2018 — Critical Essay

Xenofeminism: Alienation and Accelerationsim

Ana Llurba

As Donna Haraway did with the cyborg, xenofeminism supports the alien (the other, the foreign, the foreigner, the non-human) and alienation (the worker transformed into a commodity) as both a myth and a tool. Unlike Haraway, however, it considers the parody, irony and performance characterising postmodernism as rhetorical strategies and a political way of positioning itself as a new rationalism. This is how it claims what it considers the orphaned legacy of modernism, affirming that the belief that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise would be to concede defeat. Moreover, xenofeminism criticises contemporary left-wing movements for entrenching themselves in the struggles of collectives on the margins of the system, for retreating into the small resistances against globalised capitalism: ‘We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear.’