For our latest reading group in the Contemporary Studies Network, we read from Helen Hester’s 2018 book Xenofeminism. The section we examined – her introduction, ‘What is Xenofeminism?’ – is an attempt to conceptualise a new branch of feminism that is emerging from a world of increasing technological complexity. Adapting the digital Xenofeminist manifesto by Laboria Cuboniks, which can be found online, Hester expands on how we might approach gender theory whilst paying careful attention to the accelerating globalisation and virtuality of the present.
As Hester herself explain, ‘[x]enofeminism is an attempt to articulate a radical gender politics fit for an era of globality, complexity and technology’. In her book, she espouses three central ideas to her project of xenofeminism:
- technomaterialism, which seeks to emphasise the materiality of our technology that is often viewed as abstracted and free-floating (as not really existing within social relations) and to suggest its cooptive possibilities for liberatory politics and praxis.
- anti-naturalism, which rejects the privileging of a nature that is always gendered and always against technological intervention, much of which, as xenofeminism argues, can have feminist affordances. It also questions the representation of a natural domain as somewhere which is always beyond the possibilities of human intervention – as an untouchable horizon.
- gender abolitionism aims to dispose of the binary construction of gender and its investments in biological essentialism, and to introduce a proliferation of genders that can hopefully precipitate the collapse of not only gendered ideologies, but all ideologies inaugurated and reproduced through oppressive taxonomies, including race, class, sexuality, and so on.
Regarding Hester’s digital source material, the group first wanted to ask about the effects of this academic appropriation of a more confrontational manifesto. It was suggested by one reader that the switch in medium tries, in troubling ways, to solidify things that the manifesto might leave open. It was stressed that Hester does emphasise how this is just one version of xenofeminism and is perhaps, instead of solidifying things, trying to work through what they might look like in practical terms. Other initial reactions thought that it offered a good introduction to those first encountering the ideas, and that is was helpful via the ways in which Hester tries to tell us what xenofeminism is instead of only saying what it isn’t. A large part of the group’s appreciation related to the piece’s attempts at resolution and to the positive and practical angles it explored in its theorising.
A popular part of the text was its outlining of an ‘anti-naturalism’ and its rejection of a transcendental horizon of ‘the natural’. Questions were asked about the role of accelerationism in relation to xenofeminism’s depictions of horizons and how this might connect to its conceptualisation of modernity and machinery, as well as the relation of capitalism to disasters and exhaustion. One of the links that was proposed was the text’s feeling of impatience with leftist politics and its ties to ecofeminism and witch-feminism, and the desire to make action happen. Following this discussion, there were questions raised about the practicalities of what xenofeminism should actually look like and what worries might emerge from its implementations. One reader raised a concern about Hester’s support of technologically facilitated birth, asking whether we can simply assume that medical intervention always makes pregnancy and labour safer. Others wanted to know why gender specifically is the initial angle of analysis for the text when Hester herself stresses that the movement is intended to deal with multiple intersectional axes of identification and oppression. A proposed answer to this problem was that a part of Hester’s ambition is to rehabilitate second-wave feminism and its radical legacy which has been subsumed and sullied by its association with recent transphobic feminist discourse – an aim that people felt sympathetic towards. Another reader asked about the xenofeminist aesthetics – some of which can be ascertained from the online manifesto – that become lost in its translation into printed text, which itself does not address this potential angle of critique or positive action.
Xenofeminism’s commitment to ‘gender abolitionism’ raised many questions about our self-categorisations, especially in our digital media – how much do the perpetually supplemented drop-down menus of our online profiles feed into the marketing industry, their algorithms, and their systems for personalised advertisement? Can we ever get away from categorisation through the proliferation of genders that Hester espouses? In her claim to make space for transfeminism in xenofeminism, how successful is this particular call to gender abolition? The proliferation and its encouragement of individualisation brought to mind for one reader the problematic move from the individual to the homogenised in Foucauldian power-knowledge and its panopticon forms. It was suggested that in having to talk about the eventual elimination of categories she has to bypass solidarity politics, the attempted intersectionality of which came across as too tokenistic for some readers of the piece, especially when xenofeminism is supposed to address all identity instantiations. In a defence, the text was likened to a trend in contemporary non-fiction writing whereby semi-memoir styles often cannibalise their sources without actively eliding them. This might allow Hester traction for her ideas whilst not requiring her to always defer to the intellectual history that has influenced them.
Others found the focusing on reproduction in regards to the debate of gendered technology to be a problematic form of reductionism. Linking back to the troubles about assuming experiences of pregnancy, the ideas of ‘welcome suffering’ made us ask exactly what is being presupposed about women’s experiences of giving birth. This was found especially significant in connection with contemporary leftist attention to anti-suffering as a momentum for activism that denies the necessity of any martyrdom or asceticism. Despite the potentially troubling aspects of the piece’s assumptions, positivity was expressed towards its drive to repurpose things for their potential benefit instead of dismissing them outright.
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