#xenofeminism

[words-so-innefable]

The Xenofeminist Manifesto : A Politics for Alienation

Laboria Cuboniks

[streamxsoniksubway]

dollyoko

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks

goodreads

“Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist… Let a hundred sexes bloom! …[And, let’s] construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power… You’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited…”

Mod opinion: I haven't read this essay yet, but it sounds interesting!

[stargir1z]

helen hester: "biology is not destiny, it can be technologically transformed" interview with toni navarro

[subtheory]

I have a Goodreads account in which I write reviews of the stuff I read. You can find it here. I will follow all of you back, if you choose to follow me. I need some new inspiration!

Below you will find my two cents on Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation by the working group Laboria Cuboniks.

"Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, while never explicitly a manifesto, has consistently been described as one. This description puts certain expectations of genre and style upon the work, which might mire its reception when it does not fulfil them.

This work, however, is a breath of fresh air into a stale theoretical environment content with sloganeering and momentary action. It is predominantly a project of salvaging: salvaging seemingly tainted and impure concepts—such as alienation, reasoning, and the universal—which in the literature have been closely tied to their origins in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The repression of these concepts comes from a bastardised analytical relationship with history in which past events are regarded as blueprints for assessing future events. In moderation this practice should be encouraged, but when performed in the excessive manner that it is, it leads to the foreclosure of the new in general and a refusal to re-work old concepts to fit better aims specifically.

The work argues for a politics rooted in alienation. This alienation, however, is not the one characterised by Marx but, rather, the human's alienation from any notion of authentic nature. As Laboria Cuboniks points out, this is not a recent invention of capitalism but a rift that has been gradually opened up alongside the proliferation of reasoning. Humans were reasonable, and thus alienated, long before modernity and capitalism came to be. A politics aware of this alienation allows for interventions into a given and theological nature, which has been used to justify various horrors, e.g., the confinement of women's bodies. Such interventions may be major, initiated by humanity at large, or may be minor such as the feminist makeshift technologies concocted in times of prohibition of abortion (analysed in Helen Hester's book on Xenofeminism).

By drawing on Sellars and Brandom, Laboria Cuboniks tries to dethrone "Reason" to emphasise reasoning in its stead. That is, they abandon the old way of "Reason", as a faculty in the minds of white men, and open up for the practice of reasoning as a social enterprise, a messy and entangled doing, which entails participation of multiple agents within a diverse field of communities. This would entail silenced and oppressed groups as well. As they write: "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." One of the tasks ahead is to forge a conception of a minor reasoning encompassing difference.

The same task awaits that of the universal. The universal should not be constituted politically by ascribing one principle indiscriminatorily to a diverse fields of phenomena. Instead, it should entail a gradual and piecemeal transformation from below. No universal is truly universal. It is always a patchwork capable of being reworked one place at a time. But this reworking must strive to be all-encompassing.

Why this need to salvage such concepts? Because the left today is impotent to foster any sustained change. It is satisfied with local and small-scale interventions which have no truck with large-scale abstractions. What Laboria Cuboniks argue for is a displacement of strategy: the left should not turn its back to the universal itself, and thus to complete social transformation, but rather switch to a different account of the universal, one which is intersectional and piecemeal.

I find a lot of value in the moves this work makes. However, I wonder whether Laboria Cuboniks may themselves usher in a new sort of theology: this time, one pertaining to technology. As is the case with transhumanism, for example, technology itself may be theologised. Laboria Cuboniks is not crossing this boundary but I do believe a broader view of technology might remove any remaining tinge of doubt. In Theory, for example, well-known technology is being diffused through Foucault's technologies of self, as voluntary and transformative practices, and Heidegger's question regarding technology, in which technology becomes a tool to diagnose a present. Xenofeminists henceforth should draw on other references than the two mentioned. This could come about, for instance, through a more detailed elaboration of Firestone's concept of technology.

All in all, this work is necessary. I hope a time may arrive in which it will be more widely accepted. However, this would require its current adherents to expand upon xenofeminism, something we have yet to see done outside of Laboria Cuboniks."

[cybergardenities]

Hello people of the universe.

Welcome to the Cybergardenities Archive, please read this post to get a hold what we’ll be doing here.

