Published in 2018
140 pages
Helen Hester joined UWL from Middlesex University, where she had served as Lecturer in Promotional Cultures and Senior Lecturer in Media.
Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks.
Helen is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (2014) and the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (2015) and Dea ex Machina (2015). She is also the series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.
What is this book about?
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the ‘Laboria Cuboniks’ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
Challenging and iconoclastic, this visionary book is the essential guide to one of the most exciting intellectual trends in contemporary feminism.
