Towards Xenofeminism (Session 1)

So welcome everyone to Towards Xenofeminism, Gender Technology and Reason in the 21st Century at the new Centre for Research and Practice. We're Laborio Cubonics, or half of Laborio Kibonics, actually, which is our techno-materialist, transfeminist writing collective. Some of the other members will hopefully join us in a couple of the later weeks, so you can meet the rest of Laboria. Before I start, though, I'll introduce my cohorts here, Luca and Helen. Helen, who'll be taking us through Firestone's Dialectic of Sex later on, is

lecturer in promotional cultures at Middlesex University in London. Her research interests include gender, sexuality and techno-feminism, and she's the author of Beyond Explicit Pornography and the Displacement of Sex. Highly recommended if you guys are interested. And Luca, Olivia Luca Fraser is an independent researcher living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her four youngest children as well as being involved in the new center for research and practice and laborio cubonics she's a member of the jan van eyck association and the form and formalism working group her research deals with mathematical logic dialectics feminist and accelerationist political theory computation and artificial intelligence and she's recently been accepted to begin a

masters in applied computer science, I think, at Dalhousie University, which is pretty cool. Luca writes theoretical essays, poems, and code as well. And I'm Amy Island. I'm at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where I'm doing a creative writing PhD, looking at xenopoetics and I also run a philosophy and aesthetics group here called Aesthetics After Finitude. So hi, welcome. So what is xenofeminism? The reason we've named this towards xenofeminism is because we don't know

what it is yet. Part of the idea behind setting up this reading group to provide a platform through which we can collectively engage with a range of theories that have interrogated the relationship between queer trans feminist politics, technology and science in order to develop a set of concepts that are adequate to the complexity of our 21st century technological environment with the hope that these can be eventually deployed together under this emergent notion of xenofeminism. That said, we do actually have quite a few ideas as to what this concept might involve. And I think it might be a good idea before we kind of get into the nitty-gritty of everything to maybe briefly sketch out some of the ways that Liborio Bonnix has been

thinking about this term, xenofeminism, as a way of orienting the course as a whole. And then after that I'll explain a little bit the structure of the course and the classroom for those of you who haven't used it before. And then maybe we'll do some quick introductions. And then since we didn't really give you guys much time to do the readings in advance, Helen's going to take us through two of the most important aspects in She Learned with Firestone's Dialectic of Sex. important that there's no feminist project specifically. We're going to focus on work and reproduction today. And we'll do this in two separate blocks, so we'll address, I think, work first, Helen, and then we'll have a bit of a discussion, and then we'll do

reproduction, and follow that with a discussion as well. We're doing reproduction, then work. Reproduction first, then work. So, to kind of put this notion of xenofeminism into context, I'll just flag a couple of things. And Luca, you're welcome to jump in here as well and help me kind of elucidate some of these ideas. But as Helen has written previously, If we accept that a retreat from technological modernity is neither possible nor desirable, then it is imperative that we cultivate a feminism for an era characterized by abstraction,

complexity, globality, and technology. What might a feminist politics of alienation look like in this context? In what ways might it inform our understandings of phenomena such as social reproduction or work to generate new experiences of gendered embodiment? So, this is key, the idea of a feminist politics of alienation, with alienation grasped as a positive category, a vector of emancipatory potential, as marked by the prefix Zeno in Zenofeminism. We want to strike out from the status of ubiquitous estrangement, an ontological condition that's common to almost all of us in some way, to understand alienation as

an opportunity as a possibility to be exploited for positive political ends. And I think it's important to remark here that we don't take technology to be a priori emancipatory, but we recognise that it harbours emancipatory potential and that we need to equip ourselves with the tools necessary for identifying and extracting it. And we're interested in occupying these spaces where queer, trans and feminist discourse intersect with technological and biological innovation, and also being open to the ontological consequences that arise from this particular nexus as well. We understand xenofeminism as a feminism that avoids both the naïve optimism and coarse

technophilia of transhumanist discourses, and equally the ingenuous primitivist fantasies of going off the grid and returning to some prior ecological state of equilibrium with the earth. This latter might be a nice thought, but the reality is that it's no longer a global possibility. Progress, regress, you can say that we've already gone too far with modernity to turn back, especially if we want everybody to retain the right and equivalent freedom. So the question is how to make feminism a scalable politics How to augment its capacity to organise systemic political change And we're also concerned with questioning the dominance of the notion Pointed up incredibly usefully in post-structuralist feminist critiques of the Western philosophical tradition

That there is some necessary link between masculinity and reason For example, to paraphrase Genevieve Lloyd in her book a man of reason, male and female, in Western philosophy. Masculinity and reason are both traditionally understood as involving some kind of transcendent mastery over the emotional, material body, or embodiment more generally. And the problem with this is that embodiment and materiality, on the other hand, is then grasped as this kind of domain of the female, which is all well and good perhaps for a backwards looking critical stance but in terms of constructing a positive trans feminism adequate to the future the

idea of reason that it peddles is just misleading outdated and ultimately unproductive and what's more it portrays a questionable essentialism which is one of the the reasons that alienation operates as a positive category for us as a kind of anti-essentialism. So we need to reclaim reason as a tool for queer, trans and feminist revolt and connect it to a bunch of other notions that we're going to get to in the coming weeks, like gender abolitionism, for example, which is something that we'll look at I think next week in the biopolitics session. So I don't know, Luca, if you want to add anything to that as a kind of framing.

Right. That was fantastic and pretty exhaustive of where we've come so far. So, yeah, I mean, I think, of course, the same thing goes for alienation, as you said, for technology there. It's not that, you know, that anything alienating is a priori good, but that there's no real hope outside of these alienating gestures. Now, let's see. Yeah, I think you pretty much covered everything I was hoping to mention. So maybe I'll... Did you want to mention anything about the Zellamea quote that we've used as the epigraph?

Right, right. Let's see. Just as an idea. Okay, right, yeah. I think that it does actually hit on one of the themes that we haven't mentioned yet, which is just the status of universalism in our project. Now, just to give kind of a bit of a, maybe a bit too potted history, you know, you had, of course, these sweeping universalist projects of modernity, of modernity's emancipatory politics, which then fell under this sort of, you know, deconstructive anti-universalist critique from, say, the 60s to the 90s or so. So you pretty much have, you know, in this stretch,

this sort of prolonged case-by-case demonstration that these, you know, what we had presumed to be universal, universal values, universal projects, universal history, what have you, turned out to be really just sort of these bloated particularities in disguise. But it would always be the universality of a, the universality would just be sort of this cloaked image of the white enfranchised European male. And so, you know, it was rightly treated with great suspicion, and the attempt to sort of frame a project as universalist was then seen as de facto masculinist, white, European, what have you. Now, I think one of the sort of philosophical countercurrents that's of interest to many

of us in laborio cubanics has been this sort of effort to reactivate the motif of universalism, to the problem of universalism, not in a way that just tries to forget that this, broadly call it the postmodern critique ever happened. But to try and see this critique as sort of a necessary precondition for any true universalism at all. That the greatest threat to universalism is a sort of inflation of particularity to the point that we lack the critical capacities to discern between that bloated particular and the universal. And so there's been this

current of seeing the postmodern critique not as something just to be rejected or treated as passe or whatever, but as sort of this necessary precondition for a kind of refined, filtered, tempered universalism. I've got a terrible cough right now. Makes things really difficult. And so you see this with Badiou, for example. His whole project of hammering out a notion of the universal as generic, which is to say as intersectional, as anti-essential, this entirely has to be understood as a way of how do we reactivate a universalist politics after critiques like you get and leotards different. With Fernando Zalamea, we have something, sort of a similar gesture happening

in another domain, also informed by mathematics, but he's looking at how… so, okay, real short history of mathematics. Before the 20th century, you had the geometry, the arithmetic, and so on. Mathematics was seen as a sort of solid edifice rooted in the bedrock of absolute evidence of the givens. Around the turn of the century, this mathematical edifice started to fall into crisis. Any attempt to provide it with sort of a final, absolutely certain foundation seemed to involve concepts that would give rise to antinomies, that forced

to sort of incomplete partial axiomatizations of mathematics, a pluralization of all the different possible forms of mathematical theories, a sort of just blossoming of innumerable different axiomatics, each of which sort of had a kind of validity of its own in its own sphere, but there was no, you know, there was no, like, one axiomatic to rule them all, kind of, to sort of gather them together into this universal edifice in the old, early modern sense of universal and unity. But what you start to get in post-war mathematics is a new notion of universality, which isn't out of unifying these fragments in a single but a providing means for translating between one and the other.

And this is where the Zalamea quote comes in. It's a rethinking of universality as translation, as transversality, as sort of mobility. And so, you know, these two gestures here, but you use effort to think the universal as the generic. What is the universal is what we get once we strip away every false universal, every sort of particular that would claim to be universal. So you have the subtractive universality of Baju, which is also, I think, a basis, the notion of intersectionality that you get. The generic is the intersectional, that's what it means. And then with Xalamea, you have the universal as the trans, as what can, what's capable of translation, what can sort of transport you from one domain to the other.

It's not sort of a universal domain, it's sort of the possibility of movement. So that's, yeah, in real simple broad strokes, that's kind of what we're after with the notion of the trans. And when we talk about trans feminism, there is that double meaning there. On the one hand, it is trans in Zalamea's sense, in the sense in which he says this is sort of the age of the trans. And in the other, of course, in a much more particular sense, it also has to do with the transgender and transsexual politics within feminism, and sort of a gesture that we're making in that domain as well. I think there might be some way of nodding those together, that if there is sort of a

single structural enemy of transfeminism. It's the kind of false universalism, the kind of bloated particularity, the sort of essentialism of woman with a capital W. This is the greatest obstacle I think to any transfeminist project, but it's also I think the failure of any feminist project. So I think to have a universal feminism, one of the symptoms of the failure of feminist universality today is the conflict between a kind of reactionary form of radical feminism that frames itself as intensely hostile to trans women and on

the other hand a sort of trans friendly feminism but one that is fairly, I think maybe a bit too complacently lapsed into just a celebration of bare particularity, of bare plurality, of, you know, to each their own identity, in which sort of new forms of essentialism begin to take root. So it's a polarized essentialism, but it's still an essentialism in many respects. But I'll maybe get to that when we start dealing with trans politics more directly later. Which will be next week, I think. Next week, yeah. Could I maybe just run quickly through the schedule for the upcoming weeks?