On this page I will be posting my artistic research in the field of anti and posthumanities. There will be several types of posts. Expect source text repositories (links to texts I’m working with), cool art I find (both relating to specific project and appealing to my general interests) and finally my own projects. I will also share music recommendations, and different thoughts I have about state of our world, but I want to maintain focus on documenting creative and research processes I’m doing. I do my research to inform myself and others on different aspects of solarpunk, here understood as a modern, multi-faceted counterculture movement that seeks to overthrow and replace current socioeconomic system with one that respects everything that lives (or not).

Discussion and suggestion is encouraged <33. Bear in mind that transphobes, racists, antisemites, queerphobes, ableists and all bigots will be banned relentlessly, human rights are not up for discussion, respect people here.

Video editing and color grading commissions are welcome, please check at the portfolio post if you want to know more.

Thank you and wish you a pleasant stay.

[mtrw]

[marxistlovingmeninist]

the Communist Intergalactic is gonna be REAL patricia, just you wait :3

i cannot be getting upset at ppl not understanding the weight of that immortality poll

[zoestorm]

Thoughts on xenofeminism?

This is the first time I've heard the term; I've googled it, but I don't think I understand the concept enough to have an informed opinion.

[subtheory]

I am once again at it on my Goodreads. This time I have read Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Below follows my two cents on it:

"Even a compelling book spoils in the face of time. Such is the case with McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

The book was written and compiled in the sixties where the future was still dangerous. Enthusiasm ran high, aided by delightfully speculative sci-fi authors and increased streams of information. But innovation had already ran out of steam just twenty-five years after the publication of this book. Technology didn't become the unified project it was set out to be, connecting disparate communities and achieving marvellous feats of progress. Instead, owners of private property captured and occupied the vectors and made the flow of information contingent to capital. Ingenuity was lost to rigid standardisation.

When McLuhan writes about the difficulties of having to make sense of a new world through old concepts, we cannot claim that he was referring to anything else but to the acts of PR. The old concepts were redefined through marketing. A concept such as innovation, earlier committed to grandiose improvements, designates now the incisive ability of capturing unclaimed societal processes and monetising them. This innovative process is simple: you give a start-up a flashy brand design and then encourage them to grasp onto a process in which there is still potential for swapping out the buyer's personal property with precarious renting. The old concept of innovation was too cost-intensive. Innovation of that kind requires time, taking risks, and repeated failures. This is not a feasible business model in a world ruled by immediate profits.

An irksome thing about this book is its deification of the child. Numerous times it is heralded as approaching the world in an immediate and thus unspoiled manner. I, again, refer to Helen Hester's monograph on xenofeminism for a meticulous analysis and refutation of the phenomenon of casting children as the pure image of the future. The child enjoys this special status both on the right and on the left, and there is a need for fostering new kinships apart from the old familial structures.

Fiore's graphic layout of this work cemented the central point: the medium is that which significantly shapes how we do something. The readers are defamiliarised through the design, demanded to either flip the book upside-down or reflect it through a mirror to read the texts. The composition is distinctly modern, the typeface an aloof sans serif. However, it is grating how McLuhan and Fiore insist in text and in design that form and content are two distinct phenomena and that we must uphold a demarcation. The relationship between form and content is more murky as they are not easily distinguishable from each other. The medium becomes substantive. I didn't get the feeling that McLuhan and Fiore went quite as far in this direction as they should.

Experimental. Charming. Jejune. Obsolete."

[radfem-not-terf]

Have you encountered xenofeminism? How do you think it interacts with your inclusive radical feminism? I notice that TERFs completely dismiss the idea.

i actually have not heard of this yet! if you have a link or somewhere that i can find extra information, please send it to me and i'll do my best to give an educated response :^3

[cankerworts]

God is the GREAT unknowing , from that which we gather a many supposed knowing’s , that configure structure , that propose reality itself , as without proposition of form , there lays god vulnerable in a room of reflection , refracting the void into itself , singularity

It’s the ‘divine feminine’ because femininity is birth , reproduction ie change (opposing production in a consistent manner) by challenging , by not standing still , by maintaining formlessness , different perspective taking shape constituting a lack of act to enable non-chaos , or coherence

masculinity , the father , is the entrapment of the divine feminine , the stream of all , into a concise web of applicability , produced into a form to uphold a system that perpetuates itself in a way that honours the infinite perpetuation of the energy of the feminine that it ever consumes to uphold its creations

malleability (feminine) / ‘softness’ s

Ultimate peak / expression , is impenetrability (formlessness)

thus why , reproduction , creation (duality of the two physical emulations of the primordial collision , masculine&feminine) is THROUGH PENETRATION , the very ritual that life created to physically enact the ceremony that emulates the nature of the masculines nature to control/dominate the passivity (non-attachment) of the feminine into a mixed creation of the two’s yearning for simultaneously unknowing & also structural integrity, through a blank vessel , with physical form (physical form, the flesh, a ‘knowing’ while simultaneously being devoid of ‘purpose’ , purpose being the chase that is perpetuated by the dominion the masculine yearns for .

