mirror of
https://github.com/greyscalepress/manifestos.git
synced 2024-10-01 05:25:35 -04:00
519 lines
27 KiB
Plaintext
519 lines
27 KiB
Plaintext
# Xenofeminism
|
||
|
||
## A politics for alienation
|
||
|
||
### 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 emancipat-
|
||
tory 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 catas-
|
||
trophe 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
|
||
self-reflection 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!
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
July 2015
|
||
|
||
License: GNU Free Documentation License
|
||
|
||
Source: http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/
|