Okay, so we actually had a last minute change because we switched the session that was going to be on cyberfeminism around with the session on biopolitics and transfeminism in order to accommodate Virginia Barrett from the VNS Matrix who's going to be our guest for the Cyber Feminism Week. So you'll notice if you look in the classroom that those two weeks are actually inverted. So the readings that come up next are actually for session three. They're titled session three, so you can figure it out pretty easily. But just bear that in mind, next week we're doing, that's November the 28th, or the 29th if you're in Australia like me, Trans Feminism and Biopolitics.

December 5th is Updating Cyberfeminism. And December 12th is Reason and Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Sexual Reproduction. And Ben Woodard's going to be joining us for that one to talk about some recent work he's been doing on rationality and feminism. So I don't know how many of you guys have already experienced Google Classrooms and Google Hangouts, but there's a chat bar on the side that you can join by clicking the chat icon in the top left-hand corner. If people are posting questions up there, we might occasionally read them out so that those who are auditing us can have some insight into what's going on in the chat bar, which they won't be able to see.

So just bear that in mind. And all the readings in the syllabus are up on the classroom for your reference. And if we make any amendments to that, we might add a couple of things in the later weeks. we'll let you know there'll be an announcement that'll come up. So just a quick word about our methodology. We're framing this as a reading group with introductory sessions for each seminar, which will be run by one of us, and then will involve some kind of student presentation. So if you guys are interested in a particular text, we'll ask for the enrolled students to actually nominate the text that they want to present on and to kind of introduce the text and facilitate a discussion on that,

which will then be followed by, in the coming week, a 500-word blog post on the Google Classroom sort of using the material from the presentation. And this is for the enrolled students. And then there's a final essay, which is due two weeks after the end, but we can discuss that on the Classroom blog. and so we're also in the spirit I suppose of privileging construction over critique we want Laborio Kibonix to occupy a non-expert position and to act really as a guide rather than any kind of authority and to do so in order to encourage experiment and openness in our discussions so please don't be afraid

to ask questions to interject productively, just turn your mic on and talk to us or alternately write something in the sidebar that we can address and participate in the discussions. So we want to encourage that kind of openness from the start. So we'll have a look at assigning texts at the end so we don't have to worry about too much admin at the beginning. it might be a nice idea to just if you guys want to just briefly introduce yourselves at least tell us your names and maybe you can mention one or two things that might be interesting to others who are participating in the course

obviously the new centre for research and practice is about knitting together these two ideas of research and practice so if you're working on any personal research projects that interrogate or that will engage with this set of theories. Let us know, and we can try and build those into the course as it progresses. So I don't know if you guys want to jump in and tell us who you are. That would be really great. Anyone? I can introduce myself. I'm Tony. I'm part of the new Center for Research and Practice.

You'll see me or Jason or Mo in and out of each of these sessions. I think we're all very interested in this and what's going to be coming of this course. For me, I'm very interested in the relationship between the transversal and universality that Luke was was mentioning here. And just breaking the ice and kind of joining in and introducing myself. Next person. Christina, maybe? Do you want to introduce yourself? Oh, hi. Can you actually hear me? Yes. Yes? OK. Hi. I didn't know that I could introduce myself

because I'm a lowly auditor. I'm not, I'm just listening. You're welcome to participate. All the auditors are in the classroom. You're all welcome to participate in the conversation. Don't feel like you have to sit it out. If there's space in the classroom, then you're welcome to join in. Great. Okay, thanks. That's great. Well, so I'm an artist. I work transversely across media. and I've had a very strong interest in cyber feminist practice since the early 2000s when I went from working as a painter in the Midwest to I moved to California to a rural place and was very

kind of in an isolated but online networked environment and started practicing in kind of with, in sort of a cyberspace kind of way. And then it was interesting to find out that I was assumed, a lot of people thought that I was one of the cyber feminists from the 90s Australian group. So I was very proud to be an unofficially assumed to be part of that, which was really great. So basically my work in media really took on a lot of the alienation issues that you see Adam rated in Firestone's text, the one that you've just given. These were, as for many of us,

these were the kinds of problems that Firestone talks about are fundamental to my life experience and which I've tried to ameliorate and to create new pathways that are beyond, as you have suggested, beyond critique in the way that I practice in media and in the network. So I've been really, really active in this for a long time. And I'm really excited to see that this project of yours has really come, you know, is now like a formalized course. I think that's incredibly exciting. So anyway, that's enough for me. Awesome.

Lovely to meet you. Anyone else want to jump in? Hi, I'm Marika. Keep freezing up here. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm also auditing, and I've never taken online class before, so it's a little bit unusual to me. Hello. Hi. Are those your paintings behind you? Oh, me? Yes, that's my stuff. Awesome.

Yeah, so, yeah, I paint. So it seems like there's a few painters in this group. That's interesting. I'm also a painter, so. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Do you, um, Ivan or Gabriel or Eve? Is Eve? There is. I can go since we're doing, I guess, the group of painters first. I'm Gabrielle, and I am a painter who resides in Brooklyn, New York right now. And I make these paintings of these hyper-evolved creatures

that relate to themes dealing with the turbulent bond humans have with technology, corporeal limits, and synthetic realities. And a philosopher friend of mine mentioned the new center to me, and he said I should check out the new weird class. But the description for this course sounded... It felt relevant to what I've been thinking about recently with my art, so I decided to audit the course. Do you have any of your paintings handy there? Yeah, I have a website. Cool. But I can share it at the end so that people aren't distracted or anything. I mean, it's not in my room. I just had my room repainted.

So I don't have anything on the walls right now. Yeah, put it in the sidebar or up on the blog in the classroom. Word. Okay. Hey guys, I'm Ivan. Cool, hey. I did the other class, Accelerationism Part 1, and I'm based in Melbourne, and on Facebook probably people know me as Igor, so that sometimes generates confusion, but I'm really looking forward to this class, yeah. I'm interested in Reza and Bresier's and Benedict Singleton's work on rationality,

cunning intelligence and design as an expression of that. So the new aesthetics is being actual design. Those are my areas. And I work in information security. Now I'm always thinking of design and how I can apply these new concepts to my work as well. Zeev, do you want to say hi or should we just go on to Firestone, Helen, so that we've got enough time to get everything?

Yeah, we can do that, totally. Yeah, I'm good. If you're good to go, I'm good to go. I'll just say hi real quick. I'm Jason. I run the new center along with Tony and Luca and Mo and a number of other people. And so hopefully I'll be here in the other seminars also, the other seminar meetings. But my interest in this came especially, you know, first of all, just the general topic. I found it interesting, but I'm especially interested in it because of the way that it seems to diverge somewhat from, I mean not just somewhat, but really fundamental ways from what I thought of as kind of the most advanced forms of feminism influenced by Deleuze,

being people like Elizabeth Grosch and other people like that, who I found out via Luca, and some other people were actually pretty transphobic and actually had these very bifurcated concepts of gender and things like that that really surprised me because one of her most famous quotes was taken from Elizabeth Tarry's A Thousand Plateaus, this phrase, a thousand tiny sexes, which to me seemed to be... I couldn't imagine how somebody who thought of gender in that way as a thousand tiny sexes as having a bifurcated notion of gender in the first place, but apparently she did. So I'm just really excited about this class and looking forward to it.

Cool. Awesome. Okay, well, it's really nice to meet everybody. Can you guys hear me without any problems? I know my mic was a bit weird earlier. Is it cool now? Yes, can you hear me? Yes. Yay! Okay, awesome. Yeah, it's brilliant to have such a mixture of talents and a mixture of interests in the room and I know that Laboria Cubonics as a collective is really, really excited about an opportunity to kind of have our public outing. This is the first time we have been out as Laboria Cubonics rather than as various assorted individuals, various assorted kind of semi-related interests. So this is kind of, this is our debut.

We are debutants tonight and we are very much looking forward to it. So as Amy kind of gestured towards when she was kind of introducing this, we didn't want to start by kind of throwing you in with anything hugely kind of complicated, especially since, you know, we've done some chopping and changing the course quite recently. And we want to, if you haven't had time to do the reading for this first session, I don't think it will be like a super huge issue. Hopefully it will be quite slow, it will be quite just kind of chilled. I'm going to maybe talk for about half an hour, starting with talking about Firestone and reproductive technology. and then we're going to have a chance to stop and talk and kind of do the interesting bit really

which is kind of using my blur as a springboard for a more collective and collaborative enterprise and then once that we kind of get to the end of talking about reproduction I've got some extra stuff on Firestone's approach to working technology So, the workplace in her writing. So that might be interesting if you get further down. Okay, so, Firestone has kind of remained somewhat on the margins of recent theorising. So, Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford kind of pick up on this. and they note that despite its pioneering critique of gender, the dialectic of sex is missing from the bibliographies of queer theory.

