Xenofeminism
Elfie Reigate interviews Amy Ireland

Can you explain the core principles of Xenofeminism and its approach to gender?

Xenofeminism is pro-technology (whilst rejecting techno-optimism or the idea that technology alone will solve our problems) and pro-alienation (understood as a rejection of an idealised ‘nature’, biological determinism—or the idea that we must submit to the norms that have been ascribed to the bodies we were born in). It is anti-capitalist (the nuclear family, binary sex, and heterosexual reproduction are not eternal forms but contingent values that arose to support the metabolism of industrial capitalism), anti-humanist (the ‘human’ is an oppressive category whose practical historical meaning is the equivalent of ‘white’, ‘male’, and ‘rational’ and it holds no emancipatory power for the people it has traditionally been used to exclude), and gender abolitionist (which doesn’t mean xenofeminism supports ‘the abolition of markers of gendered difference so that everyone is the same’, rather it supports the abolition of the categories that determine possible and legitimate genders in advance, along with the social and discursive power these positions automatically grant). Xenofeminism also responds to intersectionalist demands by aspiring to a form of universalism that can be inhabited by all women (i.e. not just white women, or cis women) by speaking as ‘no one in particular’.

Where does ‘Xeno’ come from? / What does ‘Xeno’ mean?

Xeno- comes from the Greek ξένος (xenos, foreigner or stranger) and relates to something that arrives from outside, something strange and different. This alludes to xenofeminism’s ambition of constructing an alien future and welcoming technosocial developments that are foreign to our traditional conceptions. The feminist theorist Rebekah Sheldon puts it best when she writes: ‘Etymologically, xeno is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, xeno names the movement between, and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring, the other within, the eruption of another meaning’.

How does Xenofeminism differ from other feminist movements, like cyber feminism or what has been called “Goddess” feminism?

Xenofeminism is deeply indebted to cyberfeminism, especially to VNS Matrix, Donna Haraway, and the philosopher Sadie Plant, whose pioneering work in the 1990s focused on drawing connections between the roles played by women and machines in society. For example, both women and machines have been treated as—and to a large extent currently still are—‘infrastructure’ for patriarchy: exchangeable goods, property, reproductive labourers, editors, secretaries, assistants, etc. (the term ‘computer’ was even originally used to refer to—typically female—menial labourers responsible for performing repetitive calculations before the invention of the machines we know as ‘computers’ today). Instead of rejecting this structural similarity with machines, the cyberfeminists embraced it. They weren’t interested in fighting to become more ‘human’, which is to say, more like those who were oppressing them, they thought that real liberation for women could be found in the identification with technology, and they wrote, in particular, about the possibilities of the early internet for connection, organisation, knowledge sharing, and gender experimentation with a great deal of hope and enthusiasm.

There are a lot of crossovers between cyberfeminism and xenofeminism, however, in the xenofeminist manifesto, we recognise that our technological environment has changed a lot since the 1990s—the internet back then was extremely decentralised, almost entirely text-based, and it was very easy to remain anonymous online; now it is dominated by a handful of platforms owned by powerful corporations motivated by data extraction, it is predominantly visual, and it is a lot more difficult to remain anonymous. Feminists today have different challenges to face when it comes to using this technology for feminist and gender non-conforming ends, and consequently the xenofeminist manifesto is a lot more cautious and sober about how these problems, need to be approached.

At the end of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, which was written in 1985, Donna Haraway makes the unforgettable declaration ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. I think this goes for xenofeminism too. ‘Goddess’ feminism is anchored in a series of dualisms—female vs male, nature vs culture—that xenofeminism is more interested in destroying than upholding, and its reverence for the natural world is not something xenofeminists find appealing. For xenofeminism, nature is a key source of oppression. Also isn’t goddess an idealisation of woman that burdens her with various behavioural constraints, failing which she gets punished?

What does Xenofeminism mean by stating, “if nature is unjust, change nature”?

Nature is not and never has been a friend of women, whose ‘nature’ and place in the natural order has traditionally been used an alibi for their continued oppression—nor has it ever been a space of refuge for queer or gender nonconforming people, who daily suffer discrimination, vitriol, and hate on the basis of being ‘unnatural’.

Shulamith Firestone, whose work influenced the xenofeminist manifesto, wrote very passionately about this in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, where she describes pregnancy as ‘barbaric’ and calls out her hippie peers for celebrating what is objectively one of the most horrifying, painful, and downright dangerous things a woman can do with her body as ‘beautiful’ and ‘natural’, as if giving birth were some kind of ‘mystical orgasm’. For Firestone, this is just a way of trying to cover up the inconvenient fact that women simply have no choice. She believed that all social injustice arose from this primary inequality between men and women’s roles in human reproductive labour, and so, in order to create a more just society, childbirth and child rearing would have to be made the equal responsibility of both women and men from the get-go. To do this, reproductive labour would have to be separated from nature—Firestone proposed artificial wombs and robot nannies—only then would women have the same bodily autonomy as men. It is very easy to see, in Firestone’s worldview, how nature operates as a fundamental site of injustice and as something that it would be desirable to alter, in the very least to give women a choice about the extent to which they involve their bodies in the work of reproducing the human species.

