hester, 2018, xenofeminism

written 20240411.

written by one of the members of laboria cubonics, this book expands on the xenofeminist manif esto, exploring the territory of biological and social reproduction. hester notes this is one book on xenofeminism, not the book on xenofeminism, therefore the tendencies she foregrounds may not be what the other members would emphasise.

there’s a lot to explore within this territory. the part that appealed immediately to me was hester’s discussion of the feminist self-help movement of the 1970s, and specifically the del-em , an open-source menstrual extraction device. ostensibly designed to suction out menstrual blo od and tissue, the del-em gained traction because it could be used to perform abortions, several years before roe v. wade.

hester takes up the del-em as a xenofeminist provocation, against a tendency to deemphasise or outright dismiss lo-fi tools. and likewise for her discussion of the speculum as a simple tool that enabled people to perform vaginal self-exams and in a limited sense route around the medical, gynecological establishment. while these tools hardly constitute the limit of xenofeminism’s engagement with technology, the del-em is taken up, for its affordances, because it “allows us to consider how xf’s abstract theoretical principles might operate within concrete historical circumstances, but also directs critical attention towards a too often neglected area of technology” (53).

i really appreciated this as someone who likes reading about technologies in the specific, an d less so technology as though it were some monolithic entity. by doing this too, hester is b etter able to explain xenofeminism’s commitment to technology as a means of addressing gendered issues, and facing up to global orders.

hester, 2018, xenofeminism

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