Thus why , the feminine is the energy contained in the driver of ‘progressive’ political thematics , thus why the ‘feminisation’ of men is current in topic , as an ‘attack’ as the ‘feminisation’ of anything is deemed intuitively as a counter-act to the dominion that maintains the structures at be, thus why punk is feminine , counter-culture , and queer culture , xenofeminism, the breaking down of the difference between gender & sex , depiction of lucifer , it is the challenging of the physical plane , through a motherly accessing of spirit , intuition , the nature , that is without entrapment , chaos in its euphoric dance ! Tandava !

when you wish to ‘know’ it is an act of territorial dominion on the environment , a castration of the chaos that lays active , as it is slowly diluted into a contained chamber of tense unknowing , as pattern continues and runs itself dry without new opponent , new element , and without external force it begins to build so much tension that it will internally combust .

unknowing is submission to the father, not proposing father as stronger than , or more influential , but a submission that perpetuates a safety in the act of supplying actions that nurture the very passivity that can promote internal-change and forgiveness , progress .

God is Aphrodite , Sophia , Shiva , The Black Hole

[chill-in-heat]

Dining Amygdala

A breeze of cold flooded her body, he must be back from the Market. He returned through the empty room. [4] "I love when you wear that red" he remarked "Did you get the fruits?" "If apples, pears, almonds and strawberries are really nothing but "the Substance", "the Fruit", the question arises: Why does "the Fruit" manifest itself to me sometimes as an apple, sometimes as a pear, sometimes as an almond? [5] Kati stayed silent. Everything would remain in the same state of confusion. [6]

Then tasting of the fruit, "How is this?" [7] „Try!" Kati stared at the almond in disgust. "I don't like almonds and you know it." „Try!" She pinched it with two fingers and slowly led it into her mouth. "It may be a personal taste [8] but it reminds me of strawberries and cream." [9] "I hate it!" Fierce. „Now lick at it." [10], he commanded "They’ll destroy your brain." [11], she refused He was exasperated and furious. [12] "I feed you and take care of you: you love me and follow me for it." [13] he spoke. She stood up, smashed the chair and took away his almonds. She glimpsed and threw them on the ground and stomped on it Her work was strange and too violent. [14] "You’ll ruin things. [15]”, There was tension in his voice. [16] "They’ll destroy your brain." [17], she repeated, screaming. “Give it to me [18] or I'll make you!” „Make me! Take me! [19] Hit me! [20] Break me! Stuff me! Fuck me!"

Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. [21] Only mixture and disorder, wrangle and chaos give the illusion of matter. [22] We think it is about rough sex [23] but In an abstraction of Mondrian’s type, the painting ceases to be an organism or an isolated organization in order to become a division of its own surface, which must create its own relations with the divisions of the “room” in which it will be hung. A gaze could create (and destroy, and declare null and void). [24] The Room, Ovale, Ribbed ceiling, long table, Wooden chairs, chimney, Almonds. Chaos reigns. [25]

The two make their fall into the river, into oblivion.

[1] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [2] Serres, The Five Senses, [3] Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture, [4] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [5] Marx, Collected Works, [6] Serres, History of Scientific Thought, [7] The Book of the Thousand and One Nights Supplementary Nights, [8] Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture, [9] Joyce, Ulysses, [10] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [11] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [12] Hugo, Les Miserables, [13] Wollstonecraft, Complete Works, [14] Rand, The Fountainhead, [15] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [16] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [17] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [18] Hugo, Les Miserables, [19] Hugo, Les Miserables, [20] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology, [21] Cuboniks, Xenofeminism A Politics for Alienation, [22] Serres, History of Scientific Thought, [23] Carter, Shaking A Leg, [24] Handke, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, [25] Girard, Violence and the Sacred

[meetingpoints]

can’t tell if xenofeminism is brilliant or profoundly stupid. will investigate.