Fearless Speech #13 | HAU Berlin

20 Mar, 2018

Xenofeminism – A Politics for Alienation, talk at HAU, 20 March, 2018 @ 19:00. With Helen Hester and Moderation from Sonja Eismann

Xenofeminism demands a technomaterialist and gender abolitionist form of feminism. In this talk, Helen Hester, author of the book "What is Xenofeminism?" will offer a brief outline of each of these terms, using Shulamith Firestone’s contentious manifesto "The Dialectic of Sex" as a recurring reference point. First published in 1970, Firestone’s text claims that humanity’s "accumulation of skills for controlling the environment" – extending, crucially, to gendered embodiment and biological reproduction – is a means of realizing "the conceivable in the actual." It therefore looks to technology, including, most famously, assistive reproductive technologies but also forms of domestic automation and industrial cybernation as a point of leverage in efforts to transform oppressive socio-biological conditions. Together with Patricia Reed from xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, Helen Hester will discuss Shulamith Firestone’s constructive and ambitiously emancipatory vision which profoundly shaped the xenofeminist imaginary, moderated by Sonja Eismann from Missy Magazine. Event info