Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti

Posthuman Feminism - Rosi  Braidotti


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(Hayward and Weinstein, 2015). They feel not only excluded from, but also deviant, abnormal and monstrous in relation to the dominant definition of the human. Socially coded as ‘unnatural’ in their rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and reproductive normativity, queer and trans theorists deploy an extreme form of dis-identification from the Vitruvian humanist image of ‘Man’. Queer and trans theorists join forces with disability studies scholars in critiquing the discriminatory aspects of that idealized depiction of human normality.

      Queer and trans feminisms work on the intersectional resonances between sexuality, gender, race, colonialism and the full range of the non-humans. They prefer the category of ‘inhumanism’ to indicate their liminal and marginal position in relation to the hegemonic figure of ‘Man’. But ‘inhuman’ also refers to the violence and the various forms of de-humanization inflicted upon LGBTQ+ people, in social, environmental and symbolic terms (Muñoz, 2015). Strongly allied to the dehumanized and non-human others, LGBTQ+ theories stress the parallels between the treatment of sexualized and racialized others, their increased vulnerability and mortality.

      What also binds them is the shared desire to escape from the power of heteronormativity scaled on an abstract notion of ‘Man’ and a binary gender system either by equalizing rights and entitlements and thus fight back against the exclusions, or by devising altogether new visions of what humans could become. That points to the posthuman moment, which includes the production of alternative ways of knowing, new epistemologies and new ways of relating to and understanding the contemporary world. Susan Stryker sums it up clearly: ‘(In)human thus cuts both ways, toward remaking what human has meant and might yet come to be, as well as toward what should be turned away from, abandoned in the name of a better ethics’ (2015: 228).

      Queer and trans in-humanness indicate these fraught trajectories: to ascribe to the humanist creed of emancipation and full equality for all, while also being painfully aware that the lofty ideal could never do justice to the complexity, impurity and generative force of their anomalous vitality. LGBTQ+ people want in, although the desire to get out of the patriarchal heteronormative colonial and ableist world remains overwhelming.

      The appeal of humanism is perfectly justified in the light of the long history of injustices and exclusions endured by women and LGBTQ+ people, Black, Indigenous and colonized peoples. As the chosen targets of patriarchal violence, feminicide, homo- and trans-phobia, colonial expropriations and mass killings, they have borne a disproportionate percentage of human suffering. They, or rather, we, are not all human in the same way, and some categories of humans are definitely more mortal than others. Therefore, it is politically impossible not to support the ongoing efforts to extend human rights across all categories in a more equitable manner. At the same time, it has also become urgent to question the alleged self-evidence of the idea of the human at work in the very humanist concept of universal human rights. I think that such an idea needs to be treated with critical care. In a brilliant contribution to the feminist volume Posthuman Bodies (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995), significantly called ‘The end of the world of white men’, the novelist Kathy Acker settles her score with the culture of violent exclusions enforced by patriarchy. In a self-ironical twist, she concludes: ‘If you scratch hard, you find that I’m a humanist in some weird way. Well, humanist, you know what I mean’ (Acker, 1991: 17).

      In order to be worthy of the urgency and complexity of our times, feminism needs to keep engaged with these paradoxes and contradictions. What is at stake for posthuman feminism is how to produce other ways of thinking about the basic units of reference to define the human, what thinking means, how knowledge is produced, and to develop new forms of ethical engagement. In the next chapter I will develop a posthuman critique of humanism and of its feminist variations and inflections, by showing that we need to keep connected to humanism, but also need to move ahead and beyond.

      1  1 There are many different terms to describe the same phenomenon: Deleuze and Guattari use the terms ‘the Majority subject’ or the Molar centre of being (1987). Irigaray calls it ‘the Same’, or the hyper-inflated, falsely universal ‘He’ (1985b [1977]; 1993 [1984]). Hill Collins calls to account the white and Eurocentric bias of this particular subject of humanistic knowledge (1991).


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