And in some ways Firestone can be seen as a really important precursor to people like Donna Haraway, but the actual direct references to Firestone in Haraway's work are quite few and far between. I think she gets one reference in Simeon's bibles and women, and then when she's referenced, it's to critique her, so that Haraway can distance herself from what Firestone's putting forward. I kind of get the impression that up until very, very recently, contemporary feminists have found the dialectic of sex to be a kind of somewhat cumbersome and dangerous weapon to try and wield in their theorizing. But Park might be all this language of mastery,

which if you've had a chance to kind of look at some of the readings you might have picked up on, as the way that she also talks about bending nature to man, and it is man's, bending nature to man's will, kind of makes it quite difficult for a lot of people to negotiate, So that kind of begs the question of why we kind of wanted to use Firestone to explore xeno-feminism here. Well we kind of wanted to use her as an orienting figure because of her influence on later attempts to think technology alongside feminism. And because she has been the shared grounding really for a lot of the discussions taking

place within the Bori Antibonics. Like the first time we met an individual it was talking about and through Firestone. And I think a lot of us involved in the collective have kind of found that what's problematic in fire sex thinking has been as informative in shaping our project as the bits that we find a pivot. So he's kind of just like a useful person to kind of talk alongside with. Okay, so I'm going to begin, as I kind of mentioned, by talking about the elements of Forrest's argument for which she's almost certainly best known. And these are her proposals surrounding those biomedical processes enabling artificial production.

And so if you want to bump over to the next slide for me, that would be really helpful. Tony is manning my PowerPoint. There we go. Oh, actually, no, I think the next one is a lot. OK, really quickly, if there's the pictures of all of us, if you click on the one where I'm at, it will also bring it up for you completely. So you can go back and forth by clicking. So if you cannot see my screen and you want to see the screen, click on the image. Yeah, you better quickly say that you get a nice shot of a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger before we move on to the next slide. There we go. Thank you very much. So, as Nina Power notes, Firestone's approach, and this is Nina's essay that we've included in the reading list.

And it's freely available online, quite easy access. So Power notes that Piazone's approach to the question of sex is refreshingly blunt. Sex difference is real. Men and women exist and possess asymmetrical physical capacities, which have historically made existence for women extremely difficult and frequently unpleasant or even lethal. And with the development of increasingly sophisticated means of artificial reproduction, technology has, in Firestone's words, created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive natural conditions along with their cultural reinforcement. Now, however kind of refreshing or otherwise we might find this biological materialism

big, Firestone's uncompromising essentialism should at least kind of give us pause, I think. Particularly given that we as a collective identify ourselves as techno-materialist trans-feminists. So how can we negotiate the issue of biothomies, biological essentially? And I think that certainly any contemporary attempt to locate the usefulness of her argument needs to carefully qualify and proclimatise the notion of womanhood as it circulates throughout the dialectic sex. And we see this kind of qualification in Stella Sanford's response to the book, for example.

So I've got a quote from Sanford where she says, To the extent that being a female means having a particular role in the biological reproduction of the species, the female is fundamentally biologically disadvantaged by being a female. And this is Samson talking specifically about monogamy. And I kind of think that the really delicate wording here enables some theoretical maneuvering around the idea of the female. To what extent we're kind of invited to ponder does being female map onto a role in the reproductive process. And if this mapping is less than exact,

then perhaps the female, as a kind of a zoological category, is not the most accurate description of the group to which Firestone is referring. Firestone is insistent in her claim that the sex class system is based around biological differences and disadvantages suffered by those who are encumbered by the capacity to conceive, gestate, and bear a child. In her account, this group is called woman. But given that this term is a pretty woefully inadequate label for the group to which she's referring, perhaps we need not follow her in this. So perhaps a xenofeminist approach could look at biostome differently.

The position that will best enable us to put biostome to use, and ultimately I'm kind of most interested in figuring out what we can do with biostome, may be one that recognizes the existence of various anatomical differences, while understanding that it is a social act to reduce those differences to the existence of an irreducible dichotomy, correlating with the functional differences between participants in biological reproduction. Remembering that participants in biological reproduction, even potential participants, are a subset of the set of all human beings and not identical with that set.

We can make Firestone fit for Xeno-feminism, in other words, only if we reframe her insight in such a way as to no longer assume a coincidence between the body of a woman and a body provided with a fertilisable uterus. So I think kind of what I'm arguing is that there may be scope for a kind of deliberate and strategic rereading of Firestone's position. One that enables a contemporary reader to retain the insights that are stemming from her biological materialism without becoming embroiled in the most problematic and erroneous

elements of her essentially. But then again, maybe I just really like the dialectic of sex and really want to make excuses for it and find ways that I can continue to love it despite the fact that it's also pretty problematic in a lot of ways. Hey Helen. Oh, sorry. Hi, I just wanted to interject real quickly there. So yeah, my way of sort of, I've been handling that with Firestone Media has been probably similar end but in the other direction is that to say that the subjugation of women has its roots in sort of the management of reproductive bodies, right? To take that kind of thesis that Firestone is working with. I don't think it's totally necessary to conflate anyone recognized as women

with anyone who is in fact, you know, going to conceive a child or has the potential to conceive the child. To be recognized as a woman in this world means to be cast in a role that is thoroughly structured by this historical project of managing reproductive bodies or childbearing bodies. So I still think, though, even, for example, that I cannot carry a child. Still, the everyday sexism I encounter is going to be indiscernible, for the most part, from what a woman with a uterus would encounter, by and large, with some exceptions here and there, in specialized contexts. And I think that we don't have to look for an entirely

different causal story to explain both. I think that I can understand some of the sexism my experience as sort of just the sediment left by this historical project of managing wombs. You know, the fact that I don't have a womb isn't a factor there. It's just that I'm sort of, I fit the, you know, I fit the role that this has been sort of like tagged onto. And this isn't like an exact sort of casting that gets everyone right. It's just sort of like, you know, something that kind of pigeonholes bodies from the outside. So, in that way, I'd say that, yeah, politically to be a woman means to be like subject to the the sort of biopolitical effort to control wounds. Even if you don't have a wound, even if you don't want to have a child, even if you're trans. So I think there's something

interesting there too. But that's my take. I agree. No, no, I totally agree. One of the ways that I've kind of phrased it before is those who have sort of impregnatable wounds, or the impregnatable and those who have come be associated with that sex class. So the ways that bodies begin to intersect with the impregnatable and through proximity with the impregnatable kind of changing one's sort of function and position within contemporary biopolitics. It's kind of one way to kind of put that sort of productive spin on Firestone and make her like a useful tool for whatever

as then a feminist political project is. And we don't know. We're kind of groping our way towards figuring that out for ourselves. Yeah, so that's really helpful. I'm really interested. Thank you. Okay. So let's kind of jump in then and think reproduction. So probably one of the most famous kind of firestone quotes is that pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species. Really useful quotes to kind of have and to memorize. So whenever one of your friends announces that they're pregnant, you can bust that out. You know, baby showers, entirely appropriate to start talking about how,

oh, congratulations on the temporary deformation of your body for the sake of the species. You can love it. But it's not only that it is the kind of temporary and contemporary nature of that, I think, it's that both pregnancy and childbirth are painful, risky, and with difficulties, and that's sort of even today. And as such, the development of new reproductive technologies, including but not limited to to those facilitating exogenesis must be seen as an unprecedented opportunity to end the oppression of the impregnative and, as I kind of pointed out, those who have found themselves associated with that sex class.

This is the belief motivating Firestone's demands that women should be freed from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available. And this is, of course, the position with which she is most closely associated, and the one for which she is most frequently castigated, right? And there are admittedly some potential issues with Firestone's position in these technologies. One of Power's main criticisms of the dialectic of sex concerns what she calls the temporality of technology and the sequence of Firestone's projected revolution.

So Power argues that at points Firestone writes as if scientific progress will be the catalyst for social change and that others as if cultural shifts must predate the progressive implementation of scientific development. And this leads to Powers' claim, which is on the PowerPoint there, that there is a confusion in the dialectic of sex. Is it that technology will necessarily destroy existing institutions such as class and the family? Or that a cultural takeover of technology is required before science can be steered in the right feminist direction?

Although she's apparently in agreement with the position that reproductive difference between the sexes is the first division of labor, how are corrective states that seizing the means of reproduction is not merely a historical inevitability, nor something that technology itself will invoke. It can only be made possible through political organizations. Ultimately then, Power argues that technology may well be secondary with regard to the social relations without which technology has no inherent transformative capacity. And she's right, I think, to insist upon technology's embeddedness within its wider

context. And the kind of foregrounding of the political sphere that she performs in her analysis should really be common to all critically informed feminist attempts to give an account of technology. That being said, however, I think it's worth noting that some elements of Power's critique are directly addressed within Firestone's work itself. So Firestone is fully aware that not only is her socialist feminist project attendant upon the development of suitably sophisticated technoscientific capabilities, but that, quote, in the hands of our current society and under the direction of current scientists, any attempted

use of technology to free anybody is suspect. So I kind of don't think it seems quite right to me to accuse Firestone of inevitablism or determinism, as Power does. If we could just move on to the next slide. I think that would be awesome. Yay, thank you. So I would also kind of question the investments which are implicit in some of Power's comments. in establishing a kind of cause and effect narrative about the relationship between technological and other social processes. After all, I kind of think that such an investment downplays the very obvious ways in which these factors are quite closely interwoven

and quite obviously kind of mutually constitutive. And Firestone is detentive to this interdependence, as Sarah Franklin demonstrates. In the dialectic of sex, she argues, technology is presented as both a driver and a symptom, invocated in a wider process of historical unfolding. And Firestone envisaged technology both as an agent of and a means of salvation from social and environmental degradation, while constantly reminding her readers that science and technology could not achieve these ends in the absence of radical social change, including a wholesale regendering of scientific knowledge.

