Laboria Cuboniks - The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation

Published by Verso 2018
(CC-BY 4.0) Laboria Cuboniks 2018

Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International Licence

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-157-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-158-4 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-159-1 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cuboniks, Laboria, author.

Title: The Xenofeminist Manifesto : A Politics for Alienation / Laboria Cuboniks.

Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018007549| ISBN 9781788731577 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788731591 (United States e-book) | ISBN 9781788731584 (United Kingdom e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Feminist theory. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory.

Classification: LCC HQ1154 .C773 2018 | DDC 305.42dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007549

Design by Chloe Scheffe

Printed in the UK by CPI Group

Reason, like information,
wants to be free.

CONTENTS

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 its certainly not given by anything natural. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedoms construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or given neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone whos been deemed unnatural in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone whos 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 technopolitical interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isnt 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.