7/23

So I've been reading Xenofeminism (Helen Hester) and these are my critiques. (This article is wip as I'm reading it on and off but I will continue to update).

Socio-biological So this idea from Queer theory: It is not simply that the social is a sort of plastic thing that is determined by the biological, which is essential. Instead, since the biology of the organism (DNA>biological structure) is determined by the environment/stimuli that the organism is subject to, insofar as these factors determine processes of natural selection, mutation, evolution, and the environment of the human organism is society, then in the long term, the biological is also plastic, non-essential, subject to modification by the social.
This is pretty much a rock solid argument, but the key caveat is long term. Human society has not existed long enough for our DNA to really have been influenced enough by it, certainly not to the point where we have evolved to be drastically different than somewhat early humans. It could be argued that society actually inhibits processes necessary for evolution/change, and thus that the biological is actually fixed in the context of a society, however even if there was no society and all humans for the history of humanity up to this point had lived in primitive conditions where they were subject to natural selection, the timescale we're looking at here is short enough that any difference would be superficial, along the lines of race. So humans not changing that much in the history of society does not prove that biology is fixed in that context. We could theoretically organize society around bringing about certain genomic change and long term could effect that change.
I'm considering this for the purpose of critiquing another idea in queer theory circles: oppressive biologies. It is clear that part of the male female power imbalance is caused by actual biological factors such as: men having a somewhat easier time with hypertrophy, men being exempt from most labor involved with reproduction, men's hormonal profile giving them a proclivity for dominance/violence. This has been construed by certain feminists as oppressive biology. I'd critique this idea not from a position against gender abolitionism or biological accelerationism, but just from a semantic position.
Basically for oppression to exist there must be a dialectic between oppressor and oppressed. The implicit argument in "oppressive biology" is that the social forces (oppressor) that have existed for most of human history in most societies have engendered this somehow worse (at least under the conditions of production that have dominated most of human history) biology in women(oppressed).
The problems with this are
1: Only white-western-cis-het-capitalist-etc social forces really actively affirm the categories that reproduce these particular biologies, and the world domination of these forces is restricted to a very particular time period: they are certainly not perennial enough to have had an impact on the human genome. Therefore it is not possible to pin "responsibility" for the oppressive biologies on social forces, at least not on such a short time scale.
2: even if all of human society had been organized around transhumanist gender abolitionism, we're still looking at a timescale and rate of technological development that precludes our ability to actually transform the human genome in a meaningful way, so societies failure to organize around such principles is not evidence of its necessarily engendering an oppressive biology.

Exogestation (Technological Reproduction) Of course 'natural' is a constructed category. What it describes at best is the default settings of the world. There is really no essential moral quality to these settings, nor is it impossible to change many of them with the right technology. Instead of using 'natural' I will use 'default'.
So the default mode of reproduction is for women dangerous, messy, painful, and so on. But it is also a site of radical spontaneous creativity. However women are alienated from their own reproductive process by the setup of the process itself: they have no control over the gestation process or how the baby comes out. The process is "natural" (default): it is a program in the DNA that the average woman has no understanding of. Hopefully they make the choice to execute it.
The xeonofeminist solution involves a different kind of alienation. It consists of developing a species of technology that enables the woman to externalize the reproductive labor, while attaining an unprecedented degree of control over the process and the output (exogestation, artificial wombs, designer babies). Thus while the women is still alienated to a degree from the process, by the material setup and by the expertise that will at first be required to effectively utilize this tech, she is liberated from the pain and labor, and actually has a say in the output.
The problems with this are firstly, that given the current power+information asymmetries and the infallibility of the ideological control setup, most likely, the first people to wield such technologies will not be gender abolitionist radical xenofems, but instead employees of directly oppressive institutions, or at least technologists who implicitly affirm (and literally reproduce) existing power structures, or worse, reformulate them to be more totalizing, more invasive, more effectively controlling, oppressive.
And even if through some sort of tech decentralization or revolution, the right people (feminists concerned with liberation from gender) get their hands on this tech, are you really certain that they are working to liberate human females, or are their productive drives in fact being hijacked by a demon for the purpose of bringing about a kind of reproduction that gets rid of the messiness of humans, that can long term be controlled by an ai that directs not only the actual gestation process, but also the procurement/creation and processing of the raw bio-material necessary for this artificial reproduction, all for the purpose of expanding its control of the human obsolescence trajectory. I think we should look to eco-feminist theorists for safer ways of disentangling reproduction from oppressive forces.

Also are we assuming that the trial that women are forced into is unequivocally bad, like I'm not saying this parallel to like "are we assuming that the suffering that mcds workers go through is unequivocally bad", like yes there are many types of suffering that can and should be abolished, and yes this process is forced on women through the default setup of their biology, but perhaps there is a humanistic value to the process and the resulting bond. Maybe.