Xenofeminism

Our #MeToo conversations about sexual harassment and gender dynamics in workplaces lack a sufficient feminist orientation. Feminism has been commercialized and career-ized to drive ladder-climbing competition and alienation; even "intersectionality" has been co-opted by diversity and inclusion efforts to advance numbers-driven corporate greed-washing. Exploring Xenofeminism provides TWC peeps with a language that aligns a feminist agenda with worker-to-worker solidarity. Xenofeminism offers an ideological backdrop to broach the question of gendered experience in the workplace and apply the moment's magnifying glass on the patriarchy inherent to capitalism to worker organization.

Xenofeminism was architected to answer these questions: In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?

Readings

• Primary reading
  • Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks ~32 min read time
  • The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem The New Yorker, Nov 2017 ~60 min read time
• Extra reading as you desire
  • Particular Universals (interview with Helen Hester of LC) The New Inquiry, Nov 2016 ~6 min read time
  • The Reckoning: Women and Power in the Workplace The New York Times, Dec 2017 ~22 min read time
  • The #MeToo Moment The New York Times, Dec 2017 ~12 min read time
  • The Cost of Devaluing Women The New York Times, Dec 2017 ~12 min read time
  • Where is the new cyberfeminism? The Nation, July 2016 ~22 min read time
  • We are the future cunt: Cyberfeminism in the 90s (Part II is more helpful than part I) MotherBoard Nov 2014 ~20 min read time

FYI

• Xenofeminism PDF version
• Xenofeminism plain text version
• @xenofeminism on Twitter
• After Accelerationism: The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Triple Ampersand 2 min background

Areas for discussion

1. Are people in your workplace talking about sexual harassment?
   • If yes, who? (e.g. execs? peers?) What do they say?
2. Can you point to examples in your workplace experience where gendered power dynamics have been at play? Do you experience your workplace as cis-male-dominated?
3. How would you define "Lean In" or "trickle down feminism"? In what ways do you see that kind of ideology at play in your workplace?
   • In what ways is xenofeminism different from that co-option of feminism?
     • [ 0x0E ] Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capital- ism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form: you’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited.
4. What particulars of xenofeminism are a helpful feminism that you would adopt?
   • Are any of them practicable in real or digital life?
   • What could you envision to be a "feminist intervention within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world" when it come to harassment and disparities of power?
     • Are there examples you can cite that exist today?
     • Can you imagine with your group novel tech that feminists (of any gender) would/could deploy?
       • [ 0x07 ] Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–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.
5. Can you spot examples of an "insurgent memeplex" operating in our current day to day? Does #MeToo satisfy xenofeminist criteria?
   • [ 0x18 ] Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic para- site—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 unsel sh solidarity and collective self-mastery?
6. Xenofeminism is also about the liberation of tech development from capital, and the manifesto cites open source as an ideal. Do you see patriarchy at work in open source communities? In what ways could it be hijacked to a xenofeminist visioning?
   • [ 0x10 ] 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. Open, however, does not mean undirected.
7. What ideals of xenofeminism fall short or feel frustratingly out of touch with our lived experience of technology deployed by capitalism?

(art by TRACY MA in "The Reckoning: Women and Power in the Workplace" The New York Times)

“Our inner dialogues reveal something about our collective thinking: that in our public lives, and in the workplace especially, we often use this type of language to excuse, rather than confront, negative behaviors.”