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The Trans* Politics of Xenofeminism

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2020

Abstract

XF is "a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics," (0x19) and "seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning" (0x10). In her book Xenofeminism, Helen Hester works through the notion of a transfeminism which would be able to accommodate difference by means of abolishing gender altogether.

Working on ground broken by Judith Butler, Hester's Xenofeminism is a feminism for a post-gendered world; a state of 'gender post-scarcity.' "Let a thousand genders bloom," write the Xenofeminists as they work toward "a politics, without the infection of purity."(0x10) The presentation and paper would thus flesh out XF as a self-professed "technomaterialist, anti- naturalist, and gender abolitionist form of feminism" 3 which is axiomatically trans-positive. Positioned as "Donna Haraway's disobedient daughters," 4 Xenofeminism's techno-positivity reworks the dynamics of transgender sensibility as much as it challenges and ferrets out the latent nativism of feminisms predicated on essence.