Karl Marx Failed to Consider the Xenofeminists

The article "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation," written by Laboria Cuboniks, emphasizes the use of collective theoretical and political thinking through technology to give a voice to the marginalized (women, queers, and the gender-nonconforming) within society. The author stresses the use of rationalism within the manifesto of Xenofeminism in order to emphasize that reason, like information, has no gender because they both want "to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom."

Cuboniks links feminism with technology in order to, not only, be able to adequately address the complexities associated with the marginalization and discrimination of women within our contemporary society, but also provide an answer to their search for freedom from societal, patriarchal constraints. In other words, Xenofeminists aim to co-opt the structure facilitating their marginalization (technology) by rejecting the power dynamics of capitalism through their use of it. The author emphasizes the possibility of large-scale social change, rather than choosing to focus on the local. Xenofeminism also challenges the heteronormative ideal, in favor of trans and queer individuals who are marginally "tolerated" within society. Xenofeminism is intersectional: "a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies (...) and namely- Eurocentric universalism."

I especially liked this paragraph:

"Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even- especially- when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves." 

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