This excerpt is part of the Sub-Unit:
“Reconciling Self and Other: From Donna Harraway’s Cyborg to the alienation of Xenofeminism”.

Xenofeminism is one of the most recent additions to the field of intersectional cyber-feminism. The prefix xeno-  indicates the  o t h e r n e s s  and its trying to present a different kind of feminism, one which embrases technological change, claims the the unnatural and pursues a l i e n a t i o n.¹ This particular theoritical current is introduced by the collective Laboria Cuboniks² (2014), which extents to four countries and three continents and seeks to dismantle gender and do away with nature as a guarantor for inegalitarian political positions.³ Even though many of the the members of the collective are associated with academia, they do not wish for their project to be limited to a closed theoretical circle and seek its grounding in social movements. For this reason Xenofeminism is not constructed upon a solid theoretical core, always remaining under formation with the possibility of multiple readings from different directions. We can imagine Xenofeminism as an open source theoritical current/movement. Xenofeminism is interested in redefining the emancipatory potential of the feminist movement, with a fixed eye upon the inevitable transformation of gender politics via technological globalization and digital revolution. ⁴ For the purposes of this unit, we will focus on the statutory text of the collective “The Xenofeminist Manifesto” as well as Helen Hester’s book (one of the founding members): “Xenofeminism”. 

As it is already clear from its name, xenofeminism bears a direct political affinity with the work of Donna Haraway, as the collective aims to modernize it, radicalize it and  bring it back to the praxis of contemporary movements and subjects. 

“[…]we position ourselves as Haraway’s disobedient daughters”⁵ 

Xenofeminism aspires to create a project that responds to contemporary political conditions and directions through the composition of -among other things-: cyberfeminism, post-humanism, accelerationism, neo-rationalism and materialist feminism. The three main interrelated ideas of the current are techno-materialism, anti-naturalism and gender abolitionism.⁶  

Techno-materialism refers to the decisiveness of technology in its social, political and gendered dimensions. Xenofeminism does not contempt technology and rationality. It is fully aware of how both have been monopolized historically by patriarchical sovereignty, and for that exact reason it considers them to be major fields for activist intervention, reinterpretation and expropriation for the purpose of emancipation. Their identification with the patriarchy equals the admission of defeat.⁷ Laboria Cuboniks is particularly interested in the possibility of technology to be a vehicle 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.”⁸  Technology never has a positive or negative signifier, not even a neutral one. Technology is the byproduct of social antagonism, Technology is the result of social antagonism, and the more it transforms society, the more society transforms it. The products of technology have never been accessible to all subjects (especially in the non-Western world), but at the same time we are in a historical phase where they have never been so widely available before. The anti-naturalist position desires dynamism, the acceptance of constant change. It opposes fetishism and the consolidation of meaning. Science and technology are the social forces that allow us to intervene in the “natural world”, transforming it, disenchanting it. The notion that nature is possessed by some eternal essence of stability is at best a theological belief, and should in no way be a condition for the legitimization of any claim. These kind of perceptions emphatically demonstrate the emptiness of the term nature. Nature is everything and we cannot discern anything outside of it. Everything exists through and in relation to nature.“We claim that there is nothing that cannot be scientifically studied and technologically manipulated.” ⁹ Xenofeminism redefines the perplexity of the unknown and opposes the nostalgia for, and the return to, the “pure or natural”.¹⁰ More specifically, biology should not be understood as an end, if the very knowledge we acquire about it allows us to transform it. On the basis of this admission we must estublish the politics of emancipation. A policy that would accommodate all subjects. A policy that embraces subjects who are marginalized by the naturalization of biology, such as trans* individuals, people with disabilities, and those who do not conform to the dominant fetishized perception of health and normality.  

“If nature is unjust, change nature!”¹¹ 

The abolition of gender constitutes the combination and extension of the two previous positions. This perception does not desire the elimination of the gendered characteristics of individuals. The abolition that is desired is that of the asymmetrical power based on gender identity. Xenofeminism strives for the abolition of gender, just as it strives for the abolition of classes, with the difference being that classes are a result of structural oppression of patriarchal capitalism, while gender identities are a precondition. That is why xenofeminism cannot help but be intersectional, as it can thereby acquire a political orientation that permeates everything specific, rejecting the coarse categorization of bodies.¹² Faithful to its anti-naturalism, is considers the establishment of gender identity -especially the non-heteronormative – in the natural to be problematic. It does not want to question in any way  the experience, the pain and the unbearable struggle for survival of non-heteronormative bodies and subjects. This critique aims to liberate the gender disire. None of us should seek acceptance in nature and apologize to heteronormativity. “XF stresses the need to ‘render gender laughable and obsolete in its frigidity and instrumentality’. The recognition of innumerable genders is therefore only a first step in the refusal to accept any gender as a basis of  stable signification.”¹³ 

