Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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led by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The feminist mass mobilization epitomized by the #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo movements continues to fight globally. As these multiple crises unfold, the politics of sexualized, racialized, naturalized minorities – the ‘others’ – are moving centre stage, pushing dominant ‘man’ (or Anthropos) off-centre.
Posthuman feminism is thus a critical intervention in some of the most controversial and urgent contemporary debates about the ongoing transformations of the human. The feminist agenda of the posthuman convergence is the analysis of the intersection of powerful structural socio-economic forces, led by technological development, in combination with equally powerful environmental challenges, centred on the climate crisis. These multiple factors join forces in dislocating the centrality of humans and require new definitions and practices of what being human may mean.
Posthuman feminism revives the radical tradition by offering an updated analysis of advanced capitalism – not only its sophisticated technologies but also its brutal environmental deterioration. In this book I argue that posthuman feminism offers a more adequate analysis of contemporary relations of power, because it has relinquished the liberal vision of the autonomous individual as well as the socialist ideal of a privileged revolutionary subject. Whereas liberal feminism is perfectly attuned to capitalism and socialist feminism dialectically opposed to it, posthuman feminism attempts a more nuanced position while keeping a critical distance from both. Building on the radical insights of ecofeminism, feminist studies of technoscience, LGBTQ+ theories, Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminisms, posthuman feminists stretch in multiple, rhizomic and tentacular directions. A posthuman feminist framework encourages a different notion of political subjectivity as a heterogeneous assemblage of embodied and embedded humans.
The posthuman turn is about the becoming-otherwise-human of feminist and critical theory. The converse is equally true: those who do not fully occupy the position of human subjects, in the fullness of the rights and entitlements that notion entails, have a unique vantage point about what counts as the unit of reference for a re-definition of the human. My argument will remain what it has been all along in my work on critical posthuman theory: the posthuman turn can result in a renewal of subjectivities and practices by situating feminist analyses productively in the present.
It may be difficult for people who have never been considered socially and politically fully human to adopt an affirmative relation to the posthuman predicament. Women, LGBTQ+ people, the colonized, Indigenous peoples, people of colour and a multitude of non-Europeans who historically have had to fight for the basic right to be considered and treated as human, have at best an ambivalent relationship to the humanity they were and continue to be denied admission to. But my point is that this dominant, exclusionary notion of the human is precisely what is challenged by the posthuman convergence. While multiple new scenarios are circulating about the transformation of the humans, it is crucial that the voices of the marginals should be heard. The insights and critical knowledge of those who are considered less than human is urgently needed in the debates on the posthuman, both for their own sake and for the common good. The vital and more democratic project is to combine social justice and bottom-up, community-based experiments with transforming the ways in which we are becoming (post) human. These processes imply dense webs of interaction with and through the new technological universe, but also demand awareness of their environmental groundings and responsibilities.
My argument cuts both ways: first, feminist theory and practice are a major factor in defining the contemporary posthuman predicament. Some strands of feminist theory – not always the more dominant ones – are generative hubs that have inspired critical posthuman insights. I want to urge contemporary feminist theory to engage more actively with the public debates on the posthuman convergence and with mainstream posthuman scholarship. I will highlight throughout the book the original contributions of feminism to the making of distinctly posthuman ways of understanding the world and redefining politics.
Second, mainstream posthuman scholarship must make an effort to move beyond its self-referential insular tendencies and engage openly with feminist theories, including the minoritarian strands that may not be as central to the canonical Anglo-American tradition. Posthuman critical theories cannot continue to indulge in their masculinist and Eurocentric solipsism. It would be mutually beneficial if feminist theory and posthuman theory would exchange and dialogue more systematically.
Feminists working on the posthuman convergence have to confront another fundamental tension: ‘we’ feminists may well be confronting the threats and challenges of the third millennium, together, but ‘we’ are not One or the same. We are differently positioned in terms of the very historical conditions of power, entitlement and access that define us: not only are we not the same as Man, but ‘we’ feminists have never been a homogeneous, unitary notion among ourselves: we are otherwise others. This book does not take the feminist community for granted as a pre-constituted and institutionalized entity; instead, I formulate the ‘we’ as: ‘we’-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-we-differ.
The context points to the necessity of rethinking subjectivity as a web of interconnections, acknowledging that ‘we’ – all living entities – share the same planetary home, though we differ in terms of locations and access to environmental, social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity and good health services. The materially embedded differences in location that separate us do not detract from our shared intimacy with the world, our terrestrial milieu. ‘We’ are in this together. This leads me to the sentence I developed in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and that will recur throughout this book as well: ‘“we”-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-together’.
Posthuman feminists aspire to nurture and implement the ongoing process of unfolding alternative and transformative paths of becoming. We need to work together to reconstruct our shared understanding of possible posthuman futures that will include solidarity, care and compassion. We need to do so while rejecting universal and fixed notions of who ‘we’ are, respecting differences of locations and power. The politics of immanent locations allows for a non-oppositional mode of critique and enables affirmative engagement.
To those who fear that emphasizing the ‘post’ in the posthuman may result in short-circuiting the process of emancipation of the devalorized others who were not considered fully human to begin with, I reply that I share their concern. But I would add that it is becoming painfully clear that those who are marked negatively as the dehumanized and marginalized ‘others’ are currently missing out on the profits and advantages of the fourth industrial revolution, while being excessively exposed to the ravages of climate change and pandemics. Mindful that 50 per cent of carbon emissions are produced by the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population, one can only concur with Greta Thunberg that ‘the people who have contributed the least to the crisis are the ones who are going to be affected the most’ (2019: 24). This is the cruel imbalance that posthuman feminism wants to address. In other words, the posthuman condition is neither post-power nor post-injustice. The emphasis on ‘post’ in the posthuman rather implies a move forward, beyond traditional understandings of the human, so that the analyses of contemporary power and knowledge become an essential part of the feminist posthuman project.
A Posthuman Feminist Agenda
Posthuman Feminism is an intergenerational and transversal exercise in constructing a discursive community that cares for the state of the world and wants to intervene productively in it. Intergenerational, because the book reconnects to different feminist genealogies, archives and counter-memories across space and time and does not stay within the contemporary or dominant theories. By transversal, I mean a relational way of thinking by cross-referencing through categories and disciplines. It desegregates the domains of knowledge production, by creating connections and cultivating resonances among positions that may at first sight appear incompatible. Intergenerational and transversal thinking helps create the collective ‘we’ that makes for a chain of solidarity between the ‘others’, while respecting the different perspectives and lived realities of each. Intergenerational and transversal subjects are allied but differentiated, and all other differences notwithstanding, they affirm that ‘we’ are in this together, but we are