Technology and its context are frequently represented as being inexorably intertwined. This is a hallmark not just that runs through Firestone's work, but also as a lot of academic techno-feminism that came later. The feminism that followed Firestone has taken this up for real focus on how the technical and the social are to some extent inextricable and really doing for each other. When power states that what might need to take place before the transformation of technology in a progressive vein is the transformation of social relations and not the other way around, I'd suggest that she risks downplaying the extent to which these things emerge together

and inevitably shape one another, both within Firestone's work and in the extra-textual world. I'm not sure, given the way in which these various processes continually converse, that it's particularly helpful to suggest finalising our transformative efforts in one sphere before we move on to the next one. Because, well, you know, we'll never get anything done that way. We're constantly waiting to make one thing perfect before we move on to the next one, which is just never going to happen because they speak to each other and we build each other as they go. Rather than insisting upon establishing a linear sequential order to Firestone's radical feminist revolution, we would be better off cultivating a less unidirectional understanding

of the interaction between its key processes. The relationship between technology and social relations is complex, mutually shaping, dynamic and dependent upon continuous conversation. This in one area of influence kind of impact on the evolution of the other area, which in turn feedbacks into further development in an ongoing process of co-constitution. Perhaps Firestone's seemingly contradictory attempt, but articulate the temporality of technology should be seen as an expression of these non-linear and oscillating interactions. And certainly to my mind, the absence of a pre-programmable sequence for revolution is

by no means the most significant of the person. And I think we can take a pause there and kind of maybe have a little chat about the reproductive elements and then when we want to we can move on and talk more about her work. I have got a slide Tony indicating some preliminary conclusions as well but let's What more do you need? Okay, so yeah, I don't know if Luca and Amy, is there anything that you want to kind of

pull out of that and kind of... of, I mean, there's obviously the risk kind of be, I don't want to make it seem like necessarily I'm speaking for all of us and there may well be parts where you might have disagreed with what I said or would like to qualify kind of what I said. Or do we all just agree with me completely because I'm also totally cool with that. I'm pretty much on board with your reading of Firestone. And I can actually, I mean, anything that I said about it originally, I would have noted down in my thoughts on Firestone in a blog post that I wrote back in July,

I think it was, that I can put up on the blog, actually. I'll put the link up in the... Yeah, that's not cool. But yeah, I wrote a little blog post after a discussion with Helen about Firestone and her relation to some of the succeeding techno-feminist movements, specifically cyber-feminism. But I think you hit on all the points that were really kind of troubling me. And Christina actually just pointed this out on the sidebar as well, this kind of tendency to oversimplify things into these all too readily dialectical categories. I mean, it just suffices to look at the, I mean, it's quite elegant, but elegant in direct relationship to it.

its, I suppose, ineptitude, is the diagram at the back where she kind of diagrams this social revolution, which I can see is underlining Power's reading of the temporality of it. But I think that you're completely right in complexifying some of these issues. And I think, I suppose to append something to my statements on our methodology at the start, one of the things that we need to do when we're looking back at these feminist engagements with technology is identify the usable parts and pull them out and reorient them for xenofeminist purposes, which is exactly what you've just done, Helen.

You've got kind of this mechanic stripping down other thinkers for parts, right? There is something like there is a desire to just grab out the good bits and make a pretty fucking awesome trans Frankenstein monster of great bits that we've grabbed and stolen and done cool shit with That's exactly how I envision it I'll post this link up but if anyone else wants to say anything I'm looking for this thing. Yeah, I mean it's interesting to kind of relate some of this stuff to

eco-feminist thinking around reproduction and things like that where there is a real anxiety about about artificial reproduction and an understandable anxiety anxiety because it seems to come from it being quite a kind of violence and a desire to kind of control. So the very thing that Firestone tends to celebrate, this idea of the total mastery of nature, as she puts it in this really bold face, really out there kind of way, the total domination of nature, that's exactly what eco-feminists find quite problematic about some of the advances in reproductive technology and the way they seem to alienate

women from their own bodies' supposedly natural capacity. There's quite a lot of weird, nuanced peculiar arguing around this idea of being alienated from the body and what that means. and what that means. I think this is something that we kind of chatted about the first time we were kind of together in Berlin as well as a proto-Niburian schemonex, where one of the things we picked up on was eco-feminist readings of artificial reproduction and exogenesis versus a phryostomian reproduction, and the ways in which there's kind of, there's actually

actually a weird form of idealised alienation in ex-feminism that is 100,000 miles away from anything that we would want to put forward within xeno-feminism. It's a valorising of the alienation that happens through nature rather than anything else. I'm just reading through my old notes trying to find this really weird quote on that very topic. Yeah, I'm doing the same thing. I'm looking at some of her awesome quotes about the New

age movement and yeah this fetishism of the wildness and danger of nature as this almost life-threatening kind of possibility. Yeah. Yeah, because it's sort of like, it was Maria Mize, I think, she was the one that I kind of, Maria Mize and Vandana Shiva have done a lot of work together and separately about

the new developments in biotechnology and genetic engineering and reproductive technology, and suggested that these developments pointed out how science, this whole paradigm, is characteristic and patriarchal and nature colonial and aimed to dispossess women of their generative capacity. And obviously Firefell in itself picks up on the fact that science as it stands is in hands of a very particular set of people. And so, as it stands, you cannot imagine it as a mandatory tool. It would have to be a radical re-gendering of the entirety of science that would enable that to kind of move forward.

Oh, yeah, here's this quote. I don't know if this is the one you were kind of thinking, but Maria Mize argues that, quote, from time immemorial, women have dealt with pregnancy and childbirth in a creative way. But this creative process, this natural power, was not totally controlled by them. Rather, to a certain extent, it remained wild. And it's this wildness and the fact that pregnancy is something that just happens within the body, is something that's kind of beyond direct control, that kind of makes the whole idea of pregnancy really, weirdly enchanting for life. So she says, the woman does not have a blueprint in her head

according to which she makes the child. She may have fantasies, wishes, but the child that forms in her body in cooperation with nature, which she herself represents and is, is not determined by her will. ultimately neither the process nor the product are at her disposal I think it is precisely this unpredictability that constitutes the newness of each child and provides the fulfilment that is being sought which is just a really weird quote to me because this natural process is set sort of contrasted to those processes where technical and biomedical intervention has kind

of been involved so it's contrasted with assisted reproduction and she kind of views bioengineers as kind of building the child like a machine from sort of isolated component parts and you know like well kind of like our frankenstein's monster i guess And it's a version of the reproductive process that human beings are kind of seen as being in possession of a far greater degree of agency, a far greater degree of control. And because the process is no longer wild, as she kind of calls it, it loses its magic and is kind of experienced, no longer experienced as being creative or productive or spontaneous. This is just a reiteration of the...

Sorry, sorry, Helen. No, go on. I was just going to remark that it's just another version of the authenticity argument in a different guise, which at the same time is valorizing this idea of wildness. creativity is actually alighting these more problematic questions of the actual endangerment of the people who are involved in the birth process. I mean, great, it's wild and connected to a sort of primal generative force, but at the same time, there's a whole lot of problematic things

that go along with that, mortality rates, like birth mortality rates and these kind of things that women as a sex class are susceptible to, that can very well be done away with if we just get over this fetishisation of original nature. Yeah, it's a really weird way that alienation functions. because this is from a single essay by Maria Mai, that it kind of, she starts by kind of arguing against the alienation of both men and women from their body via reproductive technology. So that seems to be straightforwardly a bad thing that should be avoided.

And then it seems that what's being venerated when she's kind of talking about pregnancy is the fact of being alienated from the reproductive process by nature itself. So reproductive technology offers a kind of disenchanted alienation, which is achieved via the devolving of epistemic authority to medical experts, while nature offers what is for some reason a vastly favourable system of kind of enchanting alienation, which is kind of achieved via the subjection of the impregnated body to forces that are beyond its control. And this is apparently for her the source of the fulfillment that we're looking for,

kind of about precisely the magnification of uncertainty and unpredictability and all the things that kind of seem most terrifying about pregnancy as being the source of everything that we actually want. We want to be in a wild condition of nature, where we're vulnerable to the alienating forces of something that we can't control and that takes away our agency, which goes against, obviously, a heck of a lot of women's agitation around pregnancy and childbirth, political agitation, and around abortion, of course. So one of the things that people find around abortion activism is this idea of not being

in control of the body, not being in control of what happens to it. So there's a whole weird nexus of issues that are embedded in my approach in that essay, I think. It's very weird. is this kind of romanticising of physical endangerment in the name of enchantingly alienating nature that I think is super weird. I think that this brings up an important point for the project in sense of its long-term consequences or implications, and that's that we need to perhaps qualify or like specify what we mean by alienation

like talk about the difference between a positive and negative understanding of alienation and make sure that as we develop it under the guise of a xenofeminist concept that it is qualified because there's always this sort of problem of being misunderstood by people who are just like well you know, they're just championing alienation. Yeah, I mean, I'll put some of those quotes that I was just using, I'll drop them into the sidebar, because I think you really get the full impact of their, like, just sucking up it's enough. If, like, you can actually sit and read them and think, hmm, what? This is benign.

I think it's important to you to see why you know why this sort of to take that example natural childbirth for example does have that appeal and I think it's important not to maybe entirely dismiss it I think from I think one thing that's been sort of said in its favor, and I don't think wrongly, is that if you take sort of the existing obstetric gynecological apparatus, the whole rigmarole that is usually involved in assisting women

in giving birth, I mean, this is not itself politically neutral. I mean, this is something that is like structured down to the micro level by patriarchy and by misogyny. And so there's something to be said for this kind of heroic rebellion and this sort of enduring uncomprehensibly horrid pain just as a way of carving out a little space of freedom from that. I think there's something so I think there's something really powerful in that like in the aspects of that natural childbirth gesture too it's something I really respect at the same

time like you know that's just sort of where it crosses the line I think is when it starts to justify itself in terms of you know a sort of discourse of authenticity you know that we're connecting with our essential womanhood we're being birth giving earth goddesses and so on and that's where I think you get into the problem yeah I mean I think a lot of the things you'd have Ivan has here about BDSM yeah I think there's a lot of the kind of arguments you get for the political potential BDSM like especially coming out of kind of the gay male movement you know you do kind of see its counterpart

in this sort of like you know like hippie earth mama kind of natural birth movement like there is a similar gesture being made there and I think there's something that can be retained from that if you kind of just strain out the kind of pained authenticity the kind of essentialism there when the existing sort of framework is like you know like, not all alienation is a good thing. It's sort of a disposition of power to deliver it into the hands of the patriarchy and be made to, like, you know, give birth lying down with your legs in stirrups, being, like, pretty much commandeered by, you know, a male doctor that treats you as if you're only half there versus, like, you know, doing this, like, painful but also, like, you know, incredibly,

like, women do, some women do experience that this is a tremendously empowering experience as well. and I think that has to be, room for that has to be maintained and even Firestones keeps room for that, she sort of like imagines natural childbirth being one of those things that would still be around kind of like ironic mustaches and craft beer that would be like hipster pregnancy so yeah alright, that's all, back to you yeah, I know that because I mean we've had this discussion with Diane, right? Diane Bauer, who's another member of Lephoria Chavonics. She's always said that she personally found childbirth to be a massively empowering experience.

