The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation

By Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of oppression that have come to seem inevitable - from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself. The Xenofeminist Manifesto re-asserts that biology is not destiny, that no injustice should simply be accepted as 'the way things are', and looks to ways technologies can challenge our understandings of Nature - and even allow us to resist Nature itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788731584

Laboria Cuboniks

Laboria Cuboniks (b. 2014) is a polymorphous xenofeminist collective. As an anagram of the "Nicolas Bourbaki" group of mathematicians, Cuboniks also advances an affirmation of abstraction as an episto- political necessity for 21st century claims on equality. Espousing reason and vigorous anti-naturalism, she seeks to dismantle gender implicitly. Cuboniks is a multi-taloned, tetra-headed creature uncomfortably navigating the fields of art, design, architecture, archeology, philosophy, techno-feminism, sexuality studies, digital music, translation, writing and regular experiments with the use of evolutionary algorithms in offensive cybersecurity.

Book preview

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Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF 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. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.

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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

Reviews for The Xenofeminist Manifesto

[adaorhell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is strange to say but I wish it was not illustrated. It is like too confusing with all the images to read clearly. But very thought provoking and interesting.

[susanbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a beautiful book as an object: thick paper, bold colors, imaginative and surprising collages. The text, though, is woefully thin, articulating less a manifesto than a vague definition of xenofemism. There are echoes here of Paul Virilio, Wendy Brown, Donna Harraway, Judith Butler but no footnotes, no bibliography, so it seems as if these vague ideas sort of fell into place all at once. It's a playful book, I suppose, and pretty, but ultimately not very useful.