Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti

Posthuman Feminism - Rosi  Braidotti


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led by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The feminist mass mobilization epitomized by the #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo movements continues to fight globally. As these multiple crises unfold, the politics of sexualized, racialized, naturalized minorities – the ‘others’ – are moving centre stage, pushing dominant ‘man’ (or Anthropos) off-centre.

      Posthuman feminism revives the radical tradition by offering an updated analysis of advanced capitalism – not only its sophisticated technologies but also its brutal environmental deterioration. In this book I argue that posthuman feminism offers a more adequate analysis of contemporary relations of power, because it has relinquished the liberal vision of the autonomous individual as well as the socialist ideal of a privileged revolutionary subject. Whereas liberal feminism is perfectly attuned to capitalism and socialist feminism dialectically opposed to it, posthuman feminism attempts a more nuanced position while keeping a critical distance from both. Building on the radical insights of ecofeminism, feminist studies of technoscience, LGBTQ+ theories, Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminisms, posthuman feminists stretch in multiple, rhizomic and tentacular directions. A posthuman feminist framework encourages a different notion of political subjectivity as a heterogeneous assemblage of embodied and embedded humans.

      The posthuman turn is about the becoming-otherwise-human of feminist and critical theory. The converse is equally true: those who do not fully occupy the position of human subjects, in the fullness of the rights and entitlements that notion entails, have a unique vantage point about what counts as the unit of reference for a re-definition of the human. My argument will remain what it has been all along in my work on critical posthuman theory: the posthuman turn can result in a renewal of subjectivities and practices by situating feminist analyses productively in the present.

      My argument cuts both ways: first, feminist theory and practice are a major factor in defining the contemporary posthuman predicament. Some strands of feminist theory – not always the more dominant ones – are generative hubs that have inspired critical posthuman insights. I want to urge contemporary feminist theory to engage more actively with the public debates on the posthuman convergence and with mainstream posthuman scholarship. I will highlight throughout the book the original contributions of feminism to the making of distinctly posthuman ways of understanding the world and redefining politics.

      Second, mainstream posthuman scholarship must make an effort to move beyond its self-referential insular tendencies and engage openly with feminist theories, including the minoritarian strands that may not be as central to the canonical Anglo-American tradition. Posthuman critical theories cannot continue to indulge in their masculinist and Eurocentric solipsism. It would be mutually beneficial if feminist theory and posthuman theory would exchange and dialogue more systematically.

      The context points to the necessity of rethinking subjectivity as a web of interconnections, acknowledging that ‘we’ – all living entities – share the same planetary home, though we differ in terms of locations and access to environmental, social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity and good health services. The materially embedded differences in location that separate us do not detract from our shared intimacy with the world, our terrestrial milieu. ‘We’ are in this together. This leads me to the sentence I developed in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and that will recur throughout this book as well: ‘“we”-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-together’.

      Posthuman feminists aspire to nurture and implement the ongoing process of unfolding alternative and transformative paths of becoming. We need to work together to reconstruct our shared understanding of possible posthuman futures that will include solidarity, care and compassion. We need to do so while rejecting universal and fixed notions of who ‘we’ are, respecting differences of locations and power. The politics of immanent locations allows for a non-oppositional mode of critique and enables affirmative engagement.

      Posthuman Feminism is an intergenerational and transversal exercise in constructing a discursive community that cares for the state of the world and wants to intervene productively in it. Intergenerational, because the book reconnects to different feminist genealogies, archives and counter-memories across space and time and does not stay within the contemporary or dominant theories. By transversal, I mean a relational way of thinking by cross-referencing through categories and disciplines. It desegregates the domains of knowledge production, by creating connections and cultivating resonances among positions that may at first sight appear incompatible. Intergenerational and transversal thinking helps create the collective ‘we’ that makes for a chain of solidarity between the ‘others’, while respecting the different perspectives and lived realities of each. Intergenerational and transversal subjects are allied but differentiated, and all other differences notwithstanding, they affirm that ‘we’ are in this together, but we are


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