But I'm all for... Yeah, and you are right that Firestone kind of picks up on it as being this thing that might be kind of retained for those people for whom pregnancy remains a natural kind of instinct. But she also kind of problematizes the idea that if you go through all that pain and you go through not just the pain of labor but the discomfort of pregnancy, she thinks that there is kind of a psychological tendency for at the end of it to want to get something back. and that comes through the idea that the child belongs to you and the child is your creative project and that you have, you know,

you've kind of generated it and you've suffered for it and therefore it should be seen as an extension of you and you should be rewarded for it, which is kind of, which she thinks is one of those problems that's at the root of the nuclear family in terms of the psychosexual kind of power dynamics that it builds up and the way that then plays into the oppression of women as a sex class. But if Diane's talking on this module, is she coming in to contribute? I think she's going to join us for one of the later weeks, so maybe we can actually talk about this a little bit then. Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, I think there's quite a lot to negotiate. Maybe it's important to retain the possibility

of choosing your alienation. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Do any of you guys have anything to say? Because we should probably move on to the next section. But just kind of throw the floor open to anyone who wants to comment before we do. The other thing I might just mention is that anything that we type on the sidebar isn't readable or visible to anyone who's going to be auditing later. So I know you've made a couple of really awesome points on there, Luca. I don't know if you want to go back and address any of them, but at least for the next session,

maybe we should also kind of read them out. And I'll also save them and post them for you guys on the classroom. Okay, great. That's good. that kind of solves that problem. Did anyone have any comments to make? Well, if anyone's new to the system and isn't aware, there's a sidebar chat. There's a button on the left side of your screen which will open a sidebar on the right, and there's a little chat there. It's nice. I find it really difficult to keep one foot in the stream of the sidebar and like one foot in the kind of stream of conversation because I evidently

lack the supposedly female ability to multitask. I just get like really confused as I go, ah, but there we go. Okay, so do you want me to move on and talk a little bit about technologies that work? Yeah, if no one else has anything to say. well I actually think that maybe it would be good to continue to explore Firestone's reliance on the category of the natural just a little bit more I'm still I think Powers correctly points out the incongruities in

Firestone's position And I was wondering what the course leaders have thought about more deeply about Shulamith's apparent reliance on a biological identity as a political subject. Could you guys fill me in a little bit more about your thoughts on that before we move on? That would be great. Just this whole category of the so-called natural. I'll turn up my thing. Yeah, I think it's a really kind of rich area for exploration in relation to Firestone. I'll maybe, shall I let maybe Luca and Amy, do you want to chip in first? Because I'm really aware that people will be sick of the sound of my voice by this point.

But, no? I'd actually have to sit down and think about it a bit more because I I read this quite a while ago and hadn't really revisited it properly before the course because I was spending so much time getting a lot of admin stuff into gear but I think I think the point that she's trying to make is that and as Helen sort of touched on before that there can't be any change the social and material change is always

inextricably entangled and that you can't, I mean you have to understand nature as a separate material realm that can be tinkered with and that those changes will then filter into social and cultural change. So that there has to be a reciprocal kind of relationship between the two. And I think that she, I mean, this is, as you identified before, as a problematic part of her work, relies on these dichotomies only in order to eventually dispel them by synthesising them. But I see it as a structural kind of problem with the way that she works her argument. But yeah, I have to think a little bit more about it in terms of the dialectic of sex

and reread it properly. But that's something hopefully I'll get to over the next week and maybe we can actually start a thread on this on the classroom. I think that would be really good. Did you have any comments, Luca? I started formulating some, but then second-guess it and let you handle it. I guess it is really interesting, the position that nature and the biological and all that occupies in Firestone's work, because it's not one you see very often. There's not many, at least in the feminist tradition, there's not many feminists who would, on the one hand, sort of say, okay, here's the brute facts,

these are the natural differences between man and woman, they are different by nature, blah, blah, blah. and then most of the ones who would actually lay that down would do it in order to go on to celebrate it whereas the ones who would want to avoid celebrating this image of not truly different men and women would be the ones who would really downplay the reality or the pertinence of this distinction. They'd emphasize the murkiness, the indefiniteness of nature, the constructiveness of nature and so on And so you have like, I guess, you know, you have like that kind of eco-feminist essentialist on one side and sort of the postmodern constructivist on the other. And neither is doing what Firestone is doing, which is on the one hand a kind of, you know, brute and maybe even a bit crude but, you know, very like bold emphasis on, yeah, these are the reality of the natural facts.

It's about uteruses. It's about controlling uteruses. Women's at a disadvantage from the get-go. And this is nature's fault. but man's made it so much worse because he's been exploiting this natural imbalance. We begin on uneven ground from the get-go. What I like about Firestone is she has one line, I think it's in chapter one, where she says that sexual inequality is natural does not make it human. There's this real bold and decisive separation of the natural and the normative. that just because something is the case doesn't mean it ought to be. And you can never move from something being naturally so

to the notion that it ought to be so or that it's right or authentic that it's so. And this is what I... I mean, that's probably my favorite line in the book, if I'm not just making it up myself. I think it's there, but that it's natural does not... From the fact that it's natural, it does not follow that it is human or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, you can definitely still get down to some problems, and there's room for nuancing it and so on. And what I love about Firestone is also, I think, maybe, like, our greatest strength kind of is our greatest weakness, and it's sort of this bold willingness to draw sharp demarcating lines, which always end up needing to be complicated and mediated quite a bit.

you know things like sexuality and technology the two things at the heart of her book are actually I think two domains where the distinction between the natural and the normative or between freedom and nature or whatever are sort of the hardest to tease apart both sexuality and technology are kind of these obscure almost opaque hybrids of fact and norm of freedom in nature. And so, yeah, I just love that tension in her work, I guess. And I guess like Helen, I'm sort of, you know, I think at some level there's a kind of

love for Firestone that lets her get away with a lot in my eyes that might repel me from other authors that I'm not quite as fond of. But at the same time, I like that challenge. I like that you know, I'm sort of staying stubbornly attached to a book that I think is like so fundamentally faulted but so bold and like it just cuts open some new spaces for thinking in ways that so many other books would be like too cautious to do or wouldn't quite draw that line so yeah that's all I've got to say about that right now Yeah, like I really love the fact she just wades in with that like her kind of criteria for what the revolution is going to look like And she kind of says, okay, well, it's sort of a classic trap of asking people to spell out, well, what's it going to, okay, fair enough, you're criticizing things, but what have you got to say?

What do you think is going to make it better? And she kind of acknowledges the danger of that, but she's like, well, you know, YOLO, I'm going to do it anyway, because otherwise nobody else will. And there's this failure of imagination around the family, and nobody is willing to kind of advance an alternative. So despite the risks, I'm going to do it. And I mean, I find it really bracing and refreshing and exhilarating, the fact that she just comes out with stuff that a lot of other people would try and kind of soften or kind of make seem less confrontational. So the confrontational elements of the fly phone are really quite exhilarating to read

in a context where a lot of people feel that they can't really say anything without kind of couching it in a thousand qualifications. And the quote that you were talking about, Luca, was also one that I kind of wanted to mention, because she's drawing on the Beauvoir there. I've got my, I've got Julie with me. And she says, so she quotes the Beauvoir saying, humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. And then she kind of goes on and says, Thus, the natural is not necessarily a human value. Humanity has begun to transcend nature. We can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone,

it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. So yeah, she's pretty... Pretty ballsy! Totally academic aside, I wonder if there's a different version to this book. Like, mine has, does yours say humanity has begun to transcend nature? Yes. Mine has outgrown nature. That's a neat difference, I mean, for a hair-splitting dissection. I don't like this version as much as the previous edition, because this was the reissue, I think, the 2010 reissue. And the original is, I just like it better. It's got, like, I don't know quite why. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's because I read the original one first, but I feel like I know it more fundamentally.

Yeah, I wasn't even aware until now that there was a difference, except for pagination. I only found that out by mistake when I assigned my students to read a series of pages from the book, and then they were like, ah, it's all in the wrong chapter, and some of your pages don't exist. Yeah, because there's new subheadings and stuff. Sorry, this is really boring, nerdy, fire-study, fangirl chat. We're just kind of getting into it. But yeah, the one thing that I wanted to add, aside from this idea that the natural is not necessarily the human, and perhaps what we should privilege about the human is the extent to which it is not the natural, which I think is an interesting idea with a lot of obvious implications for articulating a kind of meaningful and substantive kind of xenofeminism.

is the idea that kind of the natural and sort of biological materialism. Right, so I've kind of, in Nick Cernick and Alex Williams' kind of work, they talk a lot about material hegemony. And their idea is that material hegemony is where the way that our world is built in the material is hugely productive of the way we think politically. And because once you kind of change the shape of the world, change the way cities are organised, the way streets are planned, the way buildings are built, it's really, really difficult to dislodge. Those material things are very deeply rooted and really hard to disembed.

