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.
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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!
*fans self*
i recommend the whole thing
buncha people told me this seems neat but they don’t get it so imma try and explain
i don’t speak academic feminism that great either so soz if i fuck it up
(long post is long so rest after the cut if you’re on the dash)
i’m going off the manifesto and also the book by Helen Hester
the book is pretty good but if the language in the XF manifesto didn’t work for you maybe give a miss because yeah dialled up to 11 there
anyway what is Xenofeminism?
wait sorry better question
why is Xenofeminism?
the manifesto doesn’t suggest much of a plan
(well it does suggest “why not buy hormones off the internet?” as a plan which is a pretty good plan because fucking medical gate keepers honestly but it’s maybe a bit of a specific one that leaves a lot of problems still on the table)
i don’t think it’s trying to though it’s not really a plan so much as a position
it creates a space and a sentiment which you can form plans around
we’re not sure how to get there but we wanna go thataway
ok so what is that direction? XF is “a politics for alienation” but what does that mean?
uh honestly that’s the bit that i’m most stuck on wiktionary help me out here
alienation: the act of alienating or the state of being alienated
gee thanks
also emotional isolation or dissociation
oh hmm ok maybe but i think this might be one of those technical terms
alienation is a highly polysemic word! We quite self-consciously play on this at different points in the manifesto - Marxist alienation, alienation through technology, alienation through our very capacity for abstract reasoning. In one way or another, all of these ideas come to be woven together to make up the fabric of xenofeminism. In the manifesto, we frame alienation as a generalized condition - one that, rather like capitalism itself, possesses both differentiating and universalizing tendencies. (Alienation may be a common experience, in other words, but it’s very clearly an unevenly distributed one - no matter in what sense we are using the word.)
right
ok
translation is hard so imma make shit up and hope it’s not totally off base
you know that feeling that where you don’t fit?
it’s not quite loneliness but that’s in there
it’s a mismatch
a lack of agency - you want to be able to pick your direction but the world is a mess and you got bills to pay so maybe later
maybe there’s that thing you want to do but you don’t because everyone would look at you weird
you’re probably a human most of the time but sometimes it feels like there’s you and there’s everyone else and one of these things is not like the other
that’s a sense of alienation
XF is asking what if the problem is not that feeling that you don’t fit in but instead the very notion of fitting in at all
what if the solution to feeling weird is not trying to be normal but saying fuck all y'all turning that dial to 11 and going full freak?
and what if we had a feminism built not on trying to build a new normal but on telling the concept of normal to take a hike?
XF is not so much a plan for this but a shape of the future they (we) want
they know that some of this could go real pear-shaped if you just try and drop it on society as is so they spend a bunch of time in the manifesto (Hester spends more time yet in the book) saying why that is
but they still want to imagine what the world should be
work in the now but dream of the future
they have three things going on in this (i put them in a different order than they do because i think it makes more sense this way):
- anti-naturalism
- gender abolitionism
- technomaterialism
anti-naturalism is their punchline but i think it’s so good that we’ll start with it:
If nature is unjust, change nature!
people talk about “born this way” and sure that was a pretty useful stick to beat people with in the fight for rights but it leaves a lot of people on this side of the fight cold
who cares if i was born this way or not if this is the way i wanna be?
i mean sure if you were born some particular way and want to roll with that then cool go for it
but if you woke up one morning and went you know what i think imma be a girl today then thumbs up good job you go girl
nature is the one that says that either we need to grow new people inside other people (which sucks for most of the people involved) or the human race goes bye bye
XF says that nature is just another asshole telling us what to do and if we want things to get better then we need to stop listening to its shitty advice
now gender abolitionism lets talk about that
gender abolitionism is the idea that gender is bad
problem is if you take that idea and stick it in the world as is what you get is lets all look and act like cis dudes
right now “gender is bad” turns in to “femininity is bad” because power gets to set the defaults so “ungendered” really means “masculine”
that sucks obviously
XF doesn’t want that instead it wants to to take all the bits that people call gender and split them up
femme with a beard? looking good!
super manly stay-at-home dad wants to knit while looking after the kids? A+ cool hobby bro
not happy with the body nature handed you? go ahead and swap it out for a new model
point is it’s all good
part of all this is rejecting labels which put people into tidy little gender categories
doesn’t matter if it’s 2 or 3 or 100 genders they’re still boxes and XF wants every thing whether big or small to be up for grabs
which is hard when nature keeps popping up and going “um excuse me i think you’ll find that bodies don’t work like that actually”
remember how nature is an asshole?
anyway part the three of XF: technomaterialism
what’s that mean?
well it means that science and technology are good actually
there’s this quote that people mostly trot out to disagree
the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house
i don’t think i’ve ever seen anyone say this except to start an argument about it but it seems to capture stuff some people believe pretty well anyway
anyway like everyone else who quotes this XF raises the obvious objection: of course they can crowbars are fucking great at dismantling houses no matter who the crowbar belongs to
XF takes the stance that if we want to fight nature then science and tech are pretty much our best friends and allies in that fight
if you’re going to be trans then it’s a hell of a lot better to do that in a world with easy access to hormones than not
if you’ve got a uterus then isn’t all this uterus management tech we’ve got super neato?
and wouldn’t it be great if we could do all of this stuff even better?
science and technology is how we get over the bullshit limitations nature put on our bodies
but like just going “lets abolish gender!!!” right now isn’t going to go so great science and tech right now have a bunch of problems
the master’s tools might be able to dismantle the master’s house but that isn’t much help when the master is the one that has all the damn tools
technology is empowering but right now the ones who already had the power
and built on the forced labour of the people who have the least
XF tries to keep the ways in which technology in society is bad (lots) separate from the fact that technology is good (technology is pretty neat)
so technology good power bad
XF’s answer to this is to seize the means of knowledge production
if the problem is that the people in power have all these cool tools then lets take the tools for ourselves
want hormones? buy ‘em on the internet and ask for help from the many people doing the same
want to better understand your body and how to fix problems with it that the medical system doesn’t take seriously? so do thousands of others why not figure out something together?
“hacker culture” has mostly been co-opted by money but XF wants to embrace it in its classic form
(no not “being an asshole to people on the internet” the sales pitch version)
lets play with knowledge
lets figure things out
if we don’t like it well lets put our heads together and figure out how to change it
so that’s as close to a translation of the core of XF as i can get but now a word from your sponsor (me)
what did i get out of this?
the future could be boring or weird and wouldn’t it be way better for everyone if it were weird?
the future is going to be extremely beige if we don’t do anything about it
doing something about it requires routing around existing power structures
but just because the tools of power were built by assholes doesn’t mean we can’t use them it’s gonna be great
feminism or transhumanism? why not both? both is good
thetasteoffire