Text page
Appropriating the Alien A Critique of Xenofeminism
A critique that tests xenofeminism's claims about alienation, abstraction, and emancipation against feminist and political objections.
Contextual work page available
This support page stays public for provenance, file paths, and archival routing. The fuller contextual work page is Appropriating the Alien A Critique of Xenofeminism.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show xenofeminism as a wager on using technical alienation rather than rejecting it. The future is treated as something to be engineered through abstraction, reason, and synthetic collectivity, even when that wager is contested.
Manifesto, critique, and interview form each make a different part of the argument visible. Policy language, political objection, and poetic militancy all become ways of testing what alien emancipation could mean.
That matters because the later feminist afterlife of the archive is not reducible to influence. It is a live argument over how much of technical modernity can be repurposed and at what cost.
How to read this text
Read the page's stance on alienation first. Whether alienation is being embraced, revised, or criticized determines almost everything else.
Watch how abstraction is translated into politics or poetics. That is where the page's synthetic ambition becomes most concrete.
Representative extracts
Stakes · paragraph 1
ARTICLES APPROPRIATING THE ALIEN: A CRITIQUE OF XENOFEMINISM By Annie Goh , 29 July 2019 Politics / AntiCapitalist / Neoliberal / Theory / Cyberfeminism / Cyborg / Feminist / Posthumanist The Xenofeminist Manifesto claims, among many things, rationalism and technology as core to a renewed futurist feminist project.
Stakes · paragraph 47
2 For example, the XFM has been featured in e-flux (2016), at the Post-Cyber Feminist International at the ICA London (2017) and was presented at Tate Modern, London (2018). It was also re-published by Verso Books: Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminism Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (New York: Verso, 2018).
Stakes · paragraph 47
It was also re-published by Verso Books: Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminism Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (New York: Verso, 2018).
Stakes · paragraph 8
A somewhat awkward answer came back from the collective to the effect that: ‘among us (the authors), some of us are queer, some of us are trans, some of us are mothers […] we are all white and from the Global North.’ Yet, we were assured that the manifesto’s subtitle, ‘a Politics for Alienation’, associated xenofeminism with the notion of ‘alienness’, but not the ‘xeno’ of ‘xenophobia’.
Stakes · paragraph 47
It was also re-published by Verso Books: Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminism Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (New York: Verso, 2018). 3 ‘After Accelerationism: The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 11 June, 2015, http://tripleampersand.org/after- accelerationism-the-xenofeminist-manifesto/ .
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.