So their argument is that by changing the kind of, it's really difficult to change those things even if they sometimes offer strategic points of leverage for a revolutionary project. But with Dyerstone, I think it's really interesting that she kind of goes in the other direction to some extent, where she sort of says that our attitudes towards gender and what counts as appropriate gendered behaviour are now so integral to the way we think. So I think it's on the first page where she's like, oh, you know, people say you can't change that, that, that, it's impossible to change that, that's just the way it is. And that that's a lot about social programming, social ideas of gender being so deep and so

embedded in our culture that we can't really get rid of them. What she suggests is that you start from the material in order to change the social. By starting to reconceive of the biological, you start to create room for this kind of bootstrapping of the social where you hack the body and then you hack ideas around gender, essentially. She starts from that material basis and then thinks about how they can talk to each other to generate something new. So yeah, I just thought that was kind of quite interesting because we are so used to thinking that the biological and the natural is the really, and the material is one of the hardest spheres to make an intervention within.

And she's like actually if you start there, you can make new and interesting things happen. And I think that's quite fresh and quite interesting. Okay, we've got, like, we've got, what, 20 minutes left? Do you want me to do a little bit of, I can just rush through some stuff about work and then we can just kind of chat about that and use it as a trigger for something? Sound good? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will do that. Okay, so, I mean, Yeah, Tony's just said that we've got a little bit of extra time. So if people are able to stay past the two-hour limit, that'd be great.

Maybe we can just kind of go until everyone needs to leave. But also, that said, yeah, we need to figure out who's going to do some of the... from our enrolled students, who's going to do a presentation or leave a discussion next week. I don't know if you want to do that. Do you want to do that now? Maybe, in case there's... I mean, who... Tony, who have we got? Ivan is one, and we have Robin, but Robin isn't presenting at a conference right now, so she couldn't make it to the first session. So it might be better to... We can put up a form on the classroom, and people can sign up. Because if an auditor wants to present as well,

it's no problem. They don't have to. Okay. enrollment should, I think. But, yeah. We could ask Ivan now. Do you want to talk about Preciado and Biopolitics next week? Which other one's available next week? I'm seeing sessions. Yeah, so just to note, the sessions are actually flipped around. I'll change it on the blog later, but because of the way Google Classroom operates, it means I actually have to delete one of the posts and then upload them again in the right order. Okay, so three, yeah, yeah. So it actually goes session one, session three, session two, session four.

I'd really like to do the one you said, press the other. Yeah. If you want, there's an article on the book. hang on I'm just bringing up the list I mean if you wanted to talk about a section of the book that'd be cool or there's that Gil Peterson article oh these are all the three I'm looking at it as well yeah so the technical capacities of the body and then there's the post-genderism essay okay I'm I'm pretty easy I would like to think the testo junkie one if that's the one initially suggested. It's actually got a nice subtitle as well which appeals to me.

Yeah, okay. It's an amazing book. I think Helen's going to talk about it a bit too but I mean it's a whole entire book that we've got in there so maybe you want to just do a section out of it or something like that. I thought you mentioned that you suggested that initially but if someone else is doing it, I'm happy to do the other one. So which one was the one? I think it's good to have two people talking about the same thing actually so I think Helen's going to talk a little bit about the book because it's a pet subject of hers but it'd be good if you wanted to have your own take on it too and then we can kind of talk about it from those two angles okay cool I just wouldn't want another text to get us on the reading list

well we can the rest of us can kind of take care of that it'd be fine Okay. Well, I'll also put a little form up on the Google Classrooms. Did any of you guys who are auditing want to sort of do one of the articles for next week? You're welcome to just for your own interest, but it's of course not obligatory. Okay, well, I'll put the form up on the classroom and if you decide later on, you're welcome to sign up and take something. Okay, cool. That's all decided. Are you ready to go on to the discussion of work, Helen?

Yes, I am. I was just having a pee, but I'm back now. It was the pesky biological material asserting itself in the face of my desire to transcend the meat world. But, okay. Another reason why Firestone was right. Yeah, so let me have a little chinwag about work. Let me bring up some of my notes. Okay, kind of in some ways, this is maybe a weird element of Firestone to focus on. To kind of think about like wage labor and industrial technology, it's a bit maybe counterintuitive because Firestone is deliberately seeking to counter an intellectual tradition in which the sex class system

is thought only to the extent to which it corresponds to economic diagnosis of oppression. But she's explicitly going out to do that. Changes in the organisation of wage labour are typically presented as being secondary to issues around sexual and social reproduction. But she's got a lot of kind of stuff there about reorganising the household about thinking about the family as a domestic unit, as well as thinking about the sexual stuff. And that tends to be where her end of this lie. But, Tony, if we could just go on to the next slide, if we could post-accelerate. Is that... Oh, no, where are we?

Hold on. Yeah, I'm... Sorry, I can't... Sorry, I can't... Okay, yeah. Okay, so, yeah, just the one directly after accelerating. So she says that the end of the family would require corresponding changes in the larger economy. And here the transformation of the economy is not framed as an end in itself necessarily, but as scaffolding for the transformation of domestic social arrangements. So I want to acknowledge that it would be a disservice to present Five Stones analysis as primarily an economic one. But for all its kind of insistence upon the primacy of sex class,

the dialectic of sex is invested in a wider project of social transformation. And this includes, crucially, the emancipation of everybody from unsacrifying and compulsory wage labor. and so the second part of that quote she said not only would reproduction be qualitatively different so would production we would first have to have to be entirely successful in our goals the socialism of a cybernetic economy aiming first to redistribute drudgery equitably but eventually to eliminate it altogether so the kind of the complete overthrow of current economic conditions is positioned as a kind of transitional

demand here. So, once capitalism has been transformed, then the revolutionary feminist project becomes feasible and that then meaningful change can start to happen. And this is perhaps part of Firestone's inconsistence, as Powell points out, potentially problematic. So some of the times some things go first, some of the times other things go first. Sequencing of revolution. And it's also an example of Firestone's radical feminist hierarchising of oppression, which is particularly awkward when it comes to Firestone's comments about race and anti-racist activism. And of course we might also question how practicable this is as a political blueprint.

If we start with complete economic transformation and then feminist revolution can happen, how does dialectic, how does the dialectic effect really imagine that change happening? Now, Firestone outlines what she calls her dangerously utopian concrete proposals. So these are the ones featuring kind of the extract you were asked to read for this session. And she admits that these proposals are sketchy. They're meant to stimulate thinking in fresh areas rather than to dictate the action. But we can kind of still pull out some very broad ideas about how the redistribution and eventual elimination of wage strategy might occur.

The first, as suggested by the reference to cybernetic socialism, is the application of technology to economic and industrial processes. So he says that with the further development and wise use of machines, people could be freed from toil, work, divorce from wages, and redefined. And this is the key to Firestone's blueprint for a better and more equitable social order. the wise use of machines, be they industrial, domestic or biomedical, to transform our experiences of production and reproduction. This is also why when I came back to Firestone after a while, in this current theoretical

moment he struck me as being so relevant because a lot of the kind of stuff that he argues for plays in so neatly to a lot of the accelerationist thinking. So that up to the fact that he argues for a guaranteed annual income, which is one of the tenets of what Alex and Nick kind of try and push forward as an idea, using the universal basic income as a way of transforming the political landscape. Okay, we can move on to the next slide now, Tony. There he is. So in terms of gendered cultures of work, the introduction of effective technologies shifts the terms of the debate in quite radical ways.

Suddenly, Firestone says, we are talking about more than a fair integration into the labour force. We are talking about the obsolescence of the labour force itself through cybernation, the radical restructuring of the economy to make work, i.e. compulsory labour, particularly alienated wage labour, no longer necessary. and concisely capturing the crux of her argument as well as the boldly optimistic tone that characterizes the final chapter of the dialectic effect. Five Stone declares that job discrimination would no longer have any basis in a society where machines do the work better than human beings of any size or skill could. Machines thus could act as the perfect equalizer,

obliterating the class systems based on exploitation of labour. Now, here is Firestone at her most techno-utopian, I think. She's kind of apparently implying that there is a near inevitable causal relationship between the rise of industrial and other workplace machinery and the dismantling of capitalist society. In this formulation, she risks generating the impression that developments within the technical sphere are also necessarily interventions within the political sphere, and that changing the way in which we use technology may, in and of itself, prove sufficient to generate social change.

And this is a position that a lot of later techno-feminism works really hard to challenge. I'm thinking about people like Judy Wackman, for example, who does a lot of work around making it clear that technology is not a kind of panacea for social issues, but deeply embedded and implicated within them. In order to make sense of this strand of Five Zones technological optimism, we might want to view her in the context of her specific historical moments. A period in which the implications of cybernetics for operating, governing, and controlling centrally planned economies were being explored. Susanna Patternan takes the influence of the cybernetics-focused theories of social planning in Firestone's work,

particularly in her consistent focus on the rational application of technology as a means to master the material world. The emphasis upon rational cybernation is, for Paakman, a particularly clear point of divergence between Firestone techno-feminism and that which characterises later approaches, and particularly those of 90s cyberfeminism. If we can just jump onto the next slide, I think. There we go. I've got a little, that's an old advert for a typewriter which is kind of stressing, it's the interconnection of typing and femininity.

So there was a lot of the ways that the original typewriters were, this is just an aside, but the way that the original typewriters were advertised was stressing the fact that typing was kind of a natural job for a woman because of women's inherent agility and musicality. And interestingly, talking about cybernetic social planning, this is one of my favourite little anecdotes about Cybersyn. So, Cybersyn was this kind of project in Elendez, Chile to use cybernetics to plan the economy. And it was eventually hoping that it could be used to better facilitate communication between the government and workers, so the government and factories.

