Review of “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2015)
Laboria Cuboniks (writer).
Read in 2024.
In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!
Yet another Marxist offshoot shaped as much by taboo as by genuine interest in social progress and justice. Marx is never mentioned, even though the “alienation” of the subtitle is his idea. Gramsci is never mentioned, but “capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality” anyway. De Beauvoir is never mentioned, it’s just that “the notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine”, as if this was something the authors had just picked up on their own.
“[P]ostmodern identity politics” and some “contemporary ecofeminism” are rejected in favour of feminism “at ease with computation” in the globalized economy, but exactly why cannot be said because the pseudonymous authors decry factionalism. They also decry the idea that “blips of negation are the best we can hope for” after some underspecified failure of the political left, but this manifesto is itself a blip of negation following the pattern laid down by the Art-Language movement: high-brow, inaccessible art as if for art’s sake, vaguely expressing a half-formed ethos around the trends of the moment, which in this case is open-source software, 3D printing, and Butlerian constructions of gender. “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) was profoundly wrong about the predictability of history, but at least it could be widely read and applied.
Some of the language, I admit, is beautiful. Paragraph 12 (“0x0C”) nostalgically blasts the puritanical tendencies of pre-#metoo social media with a little bit of “The BITCH Manifesto”’s energy. Later, “Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities”. I’ll buy that, and leave a tip for name-dropping Lisp.
“Xenofeminism is a rationalism” says the pseudonymous collective, but the manifesto’s central flaw is its obscurantism. Xenofeminism “is vehemently anti-naturalist”, they say, but do not specify whether they mean the scientific study of the natural world (Darwin’s naturalism), or moral appeals to nature, or something else entirely. “Let a hundred sexes bloom”, they proclaim, as if biologists recognized or anticipated a hundred sexes outside of human influence. “Hormones hack into gender systems”, they believe, uselessly smearing a buzzword over Judith Butler’s hot indirection between sex and gender. This does not build “new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery”. This is the abandonment of rationalism to the political enemies of the authors.
I do not concur in the authors’ analysis that the black market in hormones is “the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen”. It is literally a market. I understand that they do not wish to be associated with communist genocides and dictatorships, or with pseudoscientific rationalizations for sexism or racism, but even as they embrace “contamination”, the cowards deny even having a programme. In that they are sadly correct.