Our ability to intervene in biological, so-called ‘natural’ processes has come a long way since Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex, and artificial or ‘ectogenetic’ wombs are indeed on the horizon. Xenofeminism is particularly invested in trans politics and standing up for our right to make the most of our collective technological capacity to alter the various gendered aspects of our biological bodies. Endocrinal technology (using hormones to alter secondary sex characteristics) and surgery are some obvious examples of how technology can intervene in gendered biological processes. But gender is already highly technological. Whether you’re cis or trans, you’re are constantly using technology to produce, perform, and maintain a gendered identity by conforming to a host of highly superficial norms: whether linguistic, sartorial, physical, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, the list goes on.

This however doesn’t stop ‘nature’ being used as a watchword by conservative and reactionary voices, who claim to have found in it the ‘truth’ or the ‘reality’ of gender, which, because it is grounded in something ‘true’ and ‘real’, must also be ‘good’, and therefore, must never be changed. Following this logic, such changes would be ‘false’ or ‘unreal’, and therefore ‘bad’. No matter that certain configurations of ‘nature’ are unjust, or that they impact some bodies more than others. All of this is negated by the simple equation ‘natural = good’.

The slogan ‘If nature is unjust, change nature!’ is an antidote to this kind of thinking. It urges us to divest nature of all these (very human) values that we think we have discovered in it, especially those that continue to perpetuate inequality and injustice, and work instead toward developing the tools that will allow us to crack nature’s codes and intervene in it in a way that might allow us to live fairer, better lives.

How does Xenofeminism address the idea of a sexed binary, and biological essentialism more generally?

Quite simply: The more you know about something, the more you can hack it.

There are aspects of sexual difference that are material and currently constitute hard limits for technological intervention (some primary sex characteristics); there are aspects of sexual difference that are material and that can very easily be tinkered with (some primary sex characteristics and all secondary sex characteristics); there are aspects of sexual difference that are material and have been systematically repressed and policed (such as intersex traits), and there are aspects of sexual difference that are discursive and contingent, so that, if history had unfolded slightly differently, we might have ended up with a very different way of thinking about sexual difference (for instance, the fact that we call the X and Y chromosomes ‘sex chromosomes’ is the result of a long and scandalous debate in science, and things would perhaps have been quite different if we had ended up with the rival term ‘accessory chromosomes’ instead).

Xenofeminism holds that engaging with the materiality of sex in all its complexity is the best way to equip ourselves with the means of dismantling those aspects of it that perpetuate injustice and inequality. Nothing is essential. If something appears to be fixed and immutable, it’s just because we don’t know enough to change it yet.

What is nature?

The nature that xenofeminism identifies as a source of oppression for women, queers, and gender nonconforming people is a construction in which ideas of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘truth’, and ‘goodness’ are projected onto the material world, which is then treated as if it were the immutable source of those ideas all along. When nature is invoked as the basis of a political argument on behalf of reactionary and conservative voices, the logic it invokes is usually something like ‘what is/what was = what ought to be’. Xenofeminism, on the contrary, is future-oriented. For us the analysis of ‘what is’ is just the starting point for the synthetic process of getting somewhere better, somewhere more ‘just’. This is why we call ourselves ‘anti-naturalist’.

What is a body?

A malleable and complex admixture of biology and technology, matter and culture.

What role does technology play in Xenofeminism?

Technology is one of the tools we can use to get ourselves from ‘what is’ to ‘what ought to be’. But for this to work, technology has to be operating in a feedback loop with collective desire; women, queers, and gender nonconforming people need to get involved in imagining, appropriating, developing, and building technologies themselves (rather than dismissing technology as something that is already too compromised by capitalism or patriarchy to be worth attempting to appropriate for queer, trans, and feminist ends); just as, equally importantly, the power of technology to free us from sex and gender inequality, or discrimination based on sexual preference, cannot be simply taken for granted. Xenofeminism is clear that it is not trying to be revolutionary. Instead of masculine heroics, it advocates for a careful and patient methodology of engineering and design. This is because it recognises that technology is a double-edged sword—it can create the greatest freedoms and greatest tyrannies depending on how it is used and who is using it—so it must be approached carefully, with an understanding of the risks involved.

Is cuteness compatible with Xenofeminism in terms of its radical politic?

Cuteness, at least as Maya and I understand it in Cute Accelerationism, is a process that opens us up to all kind of transformative processes that affect sex, gender, and identity, and I think xenofeminism and cuteness are very compatible in this sense. Cuteness can certainly be a driver of the desire to change nature, although I think it might be harder task to square this with the idea of ‘justice’. Maybe the xenofeminist tagline needs to be tweaked a little? If nature is uncute, change nature? Yeah, I like that better.