[00:00] Xenofeminism, a politics for alienation, written by Laboria Kubonics. Read by Sen Naomi Kier-Schultz, June 25th, 2022. [00:15] Zero. Zero by zero. Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. [00:31] Xenofeminism 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. [00:52] No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labor, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires de-petrification. Xenofeminism is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity, and persistence. [01:22] Zero by one. [01:25] Xenofeminism seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated, but have we ever been otherwise? [01:35] It is through and not despite our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of mediacy. [01:42] 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 labor of freedom's construction. [01:55] Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or given. Neither material conditions nor social forms. Xenofeminism mutates, navigates, and probes every horizon. [02:08] 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. [02:22] 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. [02:31] Xenofeminism is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology, and the sooner it is exercised, the better. [02:43] Zero by two. [02:45] Why is there so little explicit organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? [02:52] Xenofeminism 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. [03:05] Rather than pretending to risk nothing, xenofeminism advocates necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. [03:15] Technology isn't inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. [03:28] Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender nonconforming play an unparalleled role. [03:41] Zero by three. [03:42] 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. [03:57] Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools. [04:07] Environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid or underpaid labor. [04:15] 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 labor. [04:30] Such injustice demands structural, machinic, and ideological correction. [04:39] Zero by four. [04:41] Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is by nature a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. [04:52] It is true that the canonical history of thought is dominated by men, and in its male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. [05:01] But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism, because of this miserable imbalance and not despite it. [05:08] There is no feminine rationality, nor is there a masculine one. Science is not an expression, but a suspension of gender. [05:16] If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself, and this contradiction can be leveraged. [05:24] Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. [05:30] Rationalism must itself be a feminism. [05:34] Xenofeminism marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. [05:40] It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak, as no one in particular. [05:50] Interrupt. [05:52] Zero by five. [05:53] Zero by five. [05:56] The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, [06:04] a reality cross-hatched with fiber optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, [06:11] and the unrelenting simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond. [06:19] Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of admirable but insufficient struggles bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. [06:32] While capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, [06:36] many would-be emancipatory, anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, [06:44] resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily oppressive vectors. [06:52] Such a false guarantee treats universals as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it. [07:03] Zero by six. [07:06] Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. [07:11] These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. [07:15] Much of 21st century feminism, from the remnants of postmodern identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism, [07:25] struggles to adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing substantial and enduring change. [07:30] Xenofeminism endeavors to face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material, and conceptual organization. [07:43] Zero by seven. [07:45] We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. [07:52] Xenofeminism urges constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality, and disparities of power. [08:05] Given that there are a range of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age, [08:10] from sexual harassment via social media to doxing, privacy, and the protection of online images, [08:16] the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. [08:19] Today it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world. [08:31] Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defense and freedom from patriarchal networks. [08:37] We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom. [08:40] Freedom to rather than simply freedom from and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends. [08:55] Zero by eight. [08:57] The radical opportunities afforded by the developing and alienating forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which by design only benefits the few. [09:09] There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. [09:23] This is not an illusion of the fact that a large amount of the world's poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological industry. [09:29] From factory workers laboring under abominable conditions, the Ghanaian villages have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers. [09:39] But an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. [09:44] Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsibly. [09:56] Section. Trap. [09:59] Zero by nine. [10:01] Xenofeminism rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. [10:06] Illusion, as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. [10:16] This is a politics that in wanting so much ends up building so little. [10:21] Without the labor of large scale collective social organization, declaring one's desire for global change is nothing more than wishful thinking. [10:29] On the other hand, melancholy so endemic to the left teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species to be wept over and that blips of negation are the best we can hope for. [10:41] At its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude and at its best installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair, which too often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. [10:54] The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia and under the guise of being realistic relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. [11:04] It is against such maladies that Xenofeminism inoculates. [11:11] Zero by A. [11:14] We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction to be insufficient. [11:22] To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. [11:27] Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency break of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few, a violent particularity of exclusivity, ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. [11:43] Refusing to think beyond the micro community to foster connections between fractured insurgencies to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. [11:59] Xenofeminism is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin. [12:10] Zero by Zero B. [12:13] A sense of the world's volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from contemporary queer and feminist politics in favor of a plural but static constellation of gender identities in whose bleak light equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored, while having perhaps admirably expanded thresholds of tolerance. [12:34] Too often we are told to seek solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being born this way, as if offering an excuse with nature's blessing. [12:44] All the while, the heteronormative center chugs on. [12:48] Xenofeminism challenges the centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and compulsion. [13:00] To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a defensive concession at best, and to retreat from what makes trans and queer politics more than just a lobby, that it is an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable. [13:15] Like every myth of the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and doubt. [13:23] The given is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty, whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. [13:31] When the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under nature's shrine cracked, and new histories bristling with futures escaped the old order of sex. [13:43] The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. [13:52] The time has now come to tear down this shrine entirely and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won. [14:03] Zero by C [14:06] If cyberspace once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction as become a theater where these prostrations to identity are performed. [14:21] With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation. [14:36] Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate, positioned as if they are debate. [14:46] These puritanical politics of shame, which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies, leave us cold. [14:55] We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption. [15:04] Zero by Zero D [15:07] What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. [15:17] What requires re-engineering are the mimetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviors in ways occluded by their host's self-image. [15:25] Failing this, memes like anonymity, ethics, social justice, and privilege checking host social dynamisms at odds with the often commendable intentions with which they are taken up. [15:37] The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of the desires' puppet strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. [15:50] The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires. [16:04] Parody [16:07] Zero by Zero