XENOFEMINISM: DISPOSSESSING THE NORM
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation is a manifesto created by a group of people across many timezones working together under a psuedonym Laboria Cuboniks. The concept of XF is a new form of feminism that challenges the world with a new reality that proposes the mediation of technological development using “abstraction, virtuality and complexity.” Cuboniks mentions that the development of technology is made for those in the dominant positions of society. Alienation has transcended the border of the physical world into cyberspace and XF pulls us to that reality of cyber-discimination.
That being said, the “online curation of identity that most of us engage in is both freeing and shackling at once.” For example, communities can connect together and talk about their experiences in order to empower themselves and others by transcending geographical constraints. Thus, cyber space has been a haven of activism.
Consequently, people are still being alienated. According to Cuboniks, “It is through, and not despite our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. 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.” With the recognition of exclusion among “non-normal” subjects— white, male cisgendered, heterosexuals — can be used as a device to sanction a new universalism through the forging of solidarities that cut through different forms of identities, reinforcing intersectionality as an extension of the excluded’s limitations. XF addresses stepped up inequality in cyberspace similarly to Brown, Fine, Ruglis and Castells. Similarly to XF, Brown discusses how technology is designed for whiteness, Fine and Ruglis discuss the system of dispossession in society in favor of the norm (which is translates into White privilege,) and Castells discusses the age of inequality, polarization and social exclusion where devalued people are “switched off” the global network. All three scholars arguments support XF in its critique of “the norm” and “nature,” calling for resistance and the deconstruction of an otherwise separatist status quo.
Brown breaks down how technology is designed for “prototypical whiteness,” reinforcing the notion that anything that digresses from the norm — maleness, whiteness and heteronormativity — is not included in the process of technological development. For instance, Brown claims, “to understand the practices of prototypical whiteness (as well as prototypical maleness, youth and able-bodied-ness) and the ways that biometric information technologies are sometimes inscribed in racializing schemas that see particular biometric systems privileging whiteness or lightness in the way in which bodies are measured for enrollment…”(Brown 110-111). Brown calls out the technological institutions for creating technology for the privileged just as Cuboniks does in the manifesto. Cuboniks discusses this form of institutional discrimination in the manifesto by tying the notions of “nature” and “tolerance” to normalize these exclusionary structures. Cuboniks addresses this normalized notion of “seeking solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being ‘born’ this way, as if offering an excuse with nature’s blessing” by claiming, similarly to Brown that this “tilt” in the direction of “nature is a defense concession at best, and a retreat from what makes” discrimination against gender, sexuality, race, class, etc… “an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable.” The public as asserted by Cuboniks and Brown must call for the de-institutionalization of this “prototypical whiteness” and “heteronormativity” by recognizing the discriminatory realm in which they live in. It is not assimilation that Cuboniks and Brown want, but rather the creation of a new inclusive institution flexible enough to change to accommodate progress.
Cuboniks discusses the dangerous notion of “nature” and being “born this way” used as an excuse to be discarded from the norm. Fine and Ruglis make a point of explaining how this “facade of “naturalness,”” is itself an expression of white privilege” and thus “anchors these circuits of dispossession” (Fine & Ruglis 20). While Fine and Ruglis focus on the discriminatory surveillance and dispossession of Black and Brown students in education, they still touch on Cubonik’s concept that “nature” isn’t “ a refuge of injustice, a basis or any political justification.”
Fine and Riglis argue that the “sociopolitical parasitism of racism, in which the overdevelopment of Whites relies directly upon the underdevelopment and sustained dispossession of Black and Brown students” (Fine & Ruglis 31). There is thus an inverse correlation between the progress of prototypical whiteness and the lack of progress for who are not white, cisgendered, heterosexual males, just as Cubonik’s claims. Fine and Ruglis further Cubonik’s fight for XF by affirming the injustice with the “other” :the non-norm. For instance, “Whites, have at their disposal a public sphere that enables their development, offers protection, and provides supports. …At the same time, and on the other side of the same public policies, many African American, Latino, immigrant, poor, and increasingly Muslim and queer/trans youth are being read as disposable, embodying danger, worthy of dispossession, or in need of containment” (Fine and Ruglis 31). The public’s responsibility lies in the admonition of this thought, and as Fine and Ruglis would put it, the push to “ a fierce and radical intentionality to stop the bleeding within and beyond schools;” a “radical intentionality” like Cubonik’s XF.
Similarly to Brown and Fine and Rugis, Castells also admits that “The Information Age does not have to be the age of stepped-up inequality, polarization and social exclusion. But for the moment it is. (Castells 10) Castells discusses the prevalence of a network society that depends exclusively on shared “cultural codes”. These “cultural codes” deal with how “certain categories that frame the meaning of experience, then the networks will process them efficiently, and will return to each one of us the outcome of their processing, according to the rules of domination and distribution inscripted in the network” (Castells 16). Castells’ concept of the “rules of domination and sitribution inscripted in the network” speaks to the anti-naturalist nature of XF because it admits to the injustice in the cultural system of society and the way that it frames and develops technology. Since Castells is denouncing that, Cuboniks does the same by claiming that “XF seeks to strategically deploy existing tehnologies to re-engineer the world.” This is furthered by Castells claims about how “valuable people and thier territories are switched on” and essentially the “devalued ones are switched off” (Castells 15). Like Fine and Ruglis, there is a dispossession of regions and people because they do not fit the white prototype which speak for the cause and the fight for XF.
Brown, Fine and Ruglis, and Castells discuss a breakdown of society’s discriminatory institutions that XF ultimately calls out. While at first glance XF might seem like a supposition related only to gender, it in fact embodies a complete de-categorization of what the norm or the “natural” is. XF intersectionality discusses “a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies.” Thus, XF addresses and calls for the de-institutionalization of this ratified norm in order to “let a hundred sexes [and what sex ultimately intersects with] bloom.”
Browne, Simone. “Branding Blackness.” Dark Matters: on the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press, Durham, 2015, pp. 89–129.
Castells, Manuel. “An Introduction to the Information Age.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005, pp. 6–16.
Cuboniks, Laboria. “Xenofeminism.” Laboria Cuboniks, laboriacuboniks.net/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2017.
Fine, Michelle, and Jessica Ruglis. “Circuits And Consequences Of Dispossession: The Racialized Realignment Of The Public Sphere For U.s. Youth.” Transform