MY CURRENT READING LIST

1: The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cauboniks 

2: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools For The New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin (Introduction & Chapters 1-3)

REFLECTIONS

”The Xenofeminist Manifesto” offers some useful forms of consideration regarding the type of future desired for humanity as a collective through pursuing a kind of transformative universalism. As expected, much of what is considered new or futuristic can be found in precolonial racialized societies with respect to gender & sexuality. Which reveals a lack of historical insight can very well lead to a lack of imagination. 

I found myself uncomfortable with how the author limits their understanding of nature & biology as a limited, fixed, or unchanging thing.  If we take essentialism as fact, then a denial of nature in ways makes sense.  But biology and nature are not unchanging entities but rather dynamic ever changing phenomena. And I  have a wide variety of issues with transhumanism which ignores the fact that the question of who is human is a matter of endless capital generation.

*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.“ 

Racism falls out of the perview in the first section of the manifesto as being addressed by the mention of antiracism, which I find odd since antiracism has yet to achieve its goals, some of which have yet to be theorized or practiced.  Racism embodies the central problem with Xenofeminism, the question of who is human. Who gets to be human in today’s settler society?  Who gets to decide who is human? Who gets to have their humanness respected? The human hasn’t been defined yet, and many die fighting to change recent definitions.  This transhumanism, in other words a kind of theorizing beyond the human, is defined as ”the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology” (New Oxford American Dictionary). 

Another interesting miss the collective makes is not unpacking the connections between nature, racism, and sexism.  Nature is positioned here as the enemy, more specifically the fixed, unchanging thing that requires man’s intervention.  While the thesis of the manifesto to transform nature (as if nature is inherently unequal), it relies on a reductionist and essentialist biology rather than the reality of what biology is.  Much of what was confronted about nature were age old Western colonial ideals rather than the dynamic every changing biology we know today.  Maybe Xenofeminism has a particular goal to confront essentialist naturalism, that is very possible, but I would also ask what then does Xenofeminism have for the field of evolutionary biology, advances in biotechnology, and the consequences of a different philosophy of biology saturating the public.  The kind of futurism I am interested in aligns more with Black feminist futurisms and Indigenous futurisms than with Xenofeminism.  Though the Xenofeminist Manifesto states that technology is not inherently progressive, the steps toward a better society are left unexplained for the most part.  There is a reliance on the importance of reason as a guide

Reading this manifesto made me think of Sociologist Ruha Benjamin’s new book “Race After Technology” which reviewed how different racist practices find new lives through technology, what she calls The New Jim Code.  In this text Benjamin invites readers to think of race as a kind of technology, “Race as technology: this is an invitation to consider racism in relation to other forms of domination as not just an ideology or history, but as a set of technologies that generate patterns of social relations, and these become Black-boxed as natural, inevitable, automatic” (2019:44).  With this in mind there is a complete realm that Xenofeminism ignores, especially the transfer of social relations to the material tools we use to interact with one another.

Instead of advocating for a move against nature itself, why not envision nature outside of Euro-colonial naturalism?  Nature was not and is not inherently the enemy of colonized populations. There is still much to be said about hegemonic difference as an innate part of ‘human nature’.  While many forms of domination have hinged their arguments on nature itself and what they claim to be natural, evolutionary biology has provided a expansive view of nature as a dynamic phenomena, one reliant on variation, one in which difference is not inherently hierarchical. Naturalism then is not an accurate representation of nature, but rather a falsehood, hinged on a fixed hegemonic view of organic life. Xenofeminism relies on a belief in Euro-Western naturalism and biological determinism that misrepresents nature and our place in it.