E [16:10] Xenofeminism is gender abolitionist. [16:14] Gender abolitionism is not code for the eradication of what are currently considered gendered traits from the human population. [16:21] Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster. The notion of what is gendered sticks disproportionately to the feminine. [16:30] But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in seeing the sex-wit diversity of the world reduced. [16:36] Let a hundred sexes bloom. Gender abolitionism is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. [16:51] Race abolitionism expands into a similar formula, that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than the color of one's eyes. [17:03] Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form. [17:18] You are not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage laborer or poor. You are a laborer or poor because you are exploited. [17:26] Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects, the abolition of class, gender, and race, hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. [17:40] The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say intersectional. [17:46] Intersectionality is not the morselation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. [18:01] This is not a universal that can be imposed from above but built from the bottom up, or better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. [18:12] This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars, namely, Eurocentric universalism, whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for the raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. [18:33] Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeoisie fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even and especially when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. [18:51] The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed gender abolitionists' campaign against trans women is proof enough of this. [19:06] From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false universal and dispel such confusions. [19:13] From the moderns, we have learnt to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. [19:19] Xenofeminism seeks to construct a collisional politics, a politics without the infection of purity. [19:26] Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise self-reflection, so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political bodies and something that can be appropriated against the numerous oppressions that transact with gender and sexuality. [19:43] The universal is no blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose xenofeminism as a platform. [19:52] The very process of construction is therefore understood to be a negantropic, iterative, and continual refashioning. [20:01] Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open-source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning. [20:15] Open, however, does not mean undirected. [20:20] The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to emerge as an invisible hand from apparent spontaneity, or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. [20:31] We should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries, or the successes and failures of history. [20:38] With this in mind, xenofeminism seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford. [20:50] Section. Adjust. [20:53] Zero by Eleven. [20:56] Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be re-engineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. [21:09] To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack is to say that nothing is supernatural. [21:20] Nature, quote-unquote, understood here as the unbounded arena of science, is all there is. [21:28] And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion, the unambitious and the non-scalable, the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and nature as an unremarkable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. [21:47] There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically. [21:55] Zero by Twelve. [21:58] This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. [22:06] The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. [22:12] The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is indeed an infinite task. [22:22] There are many lacuna where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. [22:30] Poetry, sex, technology, and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. [22:37] But give up on the task of revision, release the reins, and slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim. [22:47] Section. Carry. [22:50] Zero by Thirteen. [22:53] The potential of early text-based internet culture for countering repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalized groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in the 90s has clearly waned in the 21st century. [23:11] The dominance of the visual in today's online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations, and gender norms and self-representation. [23:19] But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong in the past. [23:25] Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today's web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. [23:38] Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them. They are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. [23:49] Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality. [24:04] 0 by 14. Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. [24:15] Changes to the built environment harbor some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. [24:23] As the embodiment of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its organizations are ultimately articulations about us and reciprocally how a we can be articulated. [24:37] With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary to the [24:47] collective choreography, the coordinated writing of space. [24:52] 0 by 15. From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact as an unremarkable given. [25:04] Stultifying domestic realism has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories of communal media and technical facilities. [25:17] The home is ripe for spatial transformation, and the [25:29] But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere, the way of the commune, or bearing its burdens manyfold, the way of the single parent. [25:39] If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sector, we must be able to do so. [26:09] If we want to break the economic sphere and men from the lives of their children while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. [26:22] The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic. [26:28] We must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labor and family life while building models of familiarity, familiarity, free from the deadening grind of wage labor. [26:41] 0 by 16. [27:11] The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market pharmacies it let loose, together with a publicly accessible archive endocrinological know-how, was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from gatekeeping institutions seeking to mitigate threats to establish distributions of the sexual. [27:31] To trade in the rule of bureaucrats, for the market is, however, not victory in itself. [27:37] These tides need to rise higher. [27:40] We ask whether the idiom of gender hacking is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software, [27:51] constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to practicable communism many of us have ever seen. [28:02] Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing, reactionware, grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY HRT forums and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine? [28:23] 0 by 17. [28:24] From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of techno-materialist hegemonic proportions. [28:36] Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, xenofeminism emphasizes the importance of the meso-political sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, [28:52] creation of autonomous zones and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent or top-down impositions of values and norms. [29:02] The meso-political arena of xenofeminism's universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. [29:13] As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers. [29:19] Section. Overflow. [29:21] 0 by 18. [29:23] Xenofeminism asserts that adapting our behavior for an era of Promethean complexity is a labor requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with waiting. [29:35] Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infrastructures to make the values it articulates explicit, but also to create a new set of structures. [29:49] But places demands on us as subjects. [29:52] How are we to become hosts of this new world? [29:56] How do we build a better semiotic parasite, one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery? [30:17] 0 by 19. [30:19] Is Xenofeminism a program? [30:22] Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe or a single purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. [30:31] We prefer to think like the schemer or lisp-er who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it and for any number of related problems might unfurl with ease. [30:45] Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics, a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. [31:01] We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills in context with the logic of xenofeminism. [31:14] Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow. [31:21] It is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses so as to build a new world from the scraps. [31:38] 0 by 1A. [31:39] Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. [31:47] This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological keyframe for the formation of a new logic. [31:56] In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry, the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. [32:12] We need new affordances of perception and action, unblinkered by naturalized identities. [32:18] 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, then change nature. [32:33] This has been Xenofeminism, a politics for alienation, written by Laboria Kubonics. [32:40] Read by Sen Naomi Kier Schultz, June 25th, 2022.