The Xenofeminist Manifesto - A politics for alienation

  • daily lives become abstracted, hypermediated, virtualized, complex
  • need a feminism at greater scale and cunning
  • no more ‘futureless’ pursuit of capital
  • no more submission to productive and reproductive labour
  • ‘depetrification’
  • “XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.”
  • “alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds”
  • free ourselves from immediacy
  • alienation is the work needed to construct freedoms
  • “neither material conditions nor social forms” fixed or permanent
  • anti-naturalist, no ‘natural’ essentialist nature of things - nature is a constructed category
  • little/disparate/disorganized efforts to repurpose technologies for progressive politics
  • “strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world”
  • serious risks - “prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak.”
  • need “technopolitical interfaces responsive to these risks”
  • tech use in a positive feedback loop
  • “Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking”
  • “The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized” 0X03
  • rapid growth, bloat, commodified cruft
  • “unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour”
  • gender inequality such a crucial force here in terms of reproductive labour, hidden labour, underpaid labour etc
  • rationality is not a patriarchal enterprise
  • “the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology.”
  • no gendered rationality, science is a ‘suspension of gender’
  • “two-way dependency”
  • ‘Rationalism must itself be a feminism.’
  • “the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.”
  • “monstrous complexity of our reality”
  • “a reality crosshatched” with cables/pipelines/networks
  • “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”
  • by treating big-picture politics as necessarily oppressive you generate disjuncture between what we seek to depose and the strategies to depose
  • “collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.”
  • “adamantly synthetic”
  • “constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies” - theory and practice
  • “freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from”
  • “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.”
  • “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”
  • “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. ”
  • “the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash”
  • “technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.”
  • “XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors”
  • “the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives.”
  • “melancholy–so endemic to the left–teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species”
  • “such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude, and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which too often degenerates into factionalism”
  • “The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia”
  • “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.”
  • “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. ” WAN HERE
  • “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.”
  • on queer identity and politics - “Like every myth of the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and doubt.”
  • “‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories” WAN HERE TOO
  • “contemporary social media […] has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed”
  • identity politics distracting from fundamental liberation “Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate.”
  • “politics of shame–which fetishize oppression”
  • “We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror.”
  • “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”
  • “collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings”
  • “deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems”
  • “Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist.”
  • “the notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine”
  • “Let a hundred sexes bloom! ”
  • ” ‘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”
  • “the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects–the abolition of class, gender, and race–hinges on a profound reworking of the universal”
  • “Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular”
  • “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.”
  • “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”
  • “coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity”
  • “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”
  • “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.”
  • “nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom”
  • “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. ”
  • “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.”
  • “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.”
  • 90s cyberfeminist intentions strongly declined in further decades :(
  • “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.”
  • “Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s web” - requires exploiting potential but remaining aware of older power structures
  • “Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them”
  • “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.”
  • “Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. ”
  • “the production of space and the decisions we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ ”
  • “xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy–the coordinated writing of space.”
  • “domestic space too must not escape our tentacles.”
  • “the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact”
  • “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. ”
  • “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.”
  • “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.”
  • “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. ”
  • “the distribution of hormones–who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes”
  • “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. ”
  • hormones as ‘wetware’ -“akin to what hacker culture has already done for software–constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms”
  • “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?”
  • “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.”
  • “a ferocious patience at odds with ‘waiting’. ”
  • “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?”
  • “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.”
  • “a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence.”
  • “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.”
  • “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. ”