
0x02
Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for
progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing
technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these
tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak.
Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly
of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology
isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive
feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution
impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective
theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender
non-conforming play an unparalleled role.
0x03
The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by
the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is
surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the
noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering
technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological
tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous
forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes
the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for,
while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform
some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice
demands structural, machinic and ideological correction.
0x04
Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by
nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the
canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands
we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is
precisely why feminism must be a rationalism—because of this miserable
imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there
a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender.
If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself—
and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to
be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be
a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way
dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and
declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.
INTERRUPT
0x05
The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not
proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a 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.
Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the
wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed
localities and fragmented insurrections. Whilst capitalism is understood
as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipatory
anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the
universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as
necessarily oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals as
absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek
to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it.
0x06
Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These
are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of
twenty-first century feminism—from the remnants of postmodern identity
politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism—struggles to
adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing
substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to face up
to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between
multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.
0x07
We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges constructive
oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the
recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality
and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered challenges
specifically relating to life in a digital age—from sexual harassment
via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images—the
situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it
is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports
and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked
elements of the contemporary world. Xenofeminism is about more than
digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to
cultivate the exercise of positive freedom—freedom-to rather than simply
freedom-from—and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to
redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools
in the service of common ends.
0x08
The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms
of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive
interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There
are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can
claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more
widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today.
This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world’s poor is
adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory
workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages
that have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but
an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination.
Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of
the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally
anticipate its systemic condition responsively.
TRAP
0x09
XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as the blind
presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic
coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. This is
a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so little. Without the
labour of large-scale, collective social organisation, declaring one’s desire
for global change is nothing more than wishful thinking. On the other hand,
melancholy—so endemic to the left—teaches us that emancipation is an
extinct species to be wept over and that blips of negation are the best we
can hope for. At its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political
lassitude, and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which
too often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. The malady
of melancholia only compounds political inertia, and—under the guise of
being realistic—relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It
is against such maladies that XF innoculates.
0x0A
We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting
currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow
capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions
to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call
to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few—a
violent particularity of exclusivity—ultimately entailing catastrophe for the
many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections
between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can
be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary
and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive,
fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of
our alien kin.
0x0B
A sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from
contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but static
constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of the
good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps)
admirably expanded thresholds of ‘tolerance’, too often we are told to seek
solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being ‘born’ this way, as if offering
an excuse with nature’s blessing. All the while, the heteronormative centre
chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex
and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between
freedom and compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a
defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and
queer politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion of
freedom against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of the
given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence,
and doubt. The ‘given’ is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty,
whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When the possibility of
transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature’s shrine cracked,
and new histories—bristling with futures—escaped the old order of ‘sex’.
The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that
shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. The time has now
come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a
piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won.
0x0C
If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of
essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media
has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre
where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial
practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages
are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming,
and denunciation. Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and
skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned
as if they are debate. These puritanical politics of shame—which fetishize
oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic
frenzies—leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls,
neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.
0x0D
What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social
emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic
mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the
memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded
by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’,
‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with
the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up. The task
of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s
puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of
highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the
memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing
this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires.
PARITY
0x0E
Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. ‘Gender abolitionism’ is not code for
the eradication of what are currently considered ‘gendered’ traits from the
human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster—the
notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine.
But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in seeing
the sexuate diversity of the world reduced. Let a hundred sexes bloom!
‘Gender abolitionism’ is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society
where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer
furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. ‘Race abolitionism’
expands into a similar formula—that the struggle must continue until currently
racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than
than the color of one’s eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism
must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism
where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form:
you’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor;
you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited.
0x0F
Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist
projects—the abolition of class, gender, and race—hinges on a profound
reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic,
which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of
collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political
orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing
of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above,
but built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of
transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality
must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked
particulars—namely Eurocentric universalism—whereby the male
is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and
so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois
fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the
abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even—especially—
when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless
spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’’ campaign
against trans women is proof enough of this).
0x10
From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false
universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt
to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks
to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity.
Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise selfreflection
so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political bodies
and something that can be appropriated against the numerous oppressions
that transect with gender and sexuality. The universal is no blueprint, and
rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose XF as a platform. The
very process of construction is therefore understood to be a negentropic,
iterative, and continual refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable
architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual
modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of
militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The
most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train
order to emerge as an ‘invisible hand’ from apparent spontaneity; or exploit
the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate
to learn from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With
this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just,
injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford.
ADJUST
0x11
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.
And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and the
non-scaleable; the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and
Nature as an un-remakeable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism
has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. There
is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated
technologically.
0x12
This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the
normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of
normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent
battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of
dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite
task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality
of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology
and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on
the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these
filaments instantly dim.
CARRY
0x13
The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering repressive
gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, and
creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in
the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance
of the visual in today’s online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of
identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation.
But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past.
Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s
web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power
structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. Digital
technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite
them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other
towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual
over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps
points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as
effective interventions in our jointly composed reality.
0x14
Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as
intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment
harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration
of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of ideological
constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its
organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ and reciprocally, how a
‘we’ can be articulated. With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up
future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language
of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy—the
coordinated writing of space.
0x15
From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our
tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed
impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with
home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has
no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared
laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe
for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist
futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that
reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible
at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere—the way of
the commune—or bearing its burdens manyfold—the way of the single
parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure
of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate
women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children,
while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task
before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer
an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while
building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.
0x16
From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for
biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into
gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic
calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of
hormones—who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes—is
of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market
pharmacies it let loose—together with a publicly accessible archive of
endocrinological knowhow—was instrumental in wresting control of the
hormonal economy away from ‘gatekeeping’ institutions seeking to mitigate
threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of
bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides
need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of ‘gender hacking’ is extensible
into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker
culture has already done for software—constructing an entire universe of
free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable
communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment
of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before
us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical
abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble
a platform for free and open source medicine?
0x17
From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism
avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist
hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total
structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, XF
emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited
effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous zones, and sheer
horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or top-down impositions
of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist
ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of
transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination
as a mutational driver between such frontiers.
OVERFLOW
0x18
XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity
is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds
with ‘waiting’. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not
only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it
articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to
become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic parasite—one
that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not
an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian
community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective
self-mastery?
0x19
Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a
recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved.
We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a
new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions
for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with
ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new
language for sexual politics—a language that seizes its own methods as
materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence.
We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking,
and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills
and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping,
directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of
deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its
defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps.
0x1A
Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant
X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the
insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In
affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate
for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry
than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances
of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name
of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for
any political justification whatsoever!
If nature is unjust, change nature!