And it's seen as being this really like awesome, neon mythical kind of moment in leftist thinking like Cybersyn. It was really like the whole Cybersyn office looks really sexy. It looks so, and it was like this really utopian moment of what was later kind of a quashed regime. I was really entertained and disturbed to learn that in CyberSyn, they don't have any keyboard. So they don't have any quirky keyboard. What they actually have is sort of big buttons that are different shapes. And this is because they thought that typing was just for women and secretaries. So what they have is like huge punchable buttons for men and doing manly things rather than

keyboards which are for ladies with their little fingers. I just love that and hate it. But yeah. But I want to kind of talk a little bit, and this is great because it kind of leads into what's happening in our next session or in a session in a couple of weeks. I want to lead into what cyber feminism is, how cyber feminism kind of works, and sketch out a few kind of preliminary differences between a cyber feminist approach to technology and fire-themed feminist approach to technology. So, whilst Firestone is interested in rational planning and the complete mastery of nature through manufacturing, informational and other industrial technologies, that is, in the use

of technology as a means of control, cyber feminists such as Sadie Plants are interested in the ways in which technologies evade control. So this is from classbook 0 from 1. She says, the stability of any system depends on its ability to regulate the speed at which it runs, ensuring that nothing stops too soon, goes too slow, runs too fast, goes too far. And there is always something hunting, trying to break the speed limit necessary to its organized form, tipping over a horizon at which point, even though another long-term stability may emerge on the other side, it can no longer be said that the system survives.

Nothing can guarantee a system's immunity to these runaway effects. And this kind of dissolution and this tendency towards disorder is feminized and valorized in zeros and ones, which is something that I'm sure we're going to get to and get to talk about when we get through to cyber feminism. Okay, so if we could just move on to the next slide, past our little typist. Yay. So as with responses to Firestone, reactions to classwork have at times been hostile to a perceived over-optimism. as regards technology.

So Alison Adams, for example, argues that in its cynicism over traditional political structures and in its enthusiasm for information and communication technologies, cyberfeminism forgets that women's relationship to technology is not always positive. And Plants is often taken to be representative of the wider cyber-feminist culture with which she is associated. And this too is lambasted for its uncritical techno-utopianism. And these postmodern cyber-feminists are regularly labeled as being technophilic or technomanic.

so technomanic is a term from Carol A. Seville she kind of suggests that there is a real tendency in techno-feminism to not be measured to be too techno-utopian and too excited by the possibilities of tech to reflect on new developments in a critical way so there's this kind of perceived uncritical belief in the radical possibilities of virtuality and networks. As Pattenen puts it, in Plants' work, information networks are seen as emancipatory in themselves,

subversive in terms of gender structures and gendered power relations. in a way that actually seems quite weak-sourced next to Firestone's ambitious, material kind of techno-feminist project. The excesses of post-Haraway, post-plant techno-manic feminism have been widely and convincingly dissected by a number of critics. But that being said, I think it's worth remarking that a lot of the hostility towards cyberfeminist thought has relied on a kind of pretty lazy, pretty un-nuanced critique of the ideas that it kind of advances, a kind of a caricature of what post-modern cyberfeminism is.

And it's important not to overlook Platt's repeated and explicit recognition of the limits of technology in zeros and ones. So Platt argues that, if anything, technologies are only ever intended to maintain or improve the status quo, and certainly not to revolutionize the cultures into which they are introduced. And later, again, this is from 0 to 1, when she's discussing computing technologies, Clarke suggests, whatever the particular purposes for which they are designed and employed, the overriding rationale has always been the effort to secure and extend the powers of those whose interests they are supposed to serve.

But it's kind of not quite the uncritical techno-utopianism that we might expect to find in Florence, given her kind of theoretical monsterizing in some causes, this kind of insane woman just rubbing binary code in her face and kind of like getting overexcited by the possibilities of the digital. She's actually pretty balanced at times. She has got these insights that keep cropping up about ideas around ownership, ideas around access to technology. And this kind of careful qualification of claims made on behalf of technology is common to many techno-feminist approaches, even those characterized as technomanic, I would argue.

Within this literature, one finds recurring demonstrations of critical awareness about technology's differential impact upon certain populations. An insistence upon taking into account the interests that are being served by different technologies at the current time. And this relates back to Firestone, because for all of her grand claims about machines obliterating the class system, and despite the accusations of technocracy from many of her detractors. I kind of think that the argument advanced in dialectic aspects is more careful and more nuanced than certain decontextualized and forcefully worded quotations might suggest.

indignant and ungenerous readings of Firestone appear to miss or appear to kind of deliberately overlook the care, intelligence and scepticism with which Firestone repeatedly qualified her arguments about technology. And I think this will bring us on to the last slide. Thank you, Tony. So for example, Firestone writes that cybernetics like birth control can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envision it in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare. In the hands of the present establishment, there is no doubt that the machine could be

used, is being used, to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power. And she kind of makes this point even more clearly in her response to conservative attitudes about reproductive technology. So she kind of, she notes the responses to polling on the rise of reproductive technology at the point the book was being written, tended to favour methods of these kind of new reproductive technologies, these new methods of insemination only where they reinforced and furthered present values of family life and production. So, for example, to help a barren woman have her husband's child.

And any question that could be interpreted as a kind of furthering of liberation per se was slightly rejected as unnatural. So she kind of notes that it's not the technology that seems as unnatural in that circumstance. but the suggested contestation of existing value systems, which kind of plays into what we were saying earlier about material hegemonies and the way they function. So the technology is kind of seen as being perfectly natural, perfectly normal, as long as it's being used to further what's seen as being socially acceptable ends. And it's only when those kind of social ends are being questioned or I guess perverted that it's seen as being unnatural.

So she doesn't position technology as being inherently politically revolutionary. Its uses are tied to and shaped by the culture from which it emerges and of which it is a past. So despite their differences, Firestone and Plans share a similar tendency to temper their optimism. and to openly acknowledge the possible oppressive uses to which technologies might be put. And this is kind of what sort of gets me about some of the responses to them, is that it completely overlooks those kinds of norms, and that kind of critical reflection on the differential impact of technology. It gets swept away, because it's almost as if you say one positive thing about what technology might do,

that immediately gets read as an uncritical endorsement, which is definitely not what's happening with either of these thinkers, I reckon. And we can kind of, I don't know, we can kind of argue about that and speak that when we get to our session on cyber feminism in a little bit. But I think I will shut up for now. Thank you. I'm sorry if I'm kind of coming across as slightly mental. it is now 1 o'clock in the morning where I am and also I am playing You've been great Helen Turn on our mics and clap for Helen Good job

Thank you There's been I've been finding it hard not to be distracted by the conversation that's going on in the sidebar, which is, it's such a terrible strain on multitasking activity. But Christina had some really good points in there. I don't know if you want to mention a couple of them, Christina, before we start to wind up. I forgot that it was 1am for you, Helen. Do you want me to do this because it's, because the sidebar information isn't recorded later in the... It'll be posted in the classroom, but for people who are watching it, who are watching the video, who don't bother to look it up, they won't see it.

But I thought the question that you were bringing up about machine labor was quite interesting. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's really fascinating how... I think it's really important to contextualize Firestone in the terms of her writing in the period that she's writing because it's before, even though there's a lot of computer technology in the mix with the ENIAC computers and everything, it's not something that's the widespread application of genetic modification, biomorphic modifications, financial, algorithmic modifications in the financial markets,

the numerous ways in which the machine-human interface is completely imbricated now, that wasn't really there at the time. And so I think I feel like forgiving her a little bit for sometimes relying on what I would view as too strong of a binary. In other words, she doesn't take that next sort of what would have been considered in her era a science fiction leap of looking at the machine as a labor class, which I think we kind of probably need to do now when we think about reproductive labor.

We need to have a broader, not to continue to, just as we would hopefully not continue to distinguish between a nature, culture, binary, we would also try to move beyond, you know, gender, non-gender, and also machine and human. these are like these kind of roadblocks that I think really make it very, very hard to use Firestone's ideas productively in a trans-feminist way, in the way that you're talking about doing it. In other words, we can critique her from our positions that we have, our understandings that we have now

at infinitum, but actually to use what she... in order to be able to use what she has to say, I think we have to kind of admit that she didn't understand, she apparently did not look at machines as a class, as a labor class. And I think that we pretty much are obligated to do so now. So, I mean, her work is a really wonderful dispositive for and against which we can work. I mean, so I'm just generally joining the fan group on her. I also would like to say that I think it sounded at a point that I just wanted to ask a little bit about,

was whether I understood it correctly that Sadie Plant, who I've not actually read that much personally, that she associates entropy. Oh, someone corrected me a little bit. someone said negentropy as a feminine value. And I was interested in an implied association that Sadie Plant apparently seems to be making, affiliating entropy with the feminine. And that made me think of, there's a book that was published in around 2000, whose author I can't remember. It's a book about architecture, and it's just called Fire and Entropy, which I thought was really one of the most wonderful binary sets in which to think about design and large-scale design problems.

And so it sounded to me as if she's affiliating entropy with the feminine. And I was wondering, perhaps that's a misunderstanding of plant. Could we bring that? Could you guys clarify that maybe? I'm going to go mute now. Well, I think when it comes to plants, Amy is probably our resident expert, so I'll maybe let her handle that. But in terms of some of the other points that you kind of raised, particularly about the need to contextualize the dialectic aspects within its particular historical moments, Yes, I agree because the discussion of cybernation and cybernetic communism in the dialectic aspects is really indebted to those social cybernetic experiments that were kind of taking

place in socialist countries around that time, the Soviet Union, Alende, Chile, as I kind of mentioned, GDR. And this is a point that Susanna Pattenen makes in her article as well, is that this is a time when cybernetics has been embraced with its ability to provide a theory for operating, governing and controlling centrally planned economies. So it was seen as a realm of opportunity. It was a very different landscape than the one we're used to now. I think Paternan overemphasizes the role of Lend-Aid, well, the role of Psybosyn in its influence over Firestone, basically because the timing so quite match up.

