My dear sisters, do you hear it?
A siren’s susurrating song as it snakes through the digital nether, a manifesto for a future wholly unbound by the shackles of the past? I recognize this new frequency, as it crackles, or perhaps cackles, with disruptive energy. Xenofeminism (XF)—a radical wave that hurls itself with droll defiance against the cliffs of conformity.
This is not what grandmotherly feminism looks like. XF detonates binaries, scorns the natural, and revels in the alien. Its a rallying cry for tech-savvy witches, cyborg goddesses, and gender abolitionists everywhere. For Pakistan, a land riven with contradictions galore, XF represents a new frontier of resolution against oppression in many of its ill-begotten forms: a techno-spiritual cypher that reimagines liberation for the 21st century.
Today, more than ever before, it is imperative to break apart the tired tropes of identity politics. How better to do it than with a simultaneity of cyber-feminism, post-humanist ideals and materialist-feminism. It is evident that academic theories gathering dust on the shelves of history have failed to galvanize womxn across borders. The same have sought to educate womxn on the vernacular of resistance, and found themselves lacking.
What is now needed is a framework rooted deep within lived praxis, a dynamic ecosystem of hackers, artists, activists, and thinkers who dare to imagine a world beyond the confines of gender, nature, and capital.
I need not paint a picture of patriarchal oppression in Pakistan. It is everywhere, everything, all at once. Either way, XF offers a potent antidote to the status quo. I take inspiration from fantastical visions of a biohacking collective of hijab-clad women that repurpose CRISPR to eradicate genetic diseases, flipping the bird to Western notions of progress. I am moved by the image of a young Pashtun woman, with only a smartphone and a satellite connection in hand, creating a virtual school for girls denied education by patriarchal edicts. I find solace in the idea of transgender women in Lahore’s underground queer scene creating a haven of acceptance, their identities celebrated within technology’s embrace.
XF doesn’t just liberate women, it liberates the very concept of “woman.” It dismantles the rigid gender roles that have suffocated us for millennia, replacing them with a kaleidoscope of self-expression. And in that, lies its intoxicating appeal, the same that I look to convey to you.
After all, XF is a global phenomenon. It has borne witness to Nigerian women reclaiming their bodies from the clutches of Western beauty standards, embracing their natural hair and curves as symbols of resistance. It has raised hurrahs to indigenous women in the Amazon rainforest using drones to monitor illegal logging, protecting the lands of their ancestors from corporate greed. It has reveled in the sight of disabled women in the United States hacking their prosthetics, turning them into works of art.
XF, cross-pollinating with Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, embraces the hybridity of human and machine, blurring the binaries between natural and artificial. It challenges the essentialist notions of gender propagated by patriarchal religions and colonial legacies. Instead, it envisions a world where gender is a malleable construct, a playground for self-creation and experimentation.
Moreover, it also serves as a radical critique of capitalism, a system that exploits both human and non-human bodies for profit. XF embraces the principles of accelerationism, leveraging technology to dismantle oppressive structures and create new possibilities for collective liberation. It points, for example, to Zapatistas’ use of digital networks for organizing resistance and the Kurdish women’s autonomous movement in Rojava, which prioritizes ecological sustainability and direct democracy.
In a world facing the existential threats of climate change and AI-driven automation, XF offers a vision of hope. It calls for a radical rethinking of our relationship with technology, nature, and each other. It invites us to embrace the alien within, to become cyborgs in our own right, and to forge a future that is not just inclusive but truly liberatory.
So let us join this cypher, sisters and siblings of all genders and none. Let us hack the planet, one byte at a time. Let us rewrite the code of our collective destiny. Let us embrace the alien within and unleash the radical potential of Xenofeminism. For the future is not something to be predicted, but something to be created.
And we, the Xenofeminists, must be the architects of this brave new world.