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

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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 my own 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

^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.