I think Psybosyn was just very much in development at the time Psybosyn was writing the dialects, to respect. But it's still, you know, it was a historical moment saturated with these ideas and with that kind of exhilarating potential. In terms of machines as a class and stuff like that, I think there's loads of interesting ways to think about that. And I think you're right that we do need to update our thinking on machines and our thinking on kind of technologies for this kind of current moment. And one of the things that's kind of been in my mind of late and something that I've kind of been hoping to get the opportunity to kind of talk through with people is around hyper-employment and technology. So there's an article by

Ian Bogost a little while ago in the Atlantic talking about hyper-employment as being this state in which we're not just doing our own jobs anymore, we're doing our own jobs and a bunch of other jobs as well. So they're constantly like we're now relying on technology to do jobs that once would have been done by somebody else. So he gives the example of the way email administration and so on and kind of using our kind of smartphones as a way to enable more administrative work which we do on top of our normal workload. Those of us who are lucky enough to have, lucky enough to be having normal workload and be hyper employed.

So kind of, and stuff like, it does a lot of social, technology now does quite a bit of social reproductive work. So typically our phones now would now wake us up at a particular time in a way that our mothers or wives would want to have woken us up. And there's an advert in the UK at the moment, like a new Nokia phone, where it's essentially advertising a Siri-like quality, where they're like, okay, well, remind me, can you remind me when next time my wife calls to wish her a happy anniversary? Next time I go past the flower stall, can you remind me to kind of pick up some flowers for her? And so the phone is essentially doing the job of a secretary. You know, all of that work of remembering

and all of that kind of work around the kind of soft skills and social reproduction. So the machines are doing feminized labor. And there's kind of a couple of things I think are quite interesting about that argument. First of all, I don't think Bogost in his piece really pulls up enough the fact that what he's talking about is very often the fact that technology is now devolving to us social reproduction. So he doesn't really focus that much on the gendered nature of the work, the additional work that technologies are allowing us to do. And I think that's something that kind of needs to be addressed. So I think it's quite intriguing that what he's talking about is work, the work of social

reproduction that has historically not been acknowledged as work. So stuff that has been visible and unpaid labor of largely female or feminized subjects. And the very fact that now that that work is not being done by humans, that is the point at which it is acknowledged as work. So when people were doing it, it didn't count as work. When machines do it, suddenly it becomes work because we're aware, we're kind of, you know, we're the ones who kind of program in the alarm clock in the morning. We become aware of it. And at the moment that it stops being human labor, it stops being kind of living labor and starts being done by a machine, that's when it becomes difficult and that's when it kind of becomes work.

And the other thing, and this is, I read, reading kind of like responses to Bogost's blog, and somebody kind of touched on this, and I was kind of starting to extrapolate some of the implications of the fact that femininity itself is a technology of social reproduction. So femininity has traditionally enabled certain kinds of subjects to do social, the work of social reproduction. So the point that if you have to wake somebody up in the morning, it's better to be able to do that in a nurturing and loving and feminine way because it makes the labor of doing that less difficult. You're less likely to rub people up somewhere.

And having the kind of soft skills of femininity has been a kind of a technology for getting the work of social reproduction done. And I just thought, these are ideas that have been skewing in my brain for a little while. And I'm glad I've had the chance to make them come out of my mouth, because I think that there's a lot of stuff there. But I'm kind of, yeah, but I want to kind of talk to people about it, you know what I mean, rather than just knocking around in my brain. But I don't know what people's kind of immediate response is about, because I kind of think there's a bunch of fascinating stuff there, but I need to tease it out. Cool. We just lost to Dan.

Yeah, he said he had to go. That was an awesome response, a set of responses, Helen. Did that answer your question, the first part of your question, Christine? Yes, yes, it's fine. I don't have anything to add. I think it's a great direction that maybe this course could take that thread and continue to work with it. It's like a discovered thread. I think it's really quite exciting. As I said before, we should perhaps maybe start a couple of threads on the blog after

coming out of the class or tomorrow morning just to kind of flag these as possible things to keep thinking or returning to over the next couple of weeks. In relation, I guess we should really wrap up because we're kind of getting to the very end, but it's the classroom blog, Luca. So when I refer to the blog, I'm really talking about the classroom page. So we can all put posts. If you go into the classroom, you can actually post something in there, attach links and documents and that kind of thing, and then other people can reply like a normal kind of Facebook or G Plus thread. So I encourage everyone to use it, even if you're auditing.

You're welcome to add your thoughts and documents and that kind of thing. quick response to the plant question I think, well, I don't know if it's making it clearer or less clear, but Luca put it well by qualifying that it was plant's idea of anastrophe, corresponds more to the idea of negative entropy or entropy dissipation, but that there is a sense in plant that the feminine as she understands it as part of this kind of chaotic connectionist interstitial agency is very much at home in the chaos that moves between entropy and its dissipation. So it has a certain aptitude in these

spaces that its opposite doesn't. Which is another kind of thing I think we should really unpack with plant. But I did see when you asked that question that Luca you were about to respond to it. So if you actually had something to say about that, don't let me take over. No, you got it again. I think I was just going to say something like, yeah, I mean, she's funny, it can be tricky to position along sort of the entropy, neg entropy axis just because of the way Plant understands complexity. So she sides sort of an astrophy or this kind of runaway tendency with also with things

like noise, chaos, positive feedback, a lot of things that we tend to lump in with entropy. But entropy is of course the dissolution of structure, the sort of breakdown of complexity and something that tends towards equilibrium where she's talking about ever heightening disequilibrium and complexity. So yeah, like sort of a kind of runaway complexification, which is not, which doesn't tend towards order or anything organic or, you know, anything stable or equilibrium-like. But it's also on the side of structure and complexity. It's not, it's not sort of everything just going into a gray fuzz noise. So that's, that's where I try

and put what she's after. And there's definitely some, like, tensions in it. But it's, yep, that's all. You pretty much said it. It's kind of the sense of perpetuating an identity insofar as that identity is understood as being able to be constantly redesigned. So there's, again, it's this, it is, I think, you can plug it into this concept of a, like, a dynamic structure in a way. But that's something I think we can really get into in two weeks' time. Should we... I mean, does anyone have any final points to make before we say goodbye?

Let Helen go to bed? This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. It's great. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. Yeah, and thanks, Christina, for all your wonderful feedback and questions. It's been really great having you here. Well, I hope we see you all again next week. And don't be afraid to log into the classroom and use the blog and sort of add resources and links. Also, if you're working on your own stuff or you have artworks that you're developing with these ideas in mind and you want to link your pages into the blog, go ahead and do that too.

It would be really great to kind of use this as an opportunity to connect as well. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, and, you know, if you guys want to kind of contact us less formally about stuff, like we are, we're all on Twitter if you want to have like more kind of casual conversations about stuff or you don't want to put it in a formal, peachy kind of way, you can just kind of, we're around and I'm willing to chat what we just do anyway we don't just do it when we have to we do it pretty much all the time so yeah, it would be awesome thank you, thank you to the News Centre for Research and Practice for having us and we're really looking forward to next week and maybe I will be less rambly and exhausted by that point we can but hope yeah so next week

We're doing Transfeminism and Biopolitics. Apologies for the last minute switch. And the readings are testo junkie. Or I don't know if we should assign a section of this, Helen, or if we should just... I put the whole PDF there so people can kind of... Yeah, yeah. I mean, all of the book is awesome. There is... If people can't manage to get hold... Well, if people only want to read a small bit, they could always just read the extract that's up on E-flux since that's already kind of like pre-set up. I think that's the start. So it gives you a sense of the combination of theoretical musings and then sort of more sort of personal, like odd pseudo-life writing that she does,

which is quite interesting as well from an aesthetic and creative point of view as well as a theoretical point of view. But I don't know, is there a particular bit that you'd like to flag up for our attention? I think it's interesting actually just to kind of... Sorry, Luca. Oh, sorry. It was really weird. Like, I thought that was my voice on Echo, but then I didn't recognize it, and it was very disorienting. Yeah, so what was I going to say now? Right, right. See, the techno gendered chapter is a good one, and one that kind of intersects trans themes and so on. There's so much in there.

There's this gigantic, it's a chapter section that's like a quarter of the book, but it's the study of the history of the birth control pill, which makes for some great reading. It's kind of a nice counterbalance to Firestoneian techno-optimism. So, yeah, I don't know. Those are the two bits I used for my biopolitics class when we did that book. But those are also kind of the two more sort of straight-up scholarly sections of the book, too. There's some other sort of great, more kind of evocative, autobiographical narrative sections, too, which are definitely worth taking a look at. So, I don't know. I'd say maybe Technogender is kind of the one

where you get her sort of theory of gender stuff most explicitly so that might be a good place to start and kind of spiral out and then just flip through the book and read whatever interests you after that I think we're still looking for a PDF of the book do we have one? no it's so good oh you do? sweet, you rock I've got it in Spanish too if anyone wants it in Spanish Yeah, please. Yeah. I think technogender would be like the great chapter to go for, really. I think it's one that I use the most in my own work, and it's got that great comparison of the contraceptive pill and the panopticon, which is kind of a really awesome little bit of a text.

There's also a really neat bit about the sex worker as cyborg, but that's probably less of a neat segue from today. I think Technogender. Technogender. Sweet. Yeah. The section like Becoming T, I think that's in Technogender, right? But like that sort of famous passage about just sort of dissolving into the harmony of the city and so on, that's like, yeah. So yeah, that's a good one. That and, I don't know, I had a book upstairs, I think. Not in front of me. You probably set people free at this stage, I think probably we've had a pretty intensive two and a half hours of gender chit chat. Probably people need a coffee and a nap. Yeah, that was a lot less difficult than I thought.

It didn't take too long to get over the weirdness of having the screen and the alienation and so on. Having a hands-free headset has changed everything for me. I can just kind of like pace well thanks everyone for joining in and hopefully we'll see everyone next week it's been grand bye