“Let a hundred sexes bloom!”¹⁴ 

Through this triple ideological starting point, the relationship of xenofeminism with  a l i e n a t i o n  emerges. It questions whether humanity has ever been uncontaminated from alienation and whether we can ultimately imagine them separated. In this way, xenofeminists see aspects of liberation rather than oppression in alienation. Instead of mourning the consequences of alienation, (of labor, etc.) they celebrate it.¹⁵ They wage war on stability, whether it arises from material or social conditions. “The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction.” ¹⁶ To gain a more tangible understanding of what xenofeminist praxis is or what it could be, Hester dedicates a chapter of her book to what she calls “Xenofeminist Technologies,” focusing on the issue of biological – and social – reproduction. Her reaserch revolves around the self-help groups of the second feminist wave. The two main technologies she studies are the Speculum¹⁷ and the Del-Em¹⁸. These two devices allowed many women to regain some control over their bodies, through self-examination and self-abortion, at a time when female self-knowledge about their bodies was completely discouraged and structurally undermined (especially for non-white women), and when abortion was prohibited in the majority of countries around the world. The feminists of the time successfully expropriated scientific knowledge and technology from phallocentrism, adapting them to their needs for bodily autonomy and emancipation. In parallel, she examines the contemporary movement of gender hacking, which advocates for the possibility of transforming one’s body primarily through hormone use. Projects like Open Source Gender Codes aim to socialize the knowledge and production of hormones for individuals who are excluded from accessing them. Reproductive and hormonal processing technologies provide a particular example of how the cultural alienation of the body can lead to the emancipatie the limitations of body intervention of naturalness. Self-help and D.I.Y technologies are not a panacea for xenofeminism. However, they are very useful on the one hand because they constitute very practical solutions for excluded subjectivities and on the other hand because they promote a particular ethos for how technology could be. An ethos that follows the same path as open-source software and creative commons, and desires a technology and knowledge without exclusions, which is accountable for its constructions and prerequisites, and which does not seek a transcendent position towards subjects, but positions itself on the same level with the subjects and their diverse needs.  

Donna Haraway’s and Xenofeminism’s theoretical reflections  provide us with radical perspectives for analyzing the emerging post-industrial digital world. The feminist movement, already from the 1960s, highlighted the complexity of power relations and the construction of gender subjectivity, issues that were considered inferior or at best secondary by the male custodians of emancipatory movements. These two theoretical traditions offer us the necessary tools to face the bewilderment of the complexity caused by the hyper-technological juncture, without falling into the easy solutions of total denial or unconditional acceptance. The position on the fluidity of subjectivity and biology seems to fully respond to the theoretical challenges brought by digital and technological mediation both in questions of corporeality and in questions of knowledge and meaning production. Donna Haraway and Xenofeminism want to celebrate multiplicity, by not fitting it into a digestible category. They want to praise the inseparable relationship of self and other, in the infinite multiplicity of corporeality, gender identity, culture, animality, nature. They want to claim space for the other, to express, to transform, to exist. Perhaps one of the most important legacies of this current is the reinvention of myth and utopia. In an age characterized by generalized insecurity, melancholy and pessimism, we are invited to seek liberation in the here and now, in the existing, reassembling it, expropriating it, away from the specteres of romanticism and apocalypse. 

1) Jones, Emily. “Feminist Technologies and Post-Capitalism: Defining and Reflecting Upon Xenofeminism.” Feminist Review 123, no. 1 (November 2019): pp. 126

2) Anagram of “Nicolas Bourbaki”, a pseudonym used by a group of mainly French mathematicians who worked to assert abstraction, generality and rigor in mathematics in the early twentieth century.

3) From the website of the collective – https://laboriacuboniks.net/overflow/

4) Χορδάκη, (2021). Απομυθοποιώντας το Φυσικό – Ανακτώντας την Αλλοτρίωση: Φεμινισμοί και Τεχνοεπιστήμη στο Πλαίσιο της Ψηφιακότητας. Αυτόματον: Περιοδικό Ψηφιακών Μέσων και Πολιτισμού, 1(1), 75

5) Hester Helen, Xenofeminism, Polity Press, 2018, pp. 20

6) Hester Helen, Xenofeminism, Polity Press, 2018, pp. 3

7) Laboria Cuboniks, To μανιφέστο του Ξενοφεμινισμού, Εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος, 0Χ04

8) Hester Helen, Xenofeminism, Polity Press, 2018, pp. 8

9) Laboria Cuboniks, To μανιφέστο του Ξενοφεμινισμού, Εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος, 0Χ11

10) Χορδάκη, (2021). Απομυθοποιώντας το Φυσικό – Ανακτώντας την Αλλοτρίωση: Φεμινισμοί και Τεχνοεπιστήμη στο Πλαίσιο της Ψηφιακότητας. Αυτόματον: Περιοδικό Ψηφιακών Μέσων και Πολιτισμού, 1(1), 75

11) Laboria Cuboniks, To μανιφέστο του Ξενοφεμινισμού, Εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος, 0Χ1Α

12) ibid., 0Χ0F

13) Hester Helen, Xenofeminism, Polity Press, 2018, pp. 31 The emphasis is of the writer. Text in quotation marks is a paraphrase from Subrosa, ‘Useless Gender: An Immodest Proposalfor Radical Justice’, in Yes Species (Chicago: Sabrosa Books, 2005), 57. ]

14) Laboria Cuboniks, To μανιφέστο του Ξενοφεμινισμού, Εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος, 0Χ0Ε

15) Jones, Emily. “Feminist Technologies and Post-Capitalism: Defining and Reflecting Upon Xenofeminism.” Feminist Review 123, no. 1 (November 2019): pp. 128

16) Laboria Cuboniks, To μανιφέστο του Ξενοφεμινισμού, Εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος, 0Χ01

17) A medical tool for examining body cavities.

18) In 1971, Lorraine Rothman and Carol Dowder, members of a feminist self -help group for reproductive health, modified equipment found in an underground abortion clinic, creating a device that could easily and without necessary scientific training, be an effective abortion method and a way of pausing menstruation limiting the